What’s with joio?

This is one for the questions session if I was brave enough to go on. Is joio really something people say? I’m my myneddiad course it was mywnhau and I really liked that word. I would just say it instead of joio except I don’t know how to conjugate it so joies i, dw i’n joio etc. I even looked up joio on Ap Geiriaduron and nothing. I’m no purist. I’m happy to learn slangy if it gets me over the hump of fluency from where I can then start trying to speak like the poets. But joio? Really??

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Joio is very common in speech (technically it’s enjoio, but gets cropped!). It’s fine to use mwynhau instead though. (and here’s how you conjugate it)

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Awe. My first verb conjugation table since starting ten weeks ago. Had to be you Sian. So is Ap Geiriaduron just up tight then? There are a few SSIW words a cant find. What for example is ‘ma. As in y llyfr ‘ma. Ap has other thing for “this”. Not saying it’s wrong just pronoun curious.

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'ma is short for “yma”. You’ll also hear 'na for “yna”. Welsh loves squishing things up and dropping letters!

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I guessed yma but when I looked up yma on Ap Geiriaduron is define it as “here”. I guess that makes sense. As in the book here (pointing) as in this book. Perhaps I should steer clear of Ap Geiriaduron for now.

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Absolutely spot on. :slight_smile:

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Joio is listed in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (available as the free GPC app or online at geiriadur.ac.uk). Defined as a spoken form of enjoio ‘mwynhau, … to enjoy’.

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I absolutely hate joio
Mwynhau for me

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Can’t even say it. Makes me joyless.

That site you linked is amazing. I could live there and just wallow in the conjugations.

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Even though I would not live in it like Ken, it’s super useful! :smiley: Thanks!

p.s. I also have to admit I really don’t like the sound of joio myself.
It sounds like a fake Italian verb. :laughing:

Ironically it sounds almost exactly like the Italian word for joy, gioia.
But it reminds me of when, as a child, annoying boring ladies tended to refer to us children. :roll_eyes:

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Where I live in Gorslas, Carmarthenshire joio is really common. Though you do sometimes hear mywnhau too.

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I agree in part, but as a poet in enjoy (joio) both Larkin, RST, Dylan, Heaney and the other side Milligan, mcgough, Boyce and what’s his name who was on countdown by 8/10 cats. (Name on tip of tongue but brain not cooperating) we need both. Lean to communicate then learn to be good at it I guess.

Not being oppositional at all but it’s joio for me every time but I can’t stanf licio.

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How about lico, then? :slight_smile:

Do you think welsh got it from the Romans’ directly and did we therefore give it to the Anglo Saxons?

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I really don’t know, sorry!
But you can have a look at the thread about connections with other languages (that I can’t find for you right now cause I have very little connection and might disappear any time). That’s where the experts of history and etymology hang out. :slight_smile:

felly ti’n drwglico lico - so you dislike licio - to be honest I used to think a bit like that - the thing is we speak English and when we’re learning Welsh these adopted and modified English words in Welsh can feel a bit dissapointing, you start hearing some people starting a sentence in Mae and then the rest seemingly in English, with an io on the end of the English verbs etc and you start to wonder is this Welsh or just another form of Wenglish. Our ears pick up on these English words and we tend to think there are far more of them, than there actually are.

I have to say that I have completely changed my opinion, as I learn more and more Welsh - Welsh is far more complex than that, most speakers have ways of speaking that are very difficult to envisage in English and the odd English borrowing, which is significant, but really isn’t as much as you originally think, is something natural and over-time, words become naturalised.

Lico has been around in Welsh for a long time now though - at least 400 years, similarly words like iwso, so I’m afraid this one and many others are now part of the natural languages and going to be very hard ones to avoid. I actually now say mun and butt on the end of Welsh sentences, as I do in English and it’s quite liberating, being able to do that - Welsh suddenly becomes a much more natural language to me and not something foreign or alien.

Some words that have been borrowed from English, have almost dropped out of common English usage altogether now - carcus for gofalus (careful etc) is very common where I am, but that was orignically an English borrowing from the word cark - to worry - that word is now archaic in English and I doubt anyone ever uses it anymore.

I wonder when people started using words like eisiau, whether there were people out there saying things like, what’s wrong with the old British words - everyone seems to be speaking pidgin British with Latin borrowings, these days.

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I confess being biased on the licio/lico/hoffi thing.
I do like hoffi. And don’t like licio (like @colinwilliams-1).
But since Pat and Dave Datblygu said they use lico, I can use it too! :wink:

p.s. had to edit now I realized with my lousy connection I had lost a lico, and last sentence seemed referred to licio! :smiley:

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I’m not obsessed with it just a preference. Iestyn told me they both came into the language in the 16th Century and SSiW south was pretty close to going with licio but didn’t.

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