You know you have some familiarity with Welsh when you’re watching a British house-hunting show, and when they’re in Wales, you find yourself sometimes going, “No, that’s not how the name is pronounced.”
In semi-related news, there’s a village called Cil-y-cwm (they looked at a house there), and I found myself wondering: why doesn’t ‘cwm’ get mutated? 
It doesn’t mutate because cwm is a masculine noun and only feminine nouns mutate after the definite article.
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To add to Siaron’s answer, because of the hyphenation this is not a compound word (where you’d mutate the second part, like in Cilgwm).
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That brings back memories: we spent a week in a cottage in Cil-y-cwm a few years back. A nice village with a good pub IIRR…
I’ve noticed quite a few people pronouncing “mewn” as “mee-oon” – is this a local thing?
Oh dear. I seem to have killed this wonderful thread.
In an attempt to revive it: today I noticed that tref is feminine, but pentref is masculine. Normally I’d expect it to take on the gender of the second, more significant word, but it seems to have taken its cue from ‘pen’ instead. Any idea why? Also, I can see that soft mutation hasn’t happened, so it’s pentref, not pendref.
(Live, thread, live! I don’t want to have to play around with cables and a lightning conductor at midnight wearing a lab-coat, but I will if I have to. 
)
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Just to keep you reassures that this thread won’t die I thought I’d add a bit of trivia.
(I have no idea about why it’s followed the pen instead of tref and why it’s tref not dref. My only guess is that pentref sounds more natural)
Pentref is defined as a place, smaller than a tref, without an ecclesiastic building. I’m sure that fact has blown everyone’s mind 
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My mind is completely blown, especially since I’m sure I’ve known places described as pentref with things that looked suspiciously like ecclesiastic buildings. Just having a wee existential crisis now about pentrefi.
Were those pentrefi called Llan…? If so, they exploited the ecclesistical loophole allowing them to be a pentref with a spire. (Like Llansanfraid-ar-elai or Llanbedr in the Vale just outside Cardiff) but as ever, there’s an exception to everything. So a Pentref a chymuned can have a spire 
. Pendeulwyn snuck in with that one!
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They were indeed Llan-somethings. Places like Llanmerewig in Montgomeryshire were probably the sort of thing uppermost in my mind, and I see that in that particular case the spire was a nineteenth-century addition.
I admit I held back on answering this one thinking that someone local to the South might answer. The reason being, I’ve never heard it pronounced that way up here in the North BUT way back when I was learning (the old fashioned way pre-online and pre-SSiW!) I was on a course in Lampeter where another learner from the south-west kept saying it that way and I wasn’t sure whether it was because he was pronouncing it the way he saw it written (which was ‘wrong’) or because that was the way that he heard people local to him say it (in which case it would be right). So it could well be a local/area variation but I have no personal evidence to base that on - hence why I hoped someone from an area that does use it might jump in!
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I’ve heard three people use ‘mee-oon’. Two were learners - one from Carmarthen, one of Pembrokeshire. Another was a colleague who’s a native speaker from Carmarthenshire, but I don’t see him often and have only heard him speak Welsh once, so I’m not 100% sure. Next time we’re in the same building, I’ll have to write out something like ‘Mae’r gath mynd i mewn i’r palas’ and get him to say it aloud.
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Re: Soft mutation and the simple past tense.
Can I just confirm something, please?
Is it right that mi is always implied before the simple past tense affirmative, so that the verb always undergoes soft mutation, whether or not the mi is actually present?
I know that’s happening with ‘wnes i’ and ‘ddudodd o’ etc, but does it always happen to every verb (with the right starting letters)?
Thanks
It doesn’t happen as a rule, and it’s very much up to speaker preference. So it’s completely okay to say Ces i instead of Ges i in everyday speech (although Duolingo will mark ges i without fe or mi as a mistake!)
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That’s great - thanks very much, Hendrik!
When you use irregular future and past tenses of verbs which take ‘i + verb noun’, does the ‘i’ persist or is it dropped? e.g. Does
- dw i’n mynd i weld dyn am gi
turn into
- es i i weld dyn am gi, or
- es i weld dyn am gi?
(I’m thinking of the grammar here, not how it would be pronounced in practice.)
Many thanks!
Was working my way through challenge 22 of level 1 this morning and heard something along the lines of “i think that your mum doesn’t like that film”. I learnt that negative subordinate clauses in the present tense can be formed like ‘bod … ddim’ so I said “dw i’n meddwl fod dy fam di ddim yn hoffi’r ffilm 'na” but “dw i’n meddwl nag yw dy fam di’n hoffi’r film 'na” was what was said.
Is there any difference in formality or even regionally between these two ways?
Cheers!
It depends on how formal you want to be. They are both grammatically correct but the first is what people say and write normally. More formal writing allows you to do away with the personal pronoun, so instead of es i you can just write es with the form of the word showing that you’re talking about “I”. In both cases you still have the “i” that follows forms of mynd though - the “i” in front of “weld” in your second example is the same “i” in front of “weld” in dw i’n mynd i weld
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@gregory-3 there’s no difference. You’ll hear both in the south, but the nag yw version seems more natural to me.
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That’s really helpful – thanks @Deborah-SSi! I’ve just started to come across the pronounless version in a book I’m reading and I guessed the wrong way…
Diolch yn fawr!
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