Diolch, @brynle 
I’d say 'sdim … for does dim … is quite common. In the North you can also hear 's’gennai’m … for does genna i ddim …, while in the South you get 's’da fi ddim … for does gyda fi ddim …
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Very timely… I’m reading Gwrach y Gwyllt (Bethan Gwanas) and it starts with two old farmers talking in a market near Dolgellau, and the beginning and ends of the sentences are incomprehensible to this beginner’s eyes… (hard bits in italics…)
‘Wel oedd, ti’n iawn ’fyd. Be ddigwyddodd iddi dwa?’
I’m assuming 'fyd is abbreviated hefyd, but dwa?
‘Diaw … bechod de.’
“Devil (?) poor you (?)”? Or is ‘diaw’ a variant spelling of ‘diau’, sure?
'Dow, ti’n iawn ‘fyd.’
‘He comes,…’ ?
‘Ia’n de.’
‘Yes ???’
‘Ew, oeddan tad.’
‘Yep, we did/were ???’ what’s father doing there…
Arnan ni mae’r bai am be dwch?’
‘What’s our fault, Duck??’
And this is the first page.
Still, the witch soon causes the old man’s umbrella to poke his eye out and the Welsh gets a bit easier after this…
Seriously… I’ve looked in the dictionary and can’t find anything for the words in italics. I presume they’re local dialect – any help gratefully received, thanks.
‘Wel oedd, ti’n iawn ’fyd. Be ddigwyddodd iddi dwa?’
Yes, 'fyd is an abbreviated hefyd, dwa is say/tell from dweda (like in the old tag phrase “pray tell”)
‘Diaw … bechod de.’
yes, Devil / poor thing ” and de is from ynde - “isn’t it”
'Dow, ti’n iawn ‘fyd.’
“come on” or “come now” - “come now, you’re ok too.”
‘Ia’n de.’
= iawn ynde = ok then
‘Ew, oeddan tad.’
The tad here is kind of an “indeed” tag - you’ll often hear people say Croeso tad when you thank them. I think it did originate from tad=father as in God the Father, but the common use now is more ‘indeed’.
Arnan ni mae’r bai am be dwch?’
Like dwa, (the singular form), this is also ‘say/tell’, from dwedwch
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Brilliant! Frankly, I’m not surprised I only guessed a couple
Thanks very much, @siaronjames!
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I think my favourite shortening is wmbo for dw i ddim yn gwybod - a tour de force of concision!
The one that stumped me the longest was rha which cropped up several times in “Tu ôl yr Awyr” and I eventually worked out to be yr haf.
Other ones I’ve come across are deuthi for dweud wrthi hi, wsos for wythnos, sna’m for does 'na ddim and all those tags like yli and sti.
And then there’s sa which is short for basai in the north and somehow denotes a negative sentence in the south. The novel “Siarad” by Lleucu Roberts has a mixture of northen and southern characters speaking colloquially, so i found that tricky at times. I was initially stuck with the southern gweud - was that gwneud or dweud? Turns out it’s dweud (or deud to northerners).
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There’s a minor comedy bit in one of the Bywyd Blodwen Jones books for learners by Bethan Gwanas where the eponymous heroine is stumped by wmbo and asks her tutor what it means. He says “I don’t know,” and she thinks he can’t be that good a tutor if he doesn’t know…
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yes like…sgen i’m…etc
“sgen ti dractor?” = Oes gen ti dractor? (Do you have a tractor?)
Another shortening in fast speech (dweud wrth - to tell)
Dweud wrtha = deud wrtha (north) = deutha (to tell me)
Equivalent shortening in the south/mid wales?
Some areas say Dwmbo wn i ddim/I dont know
which brings up visions of Dumbo the elephant haha
Been thinking about good translations for ‘most of all’ in Welsh
Yn bennaf oll - Most of all (pennaf - mainly/mostly) (holl - whole/all)
Seems to work well … but are there any other phrases with the same meaning?
Sentence above is also useful to see comma and adjective usuage
I find comma & adjective usage in print counterintuitive when you’ve got two adjectives qualifying the same noun. “A big, red house” tŷ mawr, coch is fine in isolation, but in the middle of a sentence the comma makes it look like it’s moving on to a new clause, and it always leads me to read it as “(He saw) a big house, red… No, damn… He saw a big, red house…”
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Yes - they sound the same but are not related. Sa i in the S = dw i ddim, and you also get smo in the SW.
Basai is from buasai, while sa i and smo fi (etc) come ultimately from (doe)s (dim ohon)a i and (doe)s (di)m (ohon)o fi respectively - how’s that for contraction!!
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So that’s the long and the short of it?
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Possibly “bron” in the sense of just before.
Sometimes you’ve just gotta use “just”. For instance when you “just want to say something” plus a load of other things
Also jyst nawr - newydd doesn’t seem to be slick enough.
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ah…There are plenty of ways to say just now/ a little while back… without using English.
The Welsh language is not that bereft my friend! 
- gynnau/ gynnau fach
- ar hyn o bryd
- ychydig yn ôl
- y funud hon
And one that some areas of Wales don’t seem to have heard but my older family used:
Cetyn (o amser) yn ôl - A short piece ago
Cetyn = small piece of something (some areas default this to a tobacco pipe sadly - but it has diverse word usage)
Just want to say
'mond isio deud (northern dialect)
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Except that Jyst/Jest has been a Welsh word for hundreds of years
I only mention, because it was the first word of Welsh that that I recognised, spoken in the wild. It did throw me tbh, as I was expecting “dim ond” as I had learnt in night-class.
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Since 1756 according to the Geriadur Pryfysgol Cymru (yes, I did just look that up…)
One of the (few remaining) enjoyments on Twitter is someone complaining that new fangled phrase is ugly / ungrammatical / a sign that the apocalypse is near, only for some spoilsport to show that new fangled phrase has been in use since 1345 by Milton, Shakespeare, and Terry Pratchett, as well as her off the telly.
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And we now have the wonderful Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes (https://corcencc.org), which shows exactly how widespread words are in different contexts (spoken, written, electronic, etc). Language is an organic thing - it can’t be controlled. Certain people can tell you “that’s not a real word”, but if enough people use it, it becomes part of the language and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it…
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Thanks for the link!
I agree that there’s a lot of (doomed) gatekeeping with language, as though any language reached a state of perfection in [enter years I was growing up] and has steadily declined ever since…
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