Tiny questions with quick answers - continuing thread

Maybe it would help if you asked her if she’d be willing to help you with a five minute practice session?.. :sunny:

Yes, that would make sense. Except that when I see her next she will be rather preoccupied with her wedding day . . .

EDIT: I may ask her, however, if she would be willing to Skype with me once in a while. I know she and Justin used to Skype a lot when they were on opposite sides of “the pond.”

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To @aran
In FAQ there is ‘How to become a member’ When I click on it nothing happens.
I am horribly aware that I am getting all the pleasure of SSiW and not paying anything. At my rate of progress, I may have died of old age before I get to Challenge 2. Can I do some sort of ‘joining’?

@henddraig do you have old or new layout? If you have the new layout if you click on “What the members get and how do I become one”, you get this:

If you have old layout …

Ups @aran! When one clicks on this help topic, really nithing happens. In new layout the text pops down the topic, while in old layout nothing (absolutely nothing) happens.

But @henddraig (I already establish that you still have old layout and if you scroll just a bit down, you get the same text as it is on my screenshot just in different design it is.

Enjoy. :slight_smile:

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Hello all! I have a question regarding “ma fe’n” and “mae e’n”. I have seen the second version in written Welsh, but hear the first version in SSIW. Do people pronounce it differently, or does it depend if it is written or spoken? Thanks!

Here is a link to a reply on this from Iestyn.

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I have a question about “does dim rhaid i fi/ti etc”. Does it mean prohibition (you mustn’t) or absence of necessity (you don’t have to)? From the lessons (I’m doing the southern course) it would seem that it’s absence of necessity, but in that case it would mean exactly the same thing as “does dim isie i fi”, right? Can they be used interchangeably, if that is the case? Diolch yn fawr!
(I’m sorry if the answer is already somewhere on the forum, I tried using the search, but didn’t find it)

Yes, this one… :sunny:

Diolch:)

That is because ‘moyn’ covers wanting, but, in the north, angen is, I think, equivalent to ‘rhaid’ and ‘need’ and ‘want’ manage OK with eisia, or am I wrong? Is rhaid used by gogs? :wink:

In the north, “want” is isio and “need” is angen. And we do use the forms of rhaid as well.

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I’ve a confession to make first. Pre-school children in Wales seem to know more Welsh than I do. Because my Welsh is limited I’ve been listening to children’s stories again and I have two quick questions I would like help with, please.
First one is a phrase that I think I heard as ‘wy yn rhedeg’. I think it may mean ‘a runny egg’ but that doesn’t quite fit literally and I have a vision of an egg with legs running away instead of one that has been lightly boiled. Should it be the sort of egg served with toast, please?
Second question is this. I think I heard ‘helpu yn llaw’. ‘A helping hand’ would fit the story (Three Little Pigs when building their houses) but doesn’t fit the word order I would have expected. Have I got it right or what should it be, please?
Thank you in anticipation of your replies.

I have come across quite an unusual problem - Welsh, unlike most of the languages I know, seems to have no participle forms. So, if I need to say something like “I saw some children running down the street” or “A girl dressed in white came into the room”, I’m at a complete loss. A Russian textbook by Khalipov suggests that in the case of the passive past participle I should replace it with “wedi+pronoun+noun derived from the verb” but it seems so complicated that I’m sure that Welsh speakers found some other way around. The book “The syntax of Welsh” suggest that I could add the suffix -(i)edig to the verb. What would be the right thing to do? Diolch yn fawr! I’m especially interested in how to say “dressed in” since that is the very thing I’m trying to write now.

The English Present Progressive is fairly unique. In German it doesn’t exist, the Present Tense is all that is used. So, “I go” and “I am going” is all “I go” in German. In Welsh it’s more of the opposite. The Present Progressive actually came from Welsh. “Dwi’n moyn llaeth” is literally “I am wanting milk”.

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In Russian we have just three tenses (Past, Present and Future), but we still have both the present and the past participles… I’m quite sure Welsh must have something like that too.

wnes i weld (welais i) rhai plant yn rhedeg i lawr y stryd.

Merch gwisgo yn gwyn.

Cheers J.P.

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Thank you! So the present participle will be “yn+verb”, right?

It sounds complicated put like that, but wedi+possessive pronoun+ verbnoun is the way to do it!

So dressed in white could be
“wedi ei gwisgo mewn gwyn”
Which is much simpler in reality than in theoretical explanation!

You can use “-edig” as an ending on verbs to do the same thing, but it’s far less common (and occasionally even means something slightly different!)

And if the “ei” is not always there in speech, it will often be [and should be😈- ignore what is in square brackets!] and- well, hope that is of some help!

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Isn’t part of the problem that English allows you to write in a grammatically sloppy way and still make sense? Other languages may be more precise and my impression is that Welsh generally is.
If “A girl dressed in white came into the room” is rewritten as “A girl who was dressed in white came into the room” then the problem disappears.

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That was exactly what I was looking for, thank you! My impression was that Khalipov often used some expressions which (though right) are no longer in common use, but it seems that his grammar is very good:)

Very strange that in the very similar Breton there seem to be two ways to express this thing, with a relative pronoun “who” and with past participle.