In the phrase ‘O’n nhw newydd ddechrau’…what does ‘o’n’ translate out to?
And ‘Fel se hi’n ddoe’…what’s ‘se’?
Thanks…sorry to sound picky but I get irked if I don’t ‘get’ a part of a phrase.
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O’n nhw = roedden nhw = they were.
Se = southern speak so I have no idea, sorry. What’s the English sentence?
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The ‘se’ is short for ‘tase’ (or ‘tasai’ in written Welsh) and the phrase translates to “if it were yesterday”
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I think the English was “as if it were yesterday” in which case, it’s a contraction of “fel (ta)sai hi’n ddoe” = “fel 'sa hi’n ddoe”
Edit: Diawl! That Dee’s so quick!
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‘O’n nhw newydd ddechrau’…what does ‘o’n’ translate out to?
It’s sometimes difficult to translate things word for word, as no language “maps” onto any other language in that way.
The “O” stems from “roedden” and that can be traced back to previous forms if you really want to. Roedden nhw means “they were”. The phrase in question though, means “They had just started”, although an older English form might be “They had newly started”, which is great, because newydd means new. So this is an imperfect past construction that is slightly idiomatic, as you may ordinarily be saying “Roedden nhw wedi” for “They had”. The “newydd” inclusion is a special case…which you shouldn’t worry about in the normal SSiW manner 
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Of course @Deborah-SSi, thank you. For some reason I thought of the hwntw ‘sai’n/so fe’n’ etc. (which I think is your version of the Welsh ‘dwi ddim yn/tydy o ddim yn’ etc.).
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Very helpful - thanks everyone.
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