Use of Plis

Dear Aran,
When I saw “Plis” in the vocabulary in lesson 6, I must say I cringed.
Whatever happened to " os gwelwch yn dda"
Sincerely
Cariad59

Remember…language evolves.

Words you are comfortble with in english aren’t necessarily english.

Even beef!

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And in Breton:

Ro din al levr, mar plij ! Give me the book, please !

How does that happen, when the French don’t say please and difficult to see why they would adopt an English word?.

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Latin…placere
Old french…plaisir

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Someone posted this root on WIki, bit of an odd derivation, but hey ho: and the Latin is from Proto-Indo-European *plā-k- ‎(“wide and flat”).

Edit: Maybe from lying down and kissing someones feet, while begging?

Can/is os gwelwch yn dda ever shortened to, say, 's gwel’n’dda? I can see that saying it all is like saying “If you please” or “If it pleases you” and we can all see what happened to that!!!

I remember the first time I got an email with “o.g.y.dd” in it… :no_mouth:

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I had a ‘discussion’ (OK … argument) with someone online recently about ‘persuadio’ - they were insisting that we should use ‘darbwyllo’ instead, because it was ‘less English’. Despite the fact that ‘persuadio’ is the older word (which came to us in Welsh just as English, French, etc. got persuade and persuader - from the Latin). I dunno … i think if you’re refusing to use words because they’re ‘foreign’ (even if they’ve been in the language since goodness knows when, and they were used in the first Welsh Bible) you’ve got a bit of a problem.

ETA Eek! By which I mean Mr/Ms ‘Darbwyllo’ has a problem, not the original poster! (Just to clarify…)

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You’ll still hear ‘os gwelwch yn dda’, but ‘plis’ is extremely common.

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I think I’ve had similar discussions with the same person.

etymologies can trick you. I’ve noticed people often assume words that sounds familiar come from English. It’s not always the case (as with perswadio).

Plus, Evolving languages are stronger languages. People never seem to complain that words like fodca and kebab (I’ve never seen this written with a Welsh spelling) are not translated. Always seems to be the English sounding words…

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