My house in Ceredigion is called “Nyth y Kiwi” so that’s a start
I definitely heard first language speakers in Llandysul saying “iwso”. I couldn’t quite bring myself to abandon “defnyddio” but I felt slightly uncomfortable, as if I was “correcting” their Welsh in some way, which I would never want to do! If I’d kept living there much longer, I’m sure “iwso” would have become natural.
Yes - literally “if there is a must”
Thanks, Deborah!
Shwmae bawb,
Would somebody mind checking the following for me, was doing some translating in my head while listening to the radio and these ones are a bit tricky so would appreciate the help:
Sometimes, you need to tell yourself that you’re the smartest man who’s ever lived
Weithiau mae eisiau i ti ddweud wrth dy hunan taw y dyn mwya deallus sy erioed byw wyt ti
He was supposed to be their best player
Eu chwaraewr gorau nhw oedd e i fod
Diolch yn fawr!
I would say
Weithiau mae eisiau i ti ddweud wrth dy hunan taw ti yw’r dyn mwya deallus sy erioed wedi byw
And the second one sounds fine to me - just eu instead of ei at the beginning
Thank you for the quick reply :)!
Ah I meant eu but for some reason typed ei, typing too fast again haha.
Please mind my sticking my nose in … would/should this become “wrthot ti dy hun(an)”?
Good question! They both sound OK to me, (hunan in the south, hun in the north), but I’ll have to think about that …
That’s why I used the brackets, I know both are used but … I was asking about the “wrthot ti” instead of just “wrth”. It just seems like it should be there.
Sorry yes, I was just confirming the hunan/hun and it’s the wrthot ti bit I’m thinking about. It seems to me that it’s more correct as wrthot ti dy hunan but running it round in my head, I feel like I’ve heard it as just wrth dy hunan but I’m starting to wonder if that’s really what people say or not.
Diolch Deborah, now it’s all I’m going to think about for the rest of today.
A fi!
Hi,
Old Course level 3, L23, introduces the first person plural of medru as fedran ni - and definitely not fedrwn ni, which is what I was expecting (and what’s in the grammar books, more importantly ). (Just to be clear, this isn’t one of those occasions when the pronunciation is a bit blurred and could be either – the -an is very clear, and it’s spelled this way in the vocab.)
The course consistently uses ‘-wn ni’ for other verbs (welwn ni, dudwn ni etc), so is -an ni a common variation of -wn ni, or is this just for medru?
Thanks!
You said “third person singular” but then talked about “fedrwn ni”, but “ni” is first person plural.
Did you mean “third person plural”? Third person plural is “fedran nhw” (they can). Did you mis-hear the “nhw” as “ni”?
Hah, no I didn’t – I meant first person plural, of course, twp that I am… So busy concentrating on the endings, I missed checking that bit! I’ll change it now.
Thanks for pointing it out!
I always get these mixed up & just say them indistinctly, or have to look them up.
-wn is, confusingly, the ending for the 1st singular conditional (I would) and for the 1st pl future (we will)
“We would” & “they would” are both officially -en (pronounced -an by some speakers).
“They will” is officially -an.
So as far as I can tell “we shall see” is welwn ni, but “we would be able to” is fedren ni.
That is confusing, but I’m used to hearing the blurring between the sounds, and this is very distinctly ‘-an ni’, which means of course that it’s a common variant in the north, otherwise SSIW wouldn’t use it.
I’m just interested why they’ve only used the ‘-an ni’ for medru, when with other verbs they use -wn ni and -wn nhw, which is itself a variant of -ân nhw, if I’ve understood it correctly. These are all in the ‘future/present’, though: the unit doesn’t touch on conditionals at all.
It’s no big deal either way, of course, but it’s the sort of variation which interests me…
Yes, this variant is very common in the north, and that is because some speakers in the north often pronounce “e” in the final syllable of a word as “a”. One famous example is the word that is officially written paned (cup), but you’ll hear it almost invariably pronounced as panad (as in the south, people rather say dishgled anyway )
Thanks Hendrik!
It’s still a bit odd that it’s used as a substitute for ‘-wn ni’, though (I suppose it’s ‘-wn’ → ‘-en’ → ‘-an’.) Not that that matters at all – it’s just interesting.
My question was really whether this variation is used for all verbs in the 1PP Present/Future, not just medru, which is the only one that SSIW uses it with.
Thanks again!