“ar rhyw gwrs ar gyfer sgwennu i’r BBC”
“some course about writing for the BBC”
Something like that…
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Responses are interesting…is everyone hearing the aw in gwrs
If so, is there a rule for when “w” sounds like “aw” and not “oo”?
No, I don’t think I am. It sounds like the “gwrs” in “wrth gwrs” to me.
(not that my ears are very reliable).
no, I hear “gwrs” as well
[quote]No, I don’t think I am. It sounds like the “gwrs” in “wrth gwrs” to me.
(not that my ears are very reliable).[/quote]
Just listened again, twice to make sure, and this time I hear the w in gwrs as o, like oh.
Can “w” ever sound like “oh”?
I hear the same. I’ve downloaded your file @cyd and put it on -15 % speed and this is exactly what I hear. before and after it’s a bit ununderstandable for me, but that’s because of not trained ears to Cymraeg rather then not hearing things properly.
That might depend on how “oh” sounds to you. Do you mean “oh” as in “oh no!” pronounced by an English person from the south-east? (well, RP is what I mean)?
I’m not sure even if Welsh has that sort of “oh” sound. Their “o” seems to be a different “pure” vowel sound, as in “go iawn”, and when a Welsh person speaks English with a strong Welsh accent, say using the word “gold”, it doesn’t sound quite the same as an English RP speaker saying it.
(and it doesn’t sound like Welsh “w” (to me) either).
Oh, the limitations of text for representing sound! I’ve tried learning IPA, but I don’t find it easy, and I’m not even sure that’s 100% reliable anyway).
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I’ve got two more tricky sound snippets for deciphering…again from Caryl Parry Jones…
first sound link
second sound link
I’ve upped the gain on the parts with words that I could not figure out so the sound should jump noticeably in those areas. If it doesn’t…or if you can’t access the links…post and let me know and I’ll fix them
Context Info: This episode of Caryl Parry Jones is about OCD…and the girl speaking is, I believe, speaking about her experiences with OCD…specifically about when she noticed something was wrong. Or, as Caryl says ‘Prid wnest ti dychry sylwi fallu bod na rywbeth dim quite yn iawn?’
I think that in the first section of the first clip she’s saying oedden i’n gweithio cael meddyliau da am iesu and for the last section of the first clip I think I’m hearing a rheg in there, but I’m not sure.
Do you need all of it transcribed, or do you get some parts of it? If you can put the parts you understand here, it’ll be faster/easier for me/us to fill in the rest… 
No, not all…there are parts in which I’m pretty sure about what’s being said.
Apologies if it wasn’t clear from my first post. I’ve edited the audio files so that the parts that I’m having trouble with are (should be) noticeably louder than the parts that I understand.
If it would help to transcribe the parts I understand here, definitely let me know and I’ll do so post haste.
Thanks again for everyone’s help!
Yeah, this, definitely - for me at any rate, it’s hard to remember which bits are louder (although it’s clear when it happens), and kind of makes the process of listening carefully for every last little bit of detail harder than it would be otherwise…
Will do. Here goes for the first sound clip. I’m italicizing the parts I’m struggling over and putting parens around the words couldn’t quite hear
Even right nol i’r cychwyn…dimond wnaes i cael profiad cynharach fi pan oen i tia chwech mlwydd oed. Ac, I guess, at a (gynnaui ni…gennwn i) really meddwl na dim byd yn wrong, 'cause jyst hogan bach chwech mlwydd oed…y gwneud pethau kind of bizarre really so…Oen i’n (gorod)…oen i’n mynd i’r capel ac oeni’n gweithio cael meddyliau da am iesu, dwi’n kind o cofio hyn yn disgwyl meddyliau da kind of dyna mae neis…jyst fydd e images rhyfedd ac ? wi’n rheg yr iesud neu images o wi’n rheg yr iesud…
Will post transcript for sound clip two when I have a minute…
‘Gorod’ is a fairly common shortening of ‘gorfod’ - and ‘meddyliadau’ isn’t very common, so I can see how that would have mislead you… who was the interviewee? The voice is familiar…
Diolch i’chi…diolch yn fawr iawn iawn.
Does ‘meddyliadau’ mean ‘thoughts’? Also, Google says ‘fatha’ is ‘like a’ and the University of Wales site has ‘fath’ but not ‘fatha’…
FYI, the interviewee is Lowri Hadden…according to this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061btkf
Croeso mawr iawn…
Yup… although it’s a fairly uncommon usage, I’d say, with ‘meddyliau’ being much more likely.
‘Fatha’ is pretty slangy - from ‘yr un fath â’…
Ah - not someone I know after all, but I bet she comes from somewhere near Rhuthun (because she sounds so much like a friend of mine who does!)…
One last question on the above…and before I submit the transcript for sound clip two…I went back and listened to this part several times and for the life of me I could not hear the ‘ddim yn’ in that phrase. The most I could hear was do’n nhw ma neis. Is there a contraction in there that I’m missing?
I’ll keep an ear out during the rest of the podcast…maybe she mentions where she’s from…
FYI, Google Translate has this as ‘of a kind’
Yes - two-fold, I’d suggest - the ‘ddim’ is getting squashed down to the ‘m’ in what you offer as ‘ma’, and then the ‘yn neis’ is becoming what you’ve got as ‘a neis’ (virtually the same sound). Interesting, now that you’ve got the content to work from, you’ve also accepted the ‘do’n’ - but on a very careful hearing, I don’t think she actually says the initial ‘d’, either.
This is what real spoken language is always like. This is happening all the time you hear/understand English, you just don’t become consciously aware of the elisions because your brain does such a good job of predicting them…
If it matters, there was a significant gap between when I listened to that bit and when I posted to the forum…at that point I was probably relying on a memory of what I’d heard.
It’s like how vision works with optical illusions…you see the “illusion” because your eyes are unconsciously filling in or leaving out the “gaps”
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Yes, a very, very similar process. See also: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/sounds-you-cant-unhear/373036/
Another very cool example :).
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