I’m puzzled and looking for some clarity, please. In Course 2, Lesson 9 we are taught to use ‘dylem ni’, the m having replaced an n. So in Lesson 25 I expected to repeat the pattern but I have listened to the pronunciation of andanon/amdonom and I cannot hear the m. It isn’t mentioned in the Lesson Guide and I checked the questions about Lesson 25 on the old forum and found no mention of it there, so it is probably just me. I know it’s only a little thing but I’m still puzzled and even more so because the Lesson Guide does include ‘arnon ni’, which hasn’t changed. Any help please?
Grammatically, it should be amdanom (ni), buit in speech, the m usually disappears, leaving the glide from amdano- into -ni, hence the n sound. The same is true of dylen ni in the south - it “should” be dylem, but you’ll rarely hear the m there outside of formal usage. Can’t say I’ve noticed the m in the north either, but I’m very reluctant to say that it doesn;t happen, as I often see things in the northern course and think “do they really say that?”, and then hear it constantly on the radio and from Aran from then on. Welsh is so varied that we often just auto-edit what we are hearing to be what we expect to hear, which is great news for new speakers - you can make loads of mistakes (or innovations as we call them on bootcamp) and most Welsh spakers will auto-correct them between ear and brain, and not notice!
I believe you will not encounter “amdanom” in “street Welsh” at all, it’s “amdanon ni” all the way. And “amdanon ni” should also be fine, I believe, in informal writing settings.
Where you will find “amdanom ni”, is in more formal writing and in very formal speech.
Very formal writing drops all the words it can and ‘amdanon ni’ turns into ‘amdanom’,
‘wrthyn nhw’ goes to ‘wrthynt’, ‘aethoch chi’ is just ‘aethoch’, with lots of etc, etc, etc.
It turns out this is how our brain works… there is too much information coming in to process, so the brain often fills in parts with what it expects so that we don’t have to consciously deal with the noise:
I distinctly recall Aran making a brief explanation of this in one of the old lessons, but I cannot remember where. He said something about how nobody says “dylem ni” I found it confusing because it had never occurred to me that anyone may say it that way. It certainly never sounded like that in the lessons.
Later I did some reading and saw the formal conjugation rules and it made more sense. Someone must have asked him about it and he put the explanation into a lesson. I guess I’d have to go through all the lessons to try to pick out where that was. Somewhere in Course 3, I believe.
There is a need, I think, for aids to learners in bridging this gap between formal Welsh and colloquial Welsh. Several of Gareth King’s excellent books definitely help here. I don’t know what else in this direction is available though.
What SSiW (and I think Gareth) does is to puncture the myth that formal Welsh is somehow superior to colloquial Welsh. It’s (probably) just the case that one is appropriate in some situations, while the other is appropriate in other situations.
[quote=“Iestyn, post:2, topic:8399”]
you can make loads of mistakes (or innovations as we call them on bootcamp)
As one who, for work reasons, was obliged to read Acts of Parliament and write formal scientific papers, my experience was that the formal version of any language is unlikely to be superior. Acts are designed to make breaking the law difficult to defend. Scientific language is designed to be specific too, to its subject. So to differentiate in Maths is very, very different from to differentiate in cell biology! Heaven help learners!
My dialectology lecturer was always very keen to make sure we understood that ‘standard Welsh’ does not exist in the same way that ‘standard English’ does, and that ‘formal Welsh’ is a dialect, like all the others.
I love this. Newyddbethau?