That can also be translated as honestly / truly. (and not just when talking about rain in Blaenau Ffestiniog 
)
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Bore da @siaronjames! Are you the lady being interviewed in Becaai Phobl #26 under the ‘Advanced’ heading in the SSiW Challenges section? (It’s the 26th of the months so #26 for me to listen to over breakfast.) I can’t understand the conversations yet (may be some years hence before I can…) and I didn’t catch the name at the beginning (I rarely do), but the tiny snippets I comprehended made me think of you and then when I listened to the beginning again I thought it was your name being introduced. (I’m booking accommodation for a fortnight in Caernarfon end of August/beginning of September ac efallai mi fydda i’n gyfle siarad tipyn bach o Gymraeg efo chdi wedyn.)
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Da iawn ti! Yes, well spotted - that’s me!
I’d be more than happy to meet up with you when you come to Caernarfon - remember to let me know closer to the date so that we can arrange something 
Nadolig Llawen to you, too!
That is of course your good right, but dismissing words simply because of their perceived similarity to English discounts the possibility that the word may have found its way into several languages (for example we use the word “emotional” in German, too) Just out of curiosity, what words do you use in Welsh for “problem”, “person” and “system”?
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TBF, I think those are probably covered by the OP’s caveat:
“For the record, I don’t have an issue with using words imported from the English… as long as there isn’t a term that already exists in Welsh for that word!”
So the question stands: is there an alternative to emosiynol that is used by actual Welsh speakers, or is that simply what everyone says, to the point that looking for an alternative will make @Tintin look like a Zealot or sound frankly mediaeval?
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Purely out of interest: does anyone know why it is “wythnos” and not “saithnos”? (I suspect it’s linked to why the French use “quinze jours” for a fortnight, were the Celtic tribes perhaps quite relaxed about time-keeping? )
The main explanation is that the week starts at midnight, whichever day you start counting the days. Then it finishes at midnight on the last night. So a week contains eight nights in total - 7 whole nights and two half-nights at either end.
Another explanation I’ve come across is “inclusive reckoning” - i.e. like in music: there are 8 full tones - natural notes - in the musical scale; but only 7 if reckoning ‘exclusively’. The same is true for days in a week. Welsh reckons a week inclusively: from Monday to the following Monday, counting both; hence also ‘pythefnos’, ‘fifteen nights’. Reckoning by nights rather than days in some languages dates back to at least the Iron Age. There are examples of both inclusive reckoning and counting by nights in Gaulish inscriptions.
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Diolch yn fawr, Siaron! This is the answer of the year for me. Wow.
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Yes, but what about when the native word turns out to be a ‘coined’ native word? Like gorsaf for stesion - I remember once asking an elderly lady Lle mae’r orsaf? and her plainly explaining to me that she couldn’t help me because she had no idea what an ‘orsaf’ was. (In fact it’s a clumsy borrowing from Middle Welsh, where it meant a battle-station, i.e. somewhere to make a stand (saf) - the civil servants have of course no ‘feel’ for language at all, and in this case just latched on the -station part and co-opted the word.)
And then what about the leicio/hoffi issue? Leicio, though obviously a loanword, is thoroughly well-established over centuries, while hoffi was and is promoted largely on the anti-import principle. I always used to urge my students to use leicio - on the ‘sound like a native-speaker’ principle.
This seems a dangerous principle generally…many English words of Norman French origin (there are large numbers, of course) have English equivalents that still exist - should we purge words like village, jolly and chamber, for example? To say nothing of the truly vast array of Latinate coinages that were made in the sixteenth century - things like calculate for reckon, domesticate for tame.
But, for you, is this only with Welsh? Or do you apply the same criteria when you’re speaking English, and similarly never use ‘emotional’, because of its Latinate - and indeed artificial - origin (see above)? I mean, clearly from your question you don’t, but emotional and emosiynol are both, and equally, foreigners in their different linguistic homes, and I don’t really see why that matters in either case.
I think we are on very dangerous ground when we condemn any example of native-speaker usage as ‘abominable’ and ‘unfortunately ubiquitous’ - surely?
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This is something I have to grapple with quite frequently as part of my work, and it’s interesting how the use of loanwords inspires such an emotional response (which would seem to be connected to an understandable antipathy towards the English language in particular - as none of the words derived from French/Latin/etc inspire the same reactions). There is a rather widespread belief (from what I can gather, based on a misinterpretation of a paragraph or two in the work of Jean Aitchison) that if we use these words within our lexicon, the English will “destroy the language from the inside out”. But no one seems to object to the English-derived “ffordd” (where we also have “lôn” and “llwybr”) - presumably because it “sounds” Welsh?
Generally speaking, loanwords add to a lexicon - they don’t displace other words (although over time, the subtleties of meaning might diverge between the terms).
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ti’n nabod fi yn rhy dda :D… dwi’n dwlu ar y gân ma… atgofion melys or nawddegau yn yr ysgol gynradd
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the problem isnt the word origin …and I agree that negatively judging someone for using a few english terms is the quickest path to language extinction!
I think the real discussion is the rapid loss of vocabulary in minority languages…much much higher than strong or stronger languages…people should not be shamed for wanting to use perfectly good welsh words and labelled “purist”… My grandmother taught me plant names in Welsh and yet later in life I get called “purist” publicly from a chap for using some name… reverse snobbery is a thing too 
although less brutal I suppose.
I can avoid awkward goglooks when using hoffi … by switching to “hoff o” … never had any consternation there …although I probably sound old fashioned haha
I rarely use lico because my English brain says I sound like Im licking something…maybe my problem is being too prudish
The problem isnt the fact that there is 10 synonyms for a word in Welsh and 5 of them are non-brythonic or old welsh in origin…the problem is that the 5 remaining older welsh words are lost due to the status of the Welsh language being the way it is.
So although I agree strongly with you Gareth that there are far larger problems than word origin … such as the loss of daily use of Welsh in public is far more dangerous than whether someone says whistlo instead of chwibanu 60% of the week…I do however think its a fair valid conversation to have about wholescale replacement of welsh words to english words due to the course of history.
(The hard pill to swallow is the impermanence of everything in the universe and that everything becomes unrecognisable over a large enough timespan - fun note to end on! )
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Well indeed these are alternatives (with SM after o dan, though) - but it would be interesting to know what, in her view, makes them ‘more appropriate’ than emosiynol. I can only think of one likely reason.
And I do indeed have sympathy with this, @brynle . But how do you feel about the wholesale replacement of English words to Norman French words over history?
I also, by the way, do see, and to some extent sympathise with, @Tintin 's point about foreign words being used in place of perfectly good ‘native’ terms - I have been reading the Soviet and Russian press for many years now, and I have to confess to wincing on a regular basis these days when now confronted with the loanword veb-sayt. But everybody says it now.
And I suspect he will share my admiration for the French with their dogged promotion of native words for even the most common international terms - I have always liked ordinateur for ‘computer’, which goes way back, and since then examples like courriel for ‘e-mail’ and logiciel for ‘software’.
And I do ackowledge that, while learners - however fluent - shouldn’t really criticise native-speakers’ choice of vocabulary, a line does need to be drawn sometimes. A friend of mine way back in Aberystwyth days told me one day that the day previously he’d gone with a (native-speaker) friend to visit friend’s (native-speaker) mother - in the opening conversation he commented on the weather to her, saying Mae’n heulog…blank look from mother, until son interpreted for her by saying Mae’r sun yn shino, with understanding then dawning across her face. Oh dear! 
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Fun, and true. And a healthy perspective on our puny and fleeting existences and the worries that beset us therein, all to no avail whatever.
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Possibly poor word-choices of mine - I meant no condemnation by them - but people will make value judgements about other people’s use of language all the time. In English, there’s the bon mot (I think it’s George Bernard Shaw) that an Englishman cannot open his mouth to speak without making another Englishman hate or despise him; and you can always check out the story behind the word “shibboleth”, if you don’t already know it.
I think that with Welsh, and its history of being suppressed, and now promoted, all of those tendencies are perhaps even more pronounced - the feeling of many native speakers that they daren’t speak to learners, because their own Welsh isn’t good enough; the feeling that an educated middle-class, Welsh-language media establishment is going to look down on them and patronise them and police their language; and then, at the same time, dw i’n blydi lyfio tsips or mae’r sun yn shino. As a learner I can have a really tin ear about these things sometimes, and veer straight from using something like lyfio (hoffi sounds Southern to me, and if I’m allowed to say leicio why can’t I say lyfio?) to using something I’ve read somewhere, that’s so literary absolutely no-one uses it in speech ever.
It’s impossible to get right; it’s important to try our best; and it’s inevitable that people (including us) will make value judgements, but it’s probably best if we try not to.
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“obviously, chi mod, ma’ fe’n roller-coaster emotional”
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Well, while I have no defence for my own scolding and unnecessary undertones, since I am famous for them hereabouts as anyone will tell you, I WILL leap to the defence of @RichardBuck - linking him (of all people!) with the word ‘unhelpful’, particularly in reference to that friendly and succinctly informative little response to your query, must be some kind of a first on here, and I am sorry to say that I for one am a bit annoyed on his behalf, not least because what he said was perfectly correct. Richard being Richard of course, he politely apologised, but in fact he had nothing to apologise for.
In his comment he was NOT calling you a zealot, but was making the reasonable and correct general point that inexperience brings with it the danger of using a word that can indeed make the user LOOK like a zealot - note highlighted word that you skipped in your quote - and that inexperienced learners should be helped to avoid this pitfall where such a circumstance arises. I hope we would all do this - I certainly did in my classes at all levels, and the advice or pointers were happily always taken in the spirit in which they were given.
Richard’s further observation about ‘frankly mediaeval’ is also justified, because true - some learners unwittingly use words that have indeed not been current in five hundred years but still appear in some widely available dictionaries without indication that they are long obsolete. It is right and proper - and helpful - for these instances to be pointed out to them as and when necessary.
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“Mae ffrind gyda fi” neu “mae gyda fi ffrind”?
The Southern course has the latter, but I have some Welsh friends who use the former. I guess that this is a regional variation, but would anyone know whereabouts one is more likely to hear each variant?
Little questions like this keep me up at night.