i’m listening to some beautiful Gwilym Bowen Rhys and came across the phrase
byth y beunydd which has been translated as ‘day in day out’. I know that’s not a literal translation, but would anyone be able to help on what ‘beunydd’ means?
Is it used in modern Welsh?
Diolch
Replied to wrong person originally, sorry. 
Beunydd = daily. 
diolch. I had always known ‘yn ddyddiol’. Is there a difference in meaning?
My dictionary shows beunydd as an adverb and beunyddiol and dyddiol as adjectives.
Ein bara beunyddiol, Our daily bread, as in the Lord’s Prayer.
Why Mi?
Am I right in assuming there is no difference between the statements ‘Mi ges i uwd i frecwast ddoe’ and ‘Ges i uwd i frecwast ddoe’? It’s confusing me because in most other languages I’ve studied ‘mi’ or similar words represent possessive pronouns eg ‘il mio’ in Italian, ‘la mien’ in French & ‘mein’ in German. So when I found the following I was more confused as to the use of ‘mi’ yn Gymraeg:
‘Mi gaethoch chi uwd i frecwast ddoe’ and ‘Mi gest ti uwd i frecwast ddoe’. As the subject asks, Why Mi?
‘mi’ is simply an ‘affirmative marker’, denoting a positive statement - it doesn’t have a translation. So yes, you’re right in assuming there is no difference between the statements ‘Mi ges i uwd i frecwast ddoe’ and ‘Ges i uwd i frecwast ddoe’. Some people use it, some don’t - it’s correct either way.
Hi Gareth
This used to throw me, too - even though I knew it didn’t mean ‘me’, my brain kept mis-parsing things like mi gafodd o as “I - no, hang on, he - got.”
@siaronjames’ explanation is all you need to know from the point of view of actually speaking Modern Welsh, but from a historical perspective you’re right - the mi of mi gafodd o is originally ‘I/me’, just as the southern equivalent fe is a version of the word for ‘he/him’.
I’ve forgotten the precise details, but it’s something like this : originally Welsh verbs couldn’t come first in a sentence, but had to be preceded by one or more ‘particles’ that didn’t necessarily mean anything translatable - things like yr and yd that you see fossilized in all the various formal written forms of ‘to be’. Over time these particles more or less dropped out of use, but the verb still couldn’t come first, so a pronoun was added in their place mi wnais, fe wnaeth; but at the same time the plural endings were all getting so mixed up in spoken Welsh that it started to become necessary to add pronouns anyway to make it clear whether you meant ni or nhw, so you wound up with forms with pronouns before and after, like mi wnes i and fe gafodd e/o. At this point you’ve got some redundancy, and - weirdly - Welsh decides that the first pronoun is basically just doing the same job as the old particles it had only just got rid of, and to generalize just one form in that same old meaningless rôle - mi in the North, fe in the South.
tl;dr - mi used to be ‘me’, but now it isn’t 
Many thanks for that explanation Richard. I’m always interested with the etymology of any language in studying. When I was learning French it made it obvious why the ^ above letters was there when I found out it indicates an ‘s’ has been dropped at some point. This explanation of ‘mi’ is equally fascinating and I appreciate you taking the time to relay the message. Diolch yn fawr.
Is this sentence correct?
“Wyt ti wedi trio troi fe i ffwrdd a ymlaen eto?”
I’m in IT and I’d like to put it on a T-shirt 
If you’re looking for “turning it off and on again” my Y Geiriadur Mawr has the set phrase “yn awr ac yn y man” for “off and on” - so maybe: troi fe yn awr ac yn y man eto?
no, I’m afraid that’s the wrong kind of ‘off and on’ - “yn awr ac yn y man” means ‘off and on’ in a time sense, as in ‘now and again’.
The ‘off’ in the ‘to turn off’ sense would be ‘diffodd’, and the translation of the whole sentence wouldn’t be a word-for-word one, it would be something like “Wyt ti wedi trio ei ddiffodd ac ei rhoi fe ymlaen eto” - which I think loses a bit in translation for the intended IT joke.
I was wondering if that would be the case. GM wasn’t very clear about that phrase. Happy to be corrected!
Back to Nabod/Gwybod. Which is it for a journey route please? Say, taith or Llwybr. It feels halfway between a place and a thing.
I’d say that’s gwybod …
Ti’n nabod y lle, yn dwyt? Ti’n gwybod lle i fynd, ti’n gwybod y ffordd?
Hmm, interesting. We had a discussion about this somewhere where it was suggested that other languages that make a similar distinction could be a good (though inevitably imperfect) guide - say, French savoir and connaître.
I don’t think my Welsh instincts are at the point where I’d yet dare to disagree with you if you’re reasonably sure, but my analogy with French is setting my spider-sense tingling - I’d say tu sais ou aller, tu sais comment y aller, but tu connais la route for you know where to go, you know how to go there, and you know the route - suggesting gwybod, gwybod and nabod…
We have same distinction in Italian, but I hadn’t thought of connecting them to gwybod/nabod yet. I’ll have to pay more attention to examples. 
Just like French you’d have to use sapere in the First two @RichardBuck mentioned. But we use both conoscere and sapere in the third (at least in everyday language).
In Welsh I would have said ti’n gwybod sut i fynd. Would that work, along @gruntius examples?
Luckily I have a get-out clause in that I wrote “I’d say” rather than “It is”.
In relation to a route, I tend to think of gwybod as meaning you have the details (i.e. information) in your head, and nabod as meaning you have had the experience of following the route
That would be my interpretation. If I was going to drive to somewhere I hadn’t been before, but I’d worked out the route on a map and memorised it, I’d use gwybod. But if it was the A470 from my home to Cardiff, I’d say nabod because I’ve driven it so many times. 