I’m not too far into fy nhaith iaith, so I haven’t completely figured this one out yet, but why is it that we use the possessive forms in the examples below, and when do we use them?
Examples:
Mae’r hen fenyw yn mynd i dy helpu di (From SSiW)
Dewch i’r ddesg a bydd rhywun yma i’ch helpu chi (From Ddysgu Cymraeg)
My instinct as a learner is to say “Mae’r hen fenyw yn mynd i helpu chi/ti” and “bydd rhywun yma i helpu chi/ti”, and I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it.
I am afraid I can’t really give you a reason why Welsh is the way it is, other than that it is not English, and building a Welsh sentence is more than just replacing English words with Welsh ones.
You have successfully identified the pattern, so now you just have to accept and use it: when the object of a verb is a pronoun, we insert the possessive particle before the verb. In literary Welsh, the “echoed” pronoun after the verb is even omitted sometimes.
That said, in colloquial speech, you’ll usually get away with constructing the sentences without the possessive particles, but it’s not strictly correct.
In Welsh, the possessive pronoun comes before the noun (and will cause mutations) and there is the optional element after the noun. It might have come from needing a distinction between ‘his’ and ‘her’ when there is no mutation to the noun ei = his causes a soft mutation and ei = her causes an aspirate one, so ei blant = his children ei phlant = her children
but ei radio could be either his or her radio, so needs to be qualified by e/o or hi after it.
This practice probably then spread to the other pronouns to cause ‘echoes’.
Just to chip in on the basis of the “why”: in the original examples, helpu isn’t, strictly speaking, a verb - it’s a verb-noun or verbal noun, like English ‘helping’ or ‘to help’.
(If you’re wondering how ‘helping’ is a noun, I always tell my English classes that ‘Swimming is good for you’ works in exactly the same way as ‘Spinach is good for you.’ There’s no question about ‘spinach’ being a noun - it’s a pile of green stuff, there on your plate; but grammatically, ‘swimming’ is the same.)
But for some reason, verb-nouns in Celtic languages aren’t allowed normal objects, like proper verbs. In Scots Gaelic it even works with nouns - ‘I am teaching the boy’ is really ‘I am a-teaching of the boy.’ And the Welsh is the same - Mae hi’n mynd i dy helpumeans “She’s going to help you” but word for word it actually says something more like “She is going to your helping.”
So that’s a bit more “why”; but it’s probably easier just to think of it as “She’s going to help you,” only with a different word order from English.
@craigf Sadly, many young people today are unaware of the existence of the gerund. It’s shame, because they are such lovely things – old people of my generation were brought up appreciating them, mainly through the work of the famous explorer-grammarian Ronald Searle.
You can get a flavour of the joy of the gerund in this extract from his authoritative treatise: How to be Topp (Willans and Searle, 1954)
This might be super nerdy, but I remember being actually excited when our English Grammar teacher introduced the gerund at school. I was in first year secondary school, and I couldn’t understand why my classmates weren’t as delighted as I was
We didn’t do English Grammar formally in the 70s (even though it was a grammar school….) Instead I learnt about gerunds and other animals from Latin lessons, mostly.
A shame because learning a modicum of grammar is useful, even if that’s mainly for raising your eyebrows at newspaper columnists who think that ‘don’t split infinitives’ is a real thing in English, not a nonsense made up by eighteenth century pedants….
These “rules” drive me nuts. They are so… wrong. People look at me like I’m an alien when I tell them English doesn’t have an infinitive (or a future tense).
Then there’s my favorite grammar joke… A preposition is something you never end a sentence with.
“This is the sort of thing up with which I shall not put.” (Winston Churchill, allegedly).
There’s a rather good book by Oliver Kamm called Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage, which does a very good job of skewering this sort of nonsense. He explains how some of the shibboleths started. For example, he says that the ‘rule’ against stranded prepositions came from Dryden (i.e. in the C17th):
The most notorious judgment advanced by the grammarians was the objection to the STRANDED PREPOSITION – the notion that you mustn’t end a sentence with a preposition. The rule is devoid of merit or reputability but it gets repeated constantly. The prohibition on stranded prepositions comes from Dryden; no one had thought of it before. Engaging in the popular recreation of criticising writers of the past for linguistic transgressions that they would never have thought of, Dryden targeted Ben Jonson for his usage here: ‘The waves and dens of beasts could not receive / The bodies that those souls were frighted from.’
Not only does Dryden criticise Jonson, he also criticises himself for having used stranded prepositions in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. The problem, says Dryden, is ‘the preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observed in my own writings’ (emphasis added).
Kamm, Oliver. Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage (p. 90). Orion. Kindle Edition.
It’s an entertaining read – as is only to be expected from the son of the late Anthea Bell, who translated the Asterix books into English.[1]
[1]: As everybody knows, the Asterix books in English are the finest translations ever made…
I don’t speak or read French, but just knowing that the translator saw the dog’s name “Idéfix” (from idée fixe, a fixed idea) and seized the opportunity to translate it “Dogmatix” makes me laugh.
Yes! There are so many great puns in the English version, and some of them are much better than the original French versions.
the druid who gives Asterix his regular dose of magic potion is Getafix in English, but only Panoramix in French
the dreadful singer is the boring Assurancetourix (= Comprehensive Insurance) in French, but Cacofonix is English
the fishmonger known for his rotten fish is Ordralfabétix in French (Alphabetical Order), but Unhygienix in English
and so on… Some of the French names are very good too – the village elder is called Agecanonix which riffs on a French expression for ‘very old/ancient’ (the English version is Geriatrix…) – but for me the English translators have taken it to a new level…
The Welsh versions, by the way, are:
Cenarheibix the dog
Gwyddioniadix the druid
Perganiedix the bard
My Welsh isn’t good enough to work out what the first and third puns are, but I assume the second is something to do with science/knowledge?
The fishmonger doesn’t appear in Asterix Y Galiad, which is the only one of the series I have, I’m afraid.
Wild guess says Perganiedix comes from pêr (sweet) and cân (song). I can’t think of anything funny or clever about Cenarheibix. Cenau plus heibio or something like…? Not all that meaningful, but I think cenau (pup) at least might be right.
I love, love, love the Asterix books my dad owns. I think I’ve read them all. He puts them out as “coffee table books” in the living room sometimes. So many puns. The translation is truly superb. I’m not even sure I’d want to read the originals if I learn French; it doesn’t sound like they’re half so funny!
Sweetsinger sounds about right and the pup-something, too!
The French books are still very funny, but a lot of the humour is very visual as many of the characters look like French politicians and TV personalities (and from forty years ago in the earlier books!). There are a lot of puns too, but you have to have a far better command of French slang / culture than I do to get some of them.
I was with a group who visited the translator for the Welsh versions of Asterix once, and it was really interesting to hear how he went about it. He used the original French, but then created puns and situations relevant to Wales. I gave all my Asterix and Tin Tin books to young friends when I was leaving Wales, and I don’t remember the names of the characters now, but I did enjoy them.
