Two questions about "it" in Challenge 16

Welsh General / Questions
#1

First question is simple: is it E? AI? I’m hearing a long-ish A.

Second question is something that really threw me. Why would darllen soft-mutate after e (or whatever it is), but gwylio doesn’t?

Challenge 16 Gog: 'ei' - eh?
#2

I was taught that ‘it’ is hi or e or o! For the weather it’s always ‘hi’, perhaps due to a male notion that unpredictability is a feminine characteristic! (Or that men are boring!). In the south ‘he’ is ‘e’ or ‘fe’ so ‘it’ ditto. In the Gogledd (north) ‘o’ replaces ‘e’!!

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#3

Pretty much an ‘ay’ sound (as in ‘hay’)… It’s written as ‘ei’…

The mutation (main answer = don’t worry, of course!) will depend on whether the ‘ei’ is referring to a feminine or masculine noun… :slight_smile:

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#4

Thanks for the tip on the ei. I was hearing a short dipthong (like ai-ee), but was coming up with every possible combination of letters except the correct one.

So just to be clear (I’m not worrying; I just like to keep things straight, or they come back to bite me on the backside later):

  1. ei ddarllen (a masculine book or magazine - masculine mutates)

  2. ei gwylio (a feminine film - no mutation)

Therefore, if I were gwylio-ing something masculine, would the g then drop?

Oh dear… convolution, thy name is Myfanwy… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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#5

LOL, like hurricanes! :grin: For a long time, the names of such storms were exclusively female. Then, I imagine, an irate female meteorologist said, “No more!” and we’ve had masculine-named storms ever since.

#6

You’re correct on your last statement, you’d soft-mutate if the object is male. But the female form carries its own mutation, but it just so happens that it affects only the letters c, p and t (which mutate to ch, ph and th respectively) so gwylio doesn’t change. One example where this aspirate mutation is visible:
Dw i’n ei charu hi - I love her.

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#7

Yup :slight_smile:

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#8

This is all very good fun.