which sounds like dwy vil, so not much different from Cornish.
1000 is mil which soft mutates because year is female and dwy not dau for the same reason.
I am going to be a nuisance again and ask, if not too busy, @garethrking Is that right?
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I’m not @garethrking, but you are right.
‘Symudais i Gymru yn nwy fil’ - just to play the mutation game a bit more.
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Ahem - yes, I was hoping to be further down that route than I am by now - broadly speaking, the production/recording work for Level 3 has turned out to take a lot more time and effort than I’d predicted.
Having said that - it’s only Catrin’s cold that has stopped us getting the first couple of Level 3 lessons out this week, which means we’ll be starting to publish consistently in the new year, which also means that it will probably be in January that we can start some of the elements of the 4k build… 
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Thanks!
What about the bit after the dwy fil? Is it dwy fil un deg saith, …deg saith, … un saith, …?
I suppose you could consider Cornish a very hwntw thing… it’s certainly southern, further south even than Caerdydd 
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Dwy fil un deg chwech etc
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Thank you!
No it isn’t
- it’s dwy because mil is a feminine noun
- it’s fil after dwy because dau and dwy both cause SM
So it’s nothing to do with blwyddyn one way or the other.
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Would you go from un deg naw to dwy fil ar hugain or dwy fil dau ddeg? And then? I have a feeling it’s dwy fil dau ddeg un, but maybe dwy ddeg un? Oh the possibilities!!!
I always say that I started to learn Welsh in “dwy fil ac un ar ddeg”, it may be wrong but there you go.
I would say that whatever number system you use, stick to it. Don’t say ugain then dau ddeg un.
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Dunno - no direct experience of this yet…
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Diolch yn fawr. Nadolig Llawen a blwyddyn newydd dda!
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Shwmae Bawb!
What is the correct pronunciation of “Powys”…is it Pow-is…or closer to Poh-wis…I hear mainly Welsh speakers say the latter in the East…but even some Welsh speakers pronounce things very anglicised.(many welsh speakers around me have forgotten trallwng is Welshpool for example!)
Its like Clwyd - I hear two different versions…only one from Welsh speakers though.
I live not far from Powys and pronounce it ow as in ouch (if you see what I mean). No idea which is “correct” though.
Hi Brynle,
Just an accent thing, I would have said.
Pow-iss in the South, but I have heard Po-iss elsewhere.
I have found “…wy” tends to “oo-i” in the South East, especially in Cardiff’s Crwys Road. Elswhere, it can by “oy” as in Llwyd: Lloyd’s Bank.
Croes is another one: Crose/croys.
I seem to live in the part of Wales, where the sounds change over, so find it best to copy a local speaker (or @Iestyn / @aran) for the local pronunciation.
Edit:
Here’s a couple Valleys place name for you, courtesy of my wife who is valleys born and bread:
Croespenmaen is pronounced “Cross pen mane”
Hirwaun is “Hear wine” in Swansea, but “Her Wayne” in Newport. I’m not sure what it is in Hirwaun
- bred
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The “wy” sound, e.g. in words like “Clwyd” and “hwyl” is an interesting one.
It has been my perception (based mainly on Radio Cymru and S4C that there is a broad “north-south divide”, but that it is fairly subtle. Sometimes I think I can put my finger on the difference, while at other times I cannot.
I remember on one of those old BBC “Catchphrase” programmes, the tutor person was gently complaining about people who pronounced “wy” as two letters, whereas, he said, it was one sound. Well, maybe, but it sounds like a dipthong to me, and I believe if you watched someone’s lips closely as they said it, you would see them moving to create the different sounds.
I’d be interested to see how someone who was an expert in IPA and an expert in Welsh wrote it in IPA.
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Further to the above, I found this:
Interesting reading.
Too lazy to read it all, but my reaction is, “Why was ITA stopped as a method of teaching?”
Surely because no self-respecting teacher in most of the north of England would go along with a book which told the kids to say ‘baahth’ for bath? (You know what I mean, even if I’m nt sure how to spell the options!).
So for variations around Cymru, the same applies!
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I am not sure if you have confused IPA with ITA, or have moved on to a different topic , but I was talking about the International Phonetic Alphabet which theoretically allows you to write down in symbolic form just about any sound the human vocal system is capable of making.
I have made a few attempts to get to grips with it, but don’t find it very easy. If I remember correctly, there are various levels of detail within it, i.e. if you want to represent sounds as precisely as possible, then you need a more detailed representation, and in practice, it gets quite difficult to read.
I have seen samples of RP English (produced by linguistics experts) represented in the most basic level of IPA, and noticed some serious discrepancies between what they thought of as RP and what I think of as RP. (e.g. representing the “a” in “about” as a schwa sound, which it isn’t as far as I’m concerned). So if there are issues over RP, what hope is there of representing the dialects of English, let alone 2nd languages and their dialects.
I nowadays tend to think of IPA as something presumably useful for linguistics academics, but not particularly useful for ordinary people learning languages.
…
There is that issue of course. The other reason why it seemed, to me at least, a less than good idea, was because it meant that children would eventually have to re-learn to read in the normal alphabet - why give them extra work to do?
Once we accept that there are many ways that a single language can be pronounced - which is certainly true in English and appears to be true in Welsh - then I think we have to accept that any attempt to write phonetically is essentially futile, and that writing is just a symbolic representation of sounds, which is open to interpretation, and the interpretation has to be taught and learned (and sometimes re-learned).
The Initial Teaching Alphabet (I.T.A. or i.t.a.) is a variant of the Latin alphabet developed by Sir James Pitman (the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, inventor of a system of shorthand) in the early 1960s. It was not intended to be a strictly phonetic transcription of English sounds, or a spelling reform for English as such, but instead a practical simplified writing system which could be used to teach English-speaking children to read more easily than can be done with traditional orthography. After children had learned to read using I.T.A., they would then eventually move on to learn standard English spelling. Although it achieved a certain degree of popularity in the 1960s, it has fallen into disuse.
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Mae’n ddrwg gen i! I misread and thought it was ITA!
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