Tiny request for a (native) Welsh Speaker

Welsh General / Questions
1

Good evening :slight_smile:

I’m currently writing my thesis and I’m looking for a Welsh Speaker who could help me with an excel file with about 20 words/expressions that I need validated… I used multiple online dictionaries but I don’t quite trust myself :wink:

I don’t think this would take more than 3 minutes…

I’m happy about any help I can get!

Thank you!

2

Do you mean validated as in recognised as being in common usage? You might need more than one speaker for that, if you don’t get a full positive set at the first time of asking - depends on how dialectical they are.

If you stick them in here, you’ll get a decent range of confirmation either from native speakers or from non-native speakers who’ll be able to recognise them as common words/expressions… :slight_smile:

3

They shouldn’t be too difficult - at least I hope not :slight_smile:
I don’t need exact translations but a general idea would be great :slight_smile:

Dammo di!
Cariad Anwyl
Duw Mawr!
Uffern dân!
Gogoniant i fywyd, i gariad, i wreigiaeth, i Mari, gyda mi’n Un!
O, fy mab, fy machgen, fy macghen bach dwr

4

You’ve got some small fixes needed here - ‘damo di’, ‘cariad annwyl’, ‘fy machgen’ - otherwise, you’ve got a mixture of normal stuff that you’d certainly hear:

‘damo di’ (southern)
‘cariad annwyl’
‘Duw mawr’ (not all that common now - Iesu mawr would be more common)
‘Uffern dân’

Then you’ve got some odd stuff - neither Catrin nor I have ever heard ‘Gogoniant i fywyd/gariad/wreigiaith/Mari/gyda mi’n Un’ - although just ‘Gogoniant!’ on its own is one of my father-in-law’s favourite expressions.

Then ‘o fy mab’ or ‘o fy machgen’ are both normal usage, but ‘fy machgen bach dwr’ made us both laught - is that really meant to be ‘dwr’ there (which means ‘water’)?..

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

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5

Oh dear! Aged crone feeling dated! “Duw mawr!” I saw and said to myself, “Well, I say that!”
I have certainly heard “Damo di”, but from English speaking folk in Abertawe and district!! - like “ach y fi”, my Auntie’s favourite, and I don’t think she ever learned a word of Cymraeg, despite being born in Abertawe in 1906!!

6

Thanks aran!

You were right, I made a typo while copying it from the book and it is supposed to be: “O, fy mab, fy machgen, fy macghen bach dewr” :slight_smile: So no water in there!

I think I’ve got most of my translations except for those few below:

  • Damo di! (in the novel I’m looking at, it’s always “Dammo di!”, however, independent of that I can’t seem to figure out the meaning of either)
  • Dammo
  • Jawch (I think it means devil - is this correct?)
  • Duw Mawr! (Great God!)
  • Uffern dân! (hellfire - is this correct?)
  • O, fy mab, fy machgen, fy macghen bach dewr
  • Gogoniant i fywyd, i gariad, i wreigiaeth, i Mari, gyda mi’n Un!

Thanks a lot in advance :smile:

7

You’ve repeated this a few times, so I’m guessing it’s a typo in the original - that needs to be ‘machgen’, not ‘macghen’…

Damo di - damn you.
Dammo - damn.
Jawch - doesn’t really mean devil - just a kind of typical Welsh ‘avoid saying the bad thing’ kind of word - ie doesn’t really exist, but diawl->diawch->jawch…
O, fy mab, fy machgen, fy machgen bach dewr - o, my son, my boy, my brave little boy.
Gogoniant is glory - otherwise, that sentence just looks bonkers… :slight_smile:

8

Ah, “Rape of the Fair Country”, by Alexander Cordell? When the narrator is under the blankets with Mari, and .. erm… “the lancing steel goes deep”, as he puts it?

Yes.

Well, he wasn’t a Welsh speaker, and I don’t know where he got this from, so I wouldn’t put any faith in it being good Welsh at any level, but it, in that context, it obviously means something along the lines of

“Glory to life, to love, to womanhood, to Mari, with me as one/united with me.”

Hope that helps!

1 Like
9

?!?!

Is then book as awful as this makes it sound?

10

Well, it’s a lot of years since I read it, but I liked it at the time!!
On the other subject, with reference to diawl, is it worth pointing out that there is no ‘j’ in Welsh, so if you see one, you can be sure it’s a borrowed word or some sort of slang!

11

Is that what they used to call a “bodice-ripper”?

12

Possibly a bit better in general than that makes it sound, but I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Of course, just my personal opinion, as Henddraig shows!

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13

Well, it’s a passing incident rather than the point of the book :blush:

14

Yes.

:slight_smile:

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15

To be fair to myself, I was about 15 and into DH Lawrence etc..I was older (a bit) when Lady Chatterly finally got published and read that.. not because I went and bought it but because my Dad got it and when I said, “I’ll borrow that when you’ve read it.” he handed it to me saying, “mark the best bits!” I told him what I thought of that and told him he’d have to damn well read it all through! (He never did!) Recently there was an adaptation of Lady Chat on TV and after a short time I changed channels, embarrassed that I had ever been naive enough to like it!!! So I might well agree with @aran now about ‘Rape of..’!

16

Of course, by the time I was that age all one had to do was to go into the school library, hold the book upright by the spine and wait for it to fall open at the relevant page(s)…

17

I’ve actually checked the publishing date and I was 17 when I read ‘Rape of…’! Looking back, time seems to fly at some times and lengthen at others. I was only at the POW Camp for… probably less than a year, but I seem to have so many memories it ‘feels’ like much longer, whereas times before and after are whirring blur!