To @Iestyn - In your note about the half marathon in the newsletter, you say that people have trouble with ‘Iestyn’. What do you mean? Do you mean they don’t know to say it like English ‘yes’?? If so, maybe SSiW does need some sort of easy guide to simple pronunciation?
The second one may well be ‘help llaw’, which is pretty common. The first is more or less impossible without having a bit more of the context… 
I’d say ‘welais i blant yn rhedeg i lawr y stryd’ and ‘daeth merch mewn gwisg wen i mewn i’r ystafell’…
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Diolch yn fawr, I have much clearer ideas about how to make the present participle now! I’m a bit confused on the subject of girls dressed in white, though. I should probably avoid them altogether in future:(
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It’s just the natural ebb and flow of languages - literal translations don’t always match common usage, as of course you know - so ‘wedi’i gwisgo mewn gwyn’ is the correct literal translation for ‘dressed in white’, but ‘in white dress’ is a common Welsh way of saying more or less the same thing - here, ‘gwisg’ doesn’t mean ‘a dress’, but ‘dress’ in general (as in ‘dress sense’, for example).
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Thank you:) Yes, of course I know that most languages lean towards word economy, which is why I suspected that probably the wedi+pronoun+verb form would be substituted with something shorter in colloquial speech. But it’s still the right way to form past partciples in writing, right?
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I’m not sure it’s always as straightforward as that - it can simply be a matter of critical mass in terms of how often something gets used, rather than any obvious economy…
But yes, wedi+(pronoun)+verb stem is solid… 
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Thank you. That’s sorted that out.
Confusingly, Google Translate gave ‘helping hand’ as the English for ‘help llaw’, ‘helpu llaw’ and ‘helpu yn llaw’ which didn’t help me at all.
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I’ve noticed that Google Translate behaves really strange lately what concerns Cymraeg to English translations or oposite. It wasn’t doing os bad before and I could relay on it but now? Or this means I’m more demanding in my wishes of translations with sentences, phrases and words …
[quote=“raymondkefford, post:127, topic:3153”]
Confusingly, Google Translate gave ‘helping hand’ as the English for ‘help llaw’, ‘helpu llaw’ and ‘helpu yn llaw’ which didn’t help me at all.[/quote]
Which perhaps indicates that you would be understood no matter which of those you used. 
Or more, on this occasion, that Google doesn’t have enough input for its algorithm to work here - both ‘helpu llaw’ and ‘helpu yn llaw’ would sound extremely odd - ‘help llaw’ is definitely what’s needed here…
Bit of an advanced question but:
Do you still hear in speech the construct ‘po’ (is this an old spelling/shortneing of ‘bod’ -to be ? )
So “Gorau po gyntaf” (soft mutate after?) - literally ’ Best be first’
Meaning - ‘the sooner the better’
(are there many uses of po aswell?)
Diolch ymlaen llaw - Thanks in advance
Hello all! I have a question regarding the construction “ar”. I discovered the wonderful band Swnami thanks to another part of this forum. In one of their tunes, they say “ti ar goll”. According to (the sometimes unreliable) google translate, this means “you lost” or something along those lines. I’m just curious about this construction, and in what contexts it might be used. Thanks!
“Ti ar goll yng nghanol y dorf” - You’re lost in the middle of the crowd.
This is one of those things that can’t be translated literally. Ar means on in most cases, but as with all prepositions, it doesn’t map between languages in a one-to-one fashion in all instances.
So, you can say “Dwi ar fy mhen fy hun” - I’m on my own - and it works fine, but in “Mae enw Cymraeg ar London” - there’s a Welsh name for London English and Welsh use different prepositions to express the same thing.
So, we just have to accept that ar goll is a single “thing” and that it means lost. And then not worry about the details. 
Edited to add - And to answer the question “in what contexts might it be used?” - pretty much anywhere you would use “lost” in English:
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Yes, you certainly hear it, in that kind of specific construction (gorau po gyntaf etc) - as for the derivation of ‘po’, dunno - sounds kind of plausible - but you’ll need to wait until one of our grammargis sees this…
Looking in the general direction of @owainlurch …
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Wot, me, Guvnor? I didn’t do nuffink!
Oh, about that.
As far as I understand (which isn’t very far at all) it’s a remnant of the old present subjunctive tense of the verb to be. When people used the subjunctive tense for… whatever it is they used the present subjunctive tense for.
(Stuff like this, presumably! Glad to be of help.)
The ‘basic’ form was “bo”, but it was often hardened to “po”.
This also happened with the imperfect subjunctive, I’m sure you will be fascinated to hear, so that the form of the verb ‘to be’, in the subjunctive was “bei”, but hardened and appearing in the form “pe” it means “were it to be” sort of thing, and us now used to mean “if” in those contexts.
So yes, what brynle said is on the right lines!
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I’m trying to clarify the structure of sentences having to do with “identity”. I think I understand that sentences using pronouns have the order reversed from what we would say in English - for example, “Anna dw i.” Or to say “She is a teacher” we would say “Athrawes yw hi”.
Is it the same when using two nouns? If I want to say, for example, “The bird is a robin”, would I say "Robin goch yw’r aderyn"?
And how does this work if you add more to the sentence? For example, if I want to say, “The bird in the tree is a robin” would I say “Robin goch yw’r aderyn yn y goeden” ?
I know it’s a stupid example sentence; I hope it’s not a stupid question altogether
Hi Anna,
I think the thing to remember is that in a normal(?) Welsh sentence the verb comes first (unlike English).
However, if you want to emphasise something, then you can put the thing you want to emphasise first.
So (I think), “Robin goch yw’r aderyn yn y goeden” ? implies that you are emphasising the “Robin Goch” (e.g. if someone else had said it was something else, and you were contradicting them).
And with “Anna dw i”, you are emphasising your name, because it’s an introduction, and it’s the name that’s important, not the verb (well, I assume that’s the reason).
These are just my rambling disjointed thoughts though.
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As Mike Ellwood says, it’s not so much a ‘grammatical’ ‘identifier’ thing, as that in Welsh the thing you emphasise is put at the start of the sentence. As it can be done in English, really. “[a] Teacher she is.” But things tend to be stressed a bit more by Welsh people - (certainly when speaking Welsh, but also in all ways including word order when speaking English!) to such an extent that some things need to be put at the start of the sentence to sound natural.
Don’t know if that helps!
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Your examples all work fine, Anna
As Mike and Owain have said, there are other possible orders, but don’t worry, they’ll come naturally with use…
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Thank you all for your replies. I think the thing that’s throwing me about this type of sentence is that the only verb is “bod” used by itself and not as an auxilliary. I don’t feel like I’ve encountered many sentences with a noun as the object. I’m fine with “Dw i’n hapus” but somehow “Yw’r aderyn robin goch” doesn’t look like right to me. It always seems like the verb comes between the nouns in the few instances I’ve seen this kind of sentence. I vaguely knew about emphasis changing the word order in Welsh, but that hadn’t occurred to me here…so thanks for pointing that out!
Diolch yn fawr!