Diolch yn fawr, Aran,
Dw i wedi ddechrau gyda mae gwastad 1 a cwblhau heriau 1-10.
Hwyl fawr,
Lex
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Diolch yn fawr!
Aha, yes I remember that construction from cwrs 3 now. and its a very natural one - presumably wnei di nol i fi works as well - i always wonder about the flexibility here in moving things like i fi around - i tend to do it a lot and don’t know if that’s bad or not.
Lots of disgled o de is nice reassurance that we’re learning the best dialect option. My mother would go off on one if I ever said cwpan or paned
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So I’d say that for my little Bro, who was sort of picked up!!? I mean we have that relationship but are not actually blood relations!! (He is actually less than 2 months younger than me - too late for twins and too soon for anything else!!!).
I had a notion I’d mis-remembered one or the other and ‘i’ came out when I was on automatic!! So its nice to know it’s OK!!!
Oh dear, I say that! Well, actually dw’i hoffi coffi!
Not specifically - not quite like the English, where you couldn’t use ‘he’s a brother to me’ without it meaning ‘he’s like a brother to me’ - in Welsh, ‘mae o’n frawd i mi’ could just mean something kind of like ‘he’s a brother of mine’.
Not sure if this would merit a quick answer or not, and in any case, I half know the answer (but I may be wrong of course).
I think I’ve heard it before (we may have even discussed it here), but occasionally I will hear a “fi” and the beginning of a sentence that includes the short form of the past tense of the verb in the “-odd” form, i.e. 3rd-person, or “he”, “she”, or a person’s name.
Well, I noticed this a couple of times last night on Rownd a Rownd:
http://www.s4c.cymru/clic/c_level2.shtml?programme_id=529479487
at about 17.11, Glenda says:
“Fi brynodd nhw iddo fo”
(She is referring to a pair of trainers that she bought Gareth, the boy they are fostering).
Now I know the “fi” is at the beginning of the sentence for emphasis, i.e. a focused sentence.
But you would think she might say: Brynais i nhw iddo fo" (or “Brynes i nhw iddo fo”).
(i.e. first person of the short-form past tense).
However, what I assume is going on is that what she says is shorthand for:
“Mae fi (pwy) sy’n brynodd nhw iddo fo” - i.e. it is me who bought them for him
(not sure if the above is grammatical though… )
Interestingly, earlier, Llio had said something similar:
at 15:45 she says:
“fi sy’n sori”. i.e. (it’s) me who’s sorry.
(BTW, for what it’s worth, Llio is a southern speaker, and Glenda a northern speaker).
Nope, not this - you’re right with your first assertion, that this is the emphatic ‘fi’ at the start of the sentence - from then on, it just makes more sense to Welsh ears to treat the ‘fi’ like any other thing that does something - so it’s always ‘fi’ + 3rd person.
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I wonder if you might clarify an issue I have regarding forming the preterite using bod as auxiliary. Your post (#1006) concords with a number of texts by other authors I have read. On the other hand, it appears to be a contradiction of what I understand from what I have seen of his published books, to be Mr Gareth King’s position on this matter.
It is omitted, for example, in the teaching manual Colloquial Welsh which only presents the preterite as formed with the inflected short forms or periphrastically using the auxiliaries gwneud and ddaru.
There is an explicit refusal in the reference work Modern Welsh
[quote]§292 General remarks
The preterite is the only tense of the verb in Welsh which makes no use of bod (the future uses bod as an option – see §274).[/quote]
I’m a bit confused why there is this refusal so I was prompted to raise the issue here due to the resemblance of your username to the name of the author of Routledge fame. Even if that resemblance be just coincidental or indeed a chosen homage to Mr King, I would be indebted for any insight that you and of course anyone else reading may care to give regarding my query.
You’re confusing two bod-related issues: the use of bod as an auxiliary, and the preterite of bod.
The preterite is indeed the only tense that doesn’t use bod as an auxiliary, so §292 is right…but you can use the preterite of bod (bu, etc) as an auxiliary to form an alternative to the perfect continuous tense (different thing from the preterite) with wedi bod yn:
Buon ni’n palu’r ardd
Dan ni wedi bod yn palu’r ardd
We have been digging the garden.
Hope that clarifies! 
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Quick update, for the sake of argument:
‘Cafodd e dynnu allan ei gilddannedd’
‘Dan ni’n cael sied wedi’i adeiladu’
I have been struggling with this construction, so I asked my friend about it yesterday (in order to take our minds off the rest of the world).
She said she wouldn’t personally use the passive like this, and would probably just go for a different structure altogether:
‘Mae e’n cael ei gilddanedd allan’
would be a simple way to say that he’s having his wisdom teeth removed.
About the shed, you would probably just say:
‘Dan ni’n codi sied’
which would tend to imply that you weren’t doing it yourself anyway. (You could always go on with more details I suppose.)
It kind of highlights what a different language Welsh is from English, and how trying to translate directly can tie you up in more knots than necessary!
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Thanks for sharing your friend’s input, @netmouse! [quote=“netmouse, post:1038, topic:3153”]
It kind of highlights what a different language Welsh is from English, and how trying to translate directly can tie you up in more knots than necessary!
[/quote]
This is very true! I went through some contortions trying to deal with my sentence. My first English sentence was “He had his teeth taken out”, but I didn’t think this really worked in translation, so I then I came up with “removed”. If I’d only come up with “out” in the first place…that seems simplest, actually
(Another challenge I have is that sometimes I need to turn my American English into British English, in order to figure out how to say something in Welsh, or find something in the dictionary )
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So “bues i yn yr ardd” means “I have been in the garden” rather than using the preterite of the verb “to be” to mean something along the lines of “I did be in the garden= I was in the garden?”. Something a bit difficult to render in English? Not sure I agree. However, it is more likely I don’t understand 
I think there is considerable overlap in English between the translation of “bues” etc and “dw i wedi bod” as “I was” and “I have been”.
“Bues i erioed ym Mharis - I was never in Paris”, to me at least, is not all that different in meaning to “Dw i erioed wedi bod ym Mharis - I have never been in Paris” French btw has a preterite of etre extremely similar to Welsh : je fus, etc. and as far as I know it is used in the same circumstances.
To be honest- because I have been lying up until now- most tenses have overlap.
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The future and the past are sometimes the same for me 
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As seemingly always, ForumWales has a nice, if very short, discussion on the matter
http://www.fforwmcymru.com/fwforum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=7858
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In English, wouldn’t it always be, “I’ve never been to Paris,” This makes it clear that the person was never in there!! Personally, I’ve been to Paris a lot of times, but I’ve never been to most places in France!
Or else we could consider Mr Ceri Jones, who in Dweud Eich Dweud p179 says:
[quote] Appendix 4:The Simple Past Tense…
(v) The simple past of bod can also be used periphrastically to form the simple past of other verbs
’Fuesh i’n ista fatha lemon yn Theatr y Showman yn gweld Y Cylch Sialc’ I sat like a lemon in the Showman Theatre watching The Chalk Circle (Dafydd Huws, 1990:83)
(vi) The simple past of bod can also be used in the perfect
'Fuoch chi ar longe mawr, Capten?’ ‘Dew, do’, fydde’r Capten yn ateb. ‘Fe fues i ar Enid Mary, fe fues i ar Sally Ann’ ‘Have you ever been on big ships, Captain?’ Good God, yes, 'the Captain would say. ‘I’ve been on the Enid Mary, and I have been on the Sally Ann’ (Eirwyn Pontshân, 1982: 66).
[/quote]
Yes - Fues i erioed… and Dw i erioed wedi bod… would appear to be virtually interchangeable on a purely translation basis, although I am pretty sure that native speakers would tend to use Fues i in this particular usage - I think I mentioned something about this in the Grammar…the idea that in this idiom (as in English), have been to really means went there and came back.
I mean…for example, the children turn up late for dinner and the mother says Lle fuoch chi? Where have you been? Again the idea of going off somewhere and then coming back. I am sure most native speakers would say this in this context, rather than Lle dych chi wedi bod?, which is not exactly wrong, but here smacks slightly of translation of the English construction.
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Yes…again it’s this idea that ‘I was in the garden but now I’ve come back’. There was a period recently when I was working in the garden, that period has since finished, and I am telling you about it now.
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