To me, there’s a lot of information being conveyed in the ond here, where in English and I guess in Welsh if you wanted to, you could or would insert more words. To me ond is more like you’d here in expressions like dim ond - for only and in English you might say when or while only, but here ond is sufficient to say all of that on it’s own, if you want to. That’s my “not really qualified to really comment” opinion anyway.
I’ve just been googling and it’s very common to see a hithau ond followed by age and ac yntau ond followed by age etc. It just seems a common way to express this sort of thing - it’s verging on idiomatic to me, but I’m sure a grammar expert could disect it if they wanted to.
Yes I understand. So, that which makes …
Tbh - y peth sy’n neud/the thing that makes - seems to come to my mind. Only beause @Nicky taught me to twist stuff around to fit my current knowledge.
Thanks everyone who chimed in on my question. I believe I understand a little better how these (particular) phrasings work now. Here’s how I have now come to think of this latter phrase: … bywyd a ddaeth i ben a hithau ond yn 26 oed. = “… a life which came to an end and she but 26 years old.”
Which sounds to me rather old-fashioned and british, but that makes sense too!
need a bit of with pronunciation with a local placename
Spelt Ewloe but I think the Welsh is ‘ewlo’
Locals say “you-low” which sounds very anglicised to me… but who knows.
Could it be ‘eh’oo-loh’ ???
The area is just east of a long running lingual boundary between Welsh and English only speakers for a good 300 years … hence why I dont know who to trust XD
The bilingual signboard at Ewloe has the same spelling in both languages. Of course, there’s no hint of pronunciation there. Your suggestion for a Welsh pronunciation could be close.
From Gareth’s excellent tome Modern Welsh…
…spoken Welsh has something approaching a relative pronoun: yr hyn meaning that which… or the thing which… It usually corresponds to what in natural English, and beth is an acceptable alternative in Welsh. Beth dach chi i gyd yn feddwl am yr hyn welson ni ar y llwyfan heno? What do you all think about what we saw on stage tonight? Yr hyn sy isio ar fryder ydy ymateb uniongyrchol a chadarn What is urgently needed is a direct and firm response Yr hyn ydy Uned Gelf ydy cylchgrawn misol newydd What Uned Gelf is, is a new monthly magazine
Note in the last two examples that yr hyn, like what, can be used at the front of a sentence to anticipate something that is about to be mentioned.
Not sure so this is just a guess. Could it be a shortening of the word “hogia” (boys) dropping the “ho” at the beginning. Colloquial Welsh seems to do this sort of thing a lot! Would that make sense in the context of where you saw it?
Ha ha. No one would have noticed. It didnt affect the overall meaning. So was it masculine feminine thing? If so im taking it that the person was a man. So not Janice Joplin?
well that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it
what I haven’t worked out is how many years “older & wiser” are needed to compensate for losing a wisdom tooth
Since I suspect that language learning will be often part of my conversations for a while …
Are these questions correct, to ask how to pronounce something?
Sut wyt ti’n ynganu hynny?
Sut ych chi’n ynganu hynny?
Then, even though it’s not only Welsh-specific, I’d really like to know if there’s a word to mean what I could define as the “music” of a language: the way a sentence, and not a single word, is pronounced.The ups and downs the voice does - and a native does correctly, while everybody else tend to apply their own native language ones! (the easiest example is native French emphasizing last syllable!
In English I think I’d call this ‘prosody’, and I think it’s more or less the same in most Romance languages. Unfortunately, you can also use the same term when speaking just about poetry, rather than language in general, and a lot of what I’ve seen in Welsh when looking for a translation just now seems to reflect that, although I’m not entirely sure.
Amongst the suggestions in the GPC for prosody is mydryddiaeth which they translate back into English as ‘metrics’ (i.e. of poetry); alternatively, they offer aceniad, and when you look that up in the GPC the bit of the Welsh definition that clearly corresponds to where it says ‘prosody’ in the English one is the rather lovely phrase cerdd dafod, but that unfortunately appears to have a technical meaning in Welsh poetics. Acenyddiaeth gives similar results, though, and @siaronjames’s suggestion of tonyddiaeth includes cerdd dafod in its definition where in English it says ‘prosody’… so maybe tonyddiaeth or maybe maybe maybe cerdd dafod??
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