In my Oxfordshire town, beating the bounds seems to go back to just after the Abbey here was dissolved by Harry Tudur. The town then got its charter. Merchants etc were apparently quite glad to see the back of the abbey which had dominated trade.
Not saying it didnt heark back to something older though, but that is the last traceable origin.
I find Gwyn Thomas’s “Ymarfer Ysgrifennu Cymraeg” very useful - I believe he was involved in assessing school exams, and wrote this book, now in its second edition I think, to address the need for a standard for written Welsh
Thank you very much! Just what I was looking for.
It seems that sometimes we say ‘iddyn nhw’ and sometimes we seem to just say ‘nhw’. Is there a logic to this, or do you simply just use ‘iddyn’ in the circumstances we learn to and not otherwise?
Iddyn nhw is “to them”.
nhw is “they”
(back of my mind thinks it can be “them” also)
Context may help to clarify meaning.
As Mike says, it’s the sense of ‘to’ - so ‘i mi’, ‘i ti’, ‘iddi hi’, ‘iddyn nhw’… 
I do kind of know this, but there is something in my head that confuses me about it. Is it really just a ‘to’ and I’m just struggling to move away from a purely ‘English’ sense of ‘to’ which isn’t exclusively about people.
I heard the following in the beginning of a Caryl Parry Jones podcast
Dyna di-recordio rhaglen yma flaen llaw fellu…
I figured that it meant something like:
This program was pre-recorded ahead of time, so
However, when I looked up the individual words…or use Google Translate…(I know, I know, but it’s all I’ve got for quick phrase translations) I get something like this:
This program is non-record advance or There is non-record program here upfront
My two questions: Is my original guess correct? If so, is this an example of why it’s best to not try to parse every individual word (or something like that)?
I’d guess you’re getting tripped up by it not mapping perfectly to English - sometimes it’ll kind of imply ‘in order to’, for example - but the best approach is just to be aware of it, note it when you happen to hear it, and wait for your brain to get happy with it…
My best guess for this would be 'Dan ni ‘di recordio’r rhaglen yma o flaen llaw, felly…’ - we’ve recorded the programme in advance. Google Translate is flawed, of course, but I think you’ve put an extra spin on this ball for them with your creatively inventive ‘di-recordio’…
‘Ymlaen llaw’ would be ‘beforehand’, I suppose, so pre-recorded 
.
Oh. So di- (i.e. di as a prefix) is not a thing?
Interesting Note: In another pre-recorded programme of Caryl Parry Jones she uses rhag- instead…which actually means pre-
There are some words which feature di- , such as
di-ddadl (indisputable, sort of not arguable)
di-ail (unmatched)
di-ben (headless)
di-boen (painless)
I think it’s just one of those things that you need to learn for individual words, because it doesn’t always mean ‘un-’ or ‘in-’ something. For example, to unpack is ‘dad-bacio’, although I remember saying di-bacio once and I was understood in the context of me clutching my suitcase.
What Helen said…
I love di-fraster, fat free
Yn ddi-os, for undoubtedly, made me smile the other day…
I’m always working at moving away from trying to parse Welsh with an expectation that it will map to English. The second I figure out how to cut that part of my brain off I will post back here.
Na phoener, it will just happen, gradually and imperceptibly
Hello! Just wondering if there are any more notes for gog level 2? I have up to lesson 11 and am eager for more!
They’re in the new design, which we’ll all be moving over to before too long - in the meantime, @faithless78 might know if there are some around!..
We have challenges 12 and 13 from Brigitte, and 14 to 20 from me in this thread:
http://forum.saysomethingin.com/t/course-1-northern-am-i-normal
Start from post 163:
I can write up the remaining challenges later in the week unless someone beats me to it…