Thank you!! That was my gut feeling, so I’ll give it more credit in future 
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Well that’s just a matter of learning which prepositions go with which verbs…there isn’t much rhyme or reason to it. It’s exactly like leaners of English having to learn that it’s look AT but listen TO, isn’t it?
Oh yes, I don’t mind learning it - just wasn’t sure if this was prepositions or idiomatic.
Didn’t I do the whole i/mi/fi thing in the grammar? §122?
Yndy! Found it. Looks like I can use “fi” most of the time and remember “i mi” as a thing (for now, until my head has space for proper readings of this).
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i fi is OK as well, you know - very southern though, I would say
I’ve found myself trying to translate what I’m thinking into Welsh more and more often, and I’ve run into a question. I have an idea what the answer would be but would like some input. This sentence (yn saesneg) has a lot of those very-hard-to-translate concepts in it (for as short as it is) but I keep thinking if I get into a conversation in Welsh and say the wrong thing, I need to have this in the back of my mind to help me back up and start over. So how would you say:
“That’s not what I meant” (or “… not what I intended”)?
Would it be something like “Dydy hynny ddim beth o’n i’n bwriadau”? Or am I way off base?
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You’re not far off at all here, but you’re right to sense that the crossover from ‘intended’ to ‘meant’ doesn’t run smoothly in Welsh…
So ‘bwriadu’ works for the ‘mean to do something’ use of ‘mean’, which is subtly different from the ‘mean’ as in signify…
So what you’ll often hear in this kind of context is something along the lines of:
‘Dydy hynny ddim beth o’n i’n bwriadu dweud’ or less elliptically
‘Dydy hynny ddim beth o’n i’n ei olygu’ or
‘Dydy hynny ddim beth o’n i’n meddwl’.
It would also be common to hear it with the emphasis switched to the ‘hynny’, as in:
‘Dim hynny o’n i’n meddwl/golygu/trio dweud’ etc…
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Thanks, that helps a lot.
I like this one especially! I think I’ll try to put that into my “emergency” bag!
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While watching Rownd a Rownd, I saw a number of short tags at the end of a sentence: 'de?, 'te?, 'ta?
What do those mean? I presume they’re a colloquial abbreviation for something?
From the context, something like “then”?
You’ve got it! Just a tag…
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Oh I’m glad we’ve got another fan here. There’s another thing that you may notice, that intrigued me for ages, and I’ve only recently found an explanation for it, and it’s ending emphatic positive statements with “tad”. e.g. “yndy tad!”, or (as recently heard “Oes tad!”.
I recently found the explanation (I think in Geiriadur Prifysgol, but I need to check). It is, as you might expect, a “reinforcer”, and apparently refers to “heavenly father”, i.e. originally, like a lot of language things, had a religious connotation, long gone now of course.
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I and another forum member have a sort of theory that the story-writing team sometimes drive the story one way, and then the other part of the team try to drive it in another direction, as a sort of ongoing game or competition.
(If you ever listen to “I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue” on Radio 4, and remember the game “tag wrestling”, you’ll know the sort of thing I mean. ).
In any case, I think they are quite “generous” in leaving red herrings lying about.
(For fun, I looked up “red herring” in Gweiadur. It gave “codi ysgyfarnog”, which is literally “to raise a hare”. That reminded me of an English expression, but I could not remember it. Perhaps it’s “to set a hare running” which I found online, but that’s not quite a red herring. It can mean to set a false story going, and eventually people will believe it, but it can have other meanings, seemingly.
In passing, I was also reminded of the nice expression “to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds”.)
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Yes, I had noticed that I think someone (perhaps you) had posted about it in the forum at some point and I had to think of that when I came across it on the show.
Rownd a Rownd is mostly a big wall of noise for me at the moment (coupled with “how can they understand each other when they talk so quickly and swallow half their syllables?”), but I hope that things will start to make sense eventually!
If I have time, I watch it with Welsh subtitles and then English ones… if I have even more time, I might start doing it three times (completely without subtitles the first time). But between work and SSiW lessons, my evenings are usually pretty full already.
When I greet someone in Cornish, I’d go with “Dydh da!” by default.
Does Welsh also use “Dydd da!” as a greeting (as in German or French or Cornish), or does it go straight from “Bore da!” to “Prynhawn da!” as in English?
(Rownd a Rownd seems to go with “Haia!” by default, but I assume I wouldn’t necessarily use that to strangers.)
I try to watch without any subtitles, and then with English subtitles. I do sometimes watch with Welsh subtitles as well, but I struggle here because I can’t read in/think about the Welsh fast enough to keep up with the speed of their speech. In English, I am a very fast reader, but it takes much longer for me to process the written Welsh. I find it interesting how I can pick out what the Welsh words are much better with the English subtitles on. When the words I know are all slurred together in the rapid speech, I sometimes can’t recognize them, but with the English subtitles on, my brain can pick out the Welsh words I’m expecting to hear - the Welsh seems so much clearer. I’ve a really long way to go before I can understand it all with no subtitles, but it’s fun to see how much I can get before I watch with the English subtitles on, and it’s fun to see how the English translation sometimes differs from what they are saying in Welsh
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It is pretty challenging, especially Meical and Iolo; sometimes Michelle. Oh, and Barry… They seem to speak in rapid bursts as well, quite apart from accent and swallowing syllables, etc. However, fortunately, you do find the stock phrases coming up again and again, so then you can concentrate on the more unfamiliar stuff (in that way, it’s not unlike the SSiW lessons).
What I try to do is watch without subtitles, re-watch with Welsh subtitles, then if necessary, again with English subtitles. The latter is not always necessary now, but it was for a long time, I must admit! And if there is anything particularly tricky or mysterious happening in the plot, I do use the English s/t’s to make sure I’ve got it. It’s nice when you can spot differences in what they say, and what the Welsh s/t’s say, and also where they have translated to English fairly liberally!
I notice that Mr Lloyd speaks a slightly more refined, perhaps more old fashioned kind of Welsh. And Arthur comes out with some colourful phrases sometimes. (He’s a big “yndy tad” man!).
And I think I learned “be’ goblyn?!” and similar from Kay Walsh,
I find Pobol y Cwm more difficult, but I haven’t watched it in a while.
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Yes, I have a really hard time with Meical! He seems to talk out of the side of his mouth with a potato in it, or something. (Unrelatedly, I still have a hard time figuring out who is who – a combination of being new to a soap with many characters and prosopagnosia.)
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That made me chuckle - I’ll tell him the next time I see him…
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Thanks for that new (to me) word: prosopagnosia!
Well, I still have problems remembering character’s names, and it took me ages to work out the various family relationships. And just when you’ve got to know them, they have a massive cull of characters, and a new lot come in. (Meical and Michelle disappeared to Australia for a while, but they came back. Their long-lost father Ron turned up one week, introducing some interesting story lines, including a son, David, that M & M didn’t know about. Ron has moved away, but David seems to be a permanent feature (for now!). He was brought up in Cardiff, which is why he talks funny. ) ).
Sôn am Pobol y Cwm, I thought this was funny (not that I want to start a political discussion, especially not on this subject!):
Pennod arall o’r opera sebon wythnosol, Pobol y Brexit, a honno’n llawn cwestiynau.
From “O’r Bae”, the weekly radio political roundup from a Welsh perspective:
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Ah, that explains the bit in the recent episode where he asked for a bottle of bubbly and a bucket of iâ… sori, ‘rhew’ (with exaggerated quotation of the northern word).
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Good spot! I’d missed that.
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Totally agree about Meical! I’m doing the Southern course, so my view of this comes from a different angle, maybe. I find Michele almost as difficult to understand as Meical most of the time, and I also have a hard time with Mr. Lloyd. I don’t find Barry or Iolo to be as bad. Carys, Llio and David are the easiest, I think.
As far as the relationships between the characters, I keep figuring out new connections all the time. I’ve only been able to watch for a little under a year, so there is a lot of history there that I am missing!
Still waiting for Pobol y Cwm to be available internationally…
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Well, yes, there’s why. They are the southerners in the mix. Hopefully when you do get to watch PyC you won’t have any trouble at all, there are only 2 northerners I think.
Meical and Arthur are the 2 I struggle with sometimes.
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