Could someone please help explain the different pronunciations of this and that in Welsh. Please excuse the English spelling but I don’t know how they are spelt yn Gymraeg. For the same sentence, Aran pronouces ‘this’ as hon and Catrin pronouces it as hun and Aran pronouces ‘that’ as honna and Catrin as hunna. Is this just a difference in their accents or is there another reason for the difference.
Could be a few different things happening here - either myself or Catrin misreading ‘hon’ vs ‘hyn’, or (perhaps a little more likely) just the fact that the difference in sound you’re talking about here is actually very, very small… 
Hon is a feminine this, hwn is the masculine, while hyn is kind of abstract, non-gender specific. But we’re talking tiny shifts, and minimal importance in terms of understanding/being understood…
Thanks. Does the masculine/feminine bit refer to the noun or the person speaking?
The noun…
One slight thing that may throw you when you are aware of the spelling is that
for “hyn” and “hynna”, because of the rules of Welsh spelling & pronunciation, the “y” takes on a different sound. So “hyn” is like “hin” would sound in English, whereas “hynna” is like “hunna” would sound in English.
(Another reason why we learn only the sounds first with SSiW, and only the spellings later. However, one way or another, people will come across the spellings, so it doesn’t hurt to be aware of that little rule. i.e. in the last syllable of a word, “y” is like in “hyn” or that little word “cyn” (“before”) that you may have come across. Otherwise it’s like the “y” in “Cymru”, which you probably know how to say.
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Dw’i’n hapus iawn to read that as it means I can get away with not knowing if something is hi or e! @aran What about my question above about swci?
p.s. I am not on here much at present as I’m ploughing my way through Chilcot, (only got to page 56 of Executuve Summary!) but it’s on my ipad and it ran out of charge!!
Goodness! You are brave. Is it downloadable then? I hope you didn’t have to pay for it.
(And don’t worry, I won’t ask you any questions about the content, or make any comment on the content or people’s reaction to it).
Noway does one have to pay. On the lap top, it seemed to down load, but then opened up. It was readable, but a nuisance and I couldn’t find it in my ‘downloads’ file. On ipad, when I clicked on it on Google, it just opened like a little angel!! I am sure that, at first, if I clicked on a page number in the index section, it went there, but now that no longer seems to work, so I have to swish through to - currently page 86 of the Executive Summary. I seem to have access to the whole report and aim to check a few things in the main body later on. But there is a hell of a lot of it!!! (Most of it covering things of which I was aware at the time - and I was just a retired person with no special knowledge!)
So, I may need to spell my email address out loud in Welsh sometime soon, and I’ve just realized I don’t have any idea how to pronounce “.” or “@” or really any punctuation marks in Welsh at all! Is there a standard way? Would “dot” and “at” work just like in English? (I’m in y Wladfa right now, so I don’t want to rely on people being fluent in English like I would in Wales…)
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Sorry all, didn’t mean to miss all your responses to my question about books on the history of the Welsh language - been a busy few week and just catching up on SSiW forum stuff today. I’d be interested in both the linguistic and the political and social elements. I’ll check out some of the books mentioned above. Diolch.
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“Dot” is fine for “dot”! For “at”, you can, if you wish, use the word for ‘snail’- “malwoden”/“malwen” depending on personal choice. (Maybe “malwen” is more common in this particular context. But I probably made that up 
)
On the other hand, as ‘@’ is shorthand for “at”, which also happens to be Welsh word, so not too intrusive
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Isn’t ‘at’ ‘ar’ or ‘am’?
The sound and spelling “at” is a Welsh word is what I was saying. Using it is therefore not too intrusive
When I started learning Welsh, a word popped in my head when I was cuddling my cat and I said you are such a swc.
I recalled that my father called me this when I was very young and had forgotten about it until then. Btw he was a butcher too!
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I’d usually expect to hear ‘at’ used in that context - I think the only people I’ve heard say ‘malwen’ have all been chaired bards…
I didn’t actually see a question there - what did you want to know about it?
I see “swci” can be “tame” as well as “pet”, but I guess it was obviously something like “pet” in this case.
Reminds me that my father in law (who had a Geordie mam) used to call everyone “pet”, and in some cases “pet lamb”.
A rather literal-minded young visitor from abroad somewhere, after being addressed in such a way, and not quite getting the affectionate nature of the term, complained later:: “why does he call me that? I am not an animal!”.
Sorry, @aran I obviously wasn’t clear, I was basically asking what you thought of dodgy translation in subtitles. I watch mainly recordings off Sky and the subtitles I get are not, I think, directly from S4C or BBC or whoever. They may be generated by a computer! Sometimes, I can see a word ‘sounds like’ the correct translation, but in this case, in some episode of Sam Tan, Norman adopts a sheep and lamb. The episode the other day just had a lamb nearly getting run over and getting taken to the Price’s to be looked after. I don’t think there was anything said about it being Norman’s lamb! But all through, the English called it ‘a lamb’, ‘the lamb’, and every time Cynraeg said ‘swci’. If the English had said, ‘pet lamb’ or ‘pet’, fine, but parents who are just beginning to learn Cymraeg at classes, would be terribly confused and might well think swci = lamb!!
Can anything be done about this sort of thing?
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Very, very little, I’m afraid! I’d never recommend using subtitles…
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Just expounding on this, with this particular case, I’m not sure you could get a suitable simple translation anyway!
“Swc/swci” seems to come from a suckling animal, particularly a suckling lamb.
They would sometimes, for reasons tragic or not, have to be hand reared.
They would then become a bit like pets before people commonly had what we would think of as pets.
This term then came to mean a pet, and by transference was applied to a young child seeking a bit of a cwtch and maldod.
It seems to have been common enough to enter into the English dialect in some areas in this way.
I’m not sure there is an English equivalent of any of those! So not necessarily bad translation, just one of those things very difficult to translate!
Mind you, as it is set in Wales, I can’t help thinking they should have just talked of it as a swc - explaining it as a lamb wanting a cwtch and a bit of maldod!
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Oh diolch! Another thing I have learned here today!! On Gower there were a lot of lambs like that! One, grown quite big, once ran eagerly to me wanting a bottle. My Cavalier King Charles didn’t like this as she was the smaller of the two. She tried to flee, unfortunately while still on her lead! She ran round and round me, tying me up, and I had to be rescued from the swci lamb by the farmer!
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