Well, if this carries on any longer we’re going to have to hope that someone with admin privileges can carve a chunk off this thread and make it into a new one about English! The thing is, standardized spelling is more conservative than speech, and kept the ‘h’ all along, but things like misspellings, puns and rhymes can give us evidence for how people really pronounced things in the past. In this word, I understand that there’s reason to believe the ‘h’ was widely dropped in speech, but then came back in as more people could read, and could see that that was how it was spelt, and so thought it ought to be there (and had been told that dropping their haitches was ‘common’). Dictionaries, when they list different pronunciations generally put them in order of priority – the most common first. (Same with looking up the gender of a noun in GPC: if it’s one that can be both, it’ll say gb if it’s more often masculine - gwrywaidd - but bg if feminine - benywaidd - is more common.) The current OED lists two pronunciations for UK, and two for US English – the version with an optional ‘h’ appears to be the main one in the US, but the version with a (non-optional) ‘h’ is still seen as the runner-up in the UK.
The order in the dictionary suggests it was more common within a certain subset of the population who speak “standard” English, but it fails to take into consideration the variation in different regions, among different social classes, etc. I’m fairly sure personal preference of the editor also plays a large role.
Sadly I haven’t found forehead in any of my dialectology books, and most are still packed away in a box somewhere.
But as you say, we’ve derailed this thread enough.
Changing the subject (an about-face?), how do I say ‘have/had’ and ‘have not/had not’ in ‘I have/had listened to it on the radio but I have/had not watched it on television’? Do I use ‘wedi/wedi bod’ - and no ‘cael’ anywhere? I stumble over ‘have’ in Welsh!
Phew! 
You sound unsure about it, but you’re basically wholly correct - there’s no cael anywhere. If I say in English “I have done my homework,” what I mean is that I did it last night, and now it is done - and look, I have it here in my hand (a bit like Chamberlain). In Welsh, if I did it last night, this morning I am after doing it (just like in Irish English).
So: Dw i wedi gwrando arni ar y radio, ond dw i ddim wedi ei gwylio ar y teledu (if we’re talking about a feminine noun, which rhaglen ‘programme’ is; some small changes if it’s something masculine).
With ‘had’ in English: O’n i wedi gwrando… do’n i ddim wedi ei gwylio… (I was after…)
And you can use bod, but only if what you want to say is “I have been listening to it.” If you say Dw i wedi dysgu, you’re saying that you have (finished) learning something, which is why the course tends to say Dw i wedi bod yn dysgu Cymraeg ers… for “I have been learning Welsh since…” - on the assumption that it’s still a bit of a work in progress.
What a great way of explaining this! The English “have” is such a difficult verb as it can mean so many different things (for which other, more sensible, languages have discrete words). But this lays it out so clearly 
You should feel proud of yourself is:
dyleti deimlo yn falch o hono ti de hyn (but probably spelt completely differently).
Could someone help me understand the components of it?
So far I have:
- dyleti = you should
- deimlo = feel
- yn falch = proud
- o hono = ???
- ti = yourself
- de = ??? another pronoun maybe???
- hyn = ???
How do I change it for other people?
is “dylechi deimol yn falch o hono chi de hyn” right for “you lot should feel proud of yourselves”?
what about “dylwni deimlo yn falch o hono fi de hyn” for “I should feel proud of myself”?
In order to unpack this sentence, let’s first look at the correct spelling:
Dylet ti deimlo’n falch ohonot ti dy hun.
The preposition o is inflected, as many prepositions in Welsh are. You’ll see how this changes according to the person in the next examples. The dy hun at the end means yourself, or literally your self, and this bit also changes according to person. So in Welsh you say something like “you your self”.
So for 2nd person plural you get
Dylech chi deimlo’n falch ohonoch chi’ch hunain. – You should be proud of yourselves.
On its own, yourselves would be eich hunain, so following a vowel, eich changes to 'ch (just like yn changes to 'n), and hunain is the plural of hun.
And finally, for 1st person singular you’d get
Dylwn i deimlo’n falch ohona i fy hun.
Thank you - I feel like I was close!
This has been one of those sentences that I just couldn’t get to sink in, and then when it suddenly did I wanted to understand it better.
In one of the North Welsh Level 3 Challenges the English audio is: ‘you are doing what you need to do’ and in both Welsh audio versions this is given as: t’in gwneud be’ ti angen gwneud eto. Is the inclusion of ‘eto’ Welsh idiom? Or was ‘again’ perhaps just missed off the English audio? (I’ll post this in Slack’s chat about challenges section too)
What, if any, is the difference between ddwedodd and ddudodd, as in pwy ddwedodd y stori ddoniol honno and ddudodd o wrtha fi sut i neud o, and why is it not pwy ddudodd? Sorry if I’m missing something obvious
There’s no difference in meaning, it’s just a difference in colloquial spelling and pronunciation - you can use either.
“Tan” & “Nes”, both mean “until” if I understand correctly. Are they more or less interchangeable, or have I got it wrong? Thanks
Pulling this from my Welsh dictionary, the difference between “nes” and “tan” is whether the speaker is talking about a specific (and usually time related) thing (“tan”) or a more general ‘until’ (“nes”). So, “I’ll wait here until eight” would use “tan” and “I’ll wait here until they call” would use “nes”
I hope that makes sense …
It does Sionned, thank you
Hello everyone!
I have just done challenge 13, level 1
I have a couple of questions, I would be grateful for any help:
around 0:50 - wnes i gyfarfod - I met
now, wnes is a past tense of gwneud, mutated because its dropped the ‘g’ - ?
but why does it use gwneud to form the past tense and not bod?
why don’t we say dw i wedi gyfarfod?
as we do with, for example, dw i wedi anghofio, dw i wedi dysgu etc.?
I remember learning French at school, most past tenses would use avoir (to have) but some verbs would take etre (to be) for the past tense, usually verbs to do with movement. Is it similar in Welsh, or am I way off the mark?
also, around 9:00, sy’n dy nabod di - who knows you.
but sy’n nabod dy chwaer - who knows your sister
so why do you use dy nabod di i.e. why say ‘you’ twice? but not for your sister?
again, trying to draw a parallel with French (apologies if that’s inappropriate, but I am trying to use how I learned one language to learn another, if that makes sense? trying to apply concepts)
is it like a reflexive verb e.g. je m’appelle - I call myself or je m’habille - I get dressed?
Diolch yn fawr iawn!
Using gwneud as an auxiliary verb is one way of constructing the past tense in Welsh, but it’s generally for single completed actions in the past.
wnes i gyfarfod = I met
dwi wedi cyfarfod = I have met
o’n i’n cyfarfod = I was meeting
The double/split pronoun is kind of optional - sometimes the second part will be included and sometimes it’s left off, much of which is personal/regional preference.
Both are mostly included either for more emphasis, or more usually when they are surrounding the verb itself - as in dy nabod di
You could equally say sy’n nabod dy chwaer di without any change in meaning.
You’ll also find that sometimes the second one is there but the first one is left out -
e.g. dwi’n cofio ti = dwi’n dy gofio di
I can’t comment on similarities with French (my O level was far too long ago and I haven’t spoken French since!) but I’m sure there are other people here who would be able to help with any parallels.
As it happens, I was thinking about this over the weekend (as you do…) I too found this lack of parallel with the French quite confusing at first, but I think the problem lies with the French rather than the Welsh. They use the perfect tense where we in English would use what’s called the preterite. In other words, our “I saw” is expressed in French as “I have seen” (J’ai vu - sorry no French accents available today!) The Welsh would also use a preterite - Mi welais.
I think there is a preterite in French (this is what I was pondering) - there is a tense used only in writing, called the passe simple (which would then be je mangeai), and in my head that corresponds with the preterite (but it’s entirely possible that I’m totally wrong about that!)
As far as the Welsh is concerned, to me it’s easier to think about it in parallel with the English “I did X” structure (I did read / Mi wnes i ddarllen), with the “I was X-ing” structure for ongoing actions (I was reading / Ro’n i’n darllen). In both these the “auxiliary” (gwneud or bod) corresponds quite helpfully with the English equivalent.
I have no idea if that’s helpful or just confuses matters further! It’s just how I have aligned things in my own head…
Thank you so much Siaron and Sara!
very detailed explanations form both of you, thanks for taking the time.
I see there are different ways of constructing the past tense, Siaron.
I guess ‘completed actions in the past’ is called the ‘past perfect’.
and ‘ongoing actions in the past’ is the ‘past imperfect’?
I had mistakenly thought wedi is a past tense of bod but I’ve looked it up and it’s actually a preposition that means ‘after’. Which sort of makes sense if you’re talking about the past.
Thanks Sara, I don’t know whether French can be compared to Welsh, or is it like ‘comparing apples to oranges’ but it sounds like you’re doing the same sort of thing I’ve been trying to do - looking for patterns you saw in one language and wondering how they apply in another language. I will look up about the preterite - I use all these things in English without knowing about them, they didn’t teach us English grammar at school. So I’d never heard of the preterite, but I use it all the time!
That’s right - that’s what Spanish does, and the oldest French texts pretty much do the same; but then later on they stop distinguishing between the two except in proper literary language. Because they were talking about Ywain on the podcast Yr Hen Iaith, that’s got me struggling through the Old French version at the moment, and it’s full of things like Or vos ai antandue bien… Ma vie et mon cors me sauvastes - “Now I have understood you… You saved my life…” I’m not sure, but I imagine that literary French keeps up the clear distinction.