Questions about Welsh

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marconatrix
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by marconatrix »

dyolf wrote:Hopefully the book will expand on what the BBC Learn Welsh PDFs teach, and then some.

This is purely out of curiosity: There is a brand of milk here in North Wales called Calon Wen which I know means White Heart, but why is white wen and not gwyn? I'm guessing that the loss of "g" is soft-mutation, but why does the "y" change to "e"?
There are a handful of adjectives in Welsh that have separate masc. and fem. forms involving a lowering of the vowels 'w, y' in the feminine to 'o, e', caused originally by the final -ā feminine ending of Brittonic. In most cases this was levelled out. The technical term is "final -ā affection". Apart from these few adjectives, the only other example I'm aware of where it causes a vowel change in inflexion is _gwraig_ pl. _gwragedd_ 'woman, women'.

There are also a few adjectives with (optional?) plural forms too.

In Cornish, fwiw, the masc. forms have been generalised in every case but one, krev "strong" where the fem. is the only form found, cf. Welsh cryf ~ gref.

Technically the 'soft mutation' is usually referred to as 'lenition', 'soft m.' is just a translation of the traditional Welsh term treigliad meddal afaik. The French term used in relation to Breton is mutation par adoucissement.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by marconatrix »

dyolf wrote:Something else which has bugged me about Welsh - when I was at primary school (so under 11 years old) we had to do certain things in Welsh, like ask for permission to visit the toilet, answer the attendance register, write the date (except in English lessons) etc. We were taught to ask the time by asking Faint o'gloch ydych chi? which appears to mean something like How much o'clock are you?. I have since learnt that most people say beth yw'r amser? which seems to make more sense. So is Faint o'gloch ydych chi? a more polite phrasing which doesn't translate properly into English?
I'm damn sure that ought to be "Faint o gloch ydi hi". I often misheard things (in English!) as a kid, we probably all do :-)

Possibly you were in an h-dropping part of S. Wales, so the /h/ got exaggerated to something like a /x/?

This happened historically in North Welsh (and the literary language) in the case of /sw- > hw- > xw-/ in words like chwech 'six' (< /sweks/). In parts of South Wales the process never went past the /hw/ stage, and indeed there are dialects where even the /h/ was lost leaving just plain /w-/.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

linguoboy wrote:
dyolf wrote: We were taught to ask the time by asking Faint o'gloch ydych chi? which appears to mean something like How much o'clock are you?. I have since learnt that most people say beth yw'r amser? which seems to make more sense. So is Faint o'gloch ydych chi? a more polite phrasing which doesn't translate properly into English?
Sure that isn't a mishearing of Faint o'r gloch ydy hi?? It's not unusual for /h/ to be pronounced [ç] before /i/ or /j/ by English-speakers, and if your teacher overemphasised the /h/ to keep the vowels from running together, I can see how it might come to resemble /x/.
It could well have been. It was 20 years ago so I don't really remember. It was the only formal Welsh language education I received as secondary school teachers were uninterested in teaching Welsh to (where I live) are large proportion of English children, so we were simply shown subtitled Welsh educational TV shows.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Yng »

wow there've been a lot of responses!!!
Richard W wrote:Roedd y plant yn chwarae yn y parc = 'The children played/were playing in the park'.

I've a feeling the English tenses etc. don't map cleanly into the Welsh ones. Somewhere in the system there should be something like Chwaraeodd y plant yn y parc = 'The children played in the park'; I'm not sure if it's colloquial Welsh, and I have little confidence I have inflected the verb correctly.
This is fine, though I would be more likely to say naeth y plant chwarae - synthetic preterite is not used that much up north. I would write chwaraeodd though.The Welsh tenses do actually line up pretty well with the English ones, except that maybe there's more of a tendency to use the continuous (as you also find in some Wenglish dialects), especially with e.g. verbs of opinion (o'n i'n meddwl, gwyddwn i/o'n i'n gwbod, etc)
There is or was an inflected imperfect but this has merged with the past subjunctive in the modern language (same as in Scots Gaelic) and is used for habitual action in the past, in statements like, "When I was a kid we all used to play/would play in the street". Even here though the imperfect of 'bod' with 'yn' + verbal noun, feels more natural, "Pan oeddwn i'n blentyn, bydden ni i gyd yn chwarae yn y stryd", literally '... we would all be playing/ we all used to play'
There's no inflected imperfect anymore except for a couple of verbs (colloquially, that is; Literary Welsh is different). Those verbs that do have it tend to use it only for conditional constructions (hoffwn i etc in some dialects). In some South Walian dialects, which are the most synthetic, most verbs can take these endings but they're only used for conditionals.
That's a bit odd. I'm used to a different kind of ambiguity, one where the future is used with habitual meaning. So Ydy Bethan yn siopa yn Llundain? would mean only "Is Bethan shopping in London?" whereas Fydd Bethan yn siopa yn Llundain? could mean either "Will Bethan be shopping in London?" or "Does Bethan shop in London?"
This depends entirely on context. The bydd habitual is, I think, a solidly Northern dialect form, and is interchangeable (IME) with the forms with ydy.
Something else which has bugged me about Welsh - when I was at primary school (so under 11 years old) we had to do certain things in Welsh, like ask for permission to visit the toilet, answer the attendance register, write the date (except in English lessons) etc. We were taught to ask the time by asking Faint o'gloch ydych chi? which appears to mean something like How much o'clock are you?. I have since learnt that most people say beth yw'r amser? which seems to make more sense. So is Faint o'gloch ydych chi? a more polite phrasing which doesn't translate properly into English?
This will be faint o'r gloch ydy hi? ('how much o' clock is it?'), which we all had to learn in school - you can say that or beth ydy'r amser. The latter is possibly more English-y, but both are used.
There are also a few adjectives with (optional?) plural forms too.
Almost all adjectives have optional literary plural forms formed with various endings (though mainly -ion or -on) or possibly with some vowel shift, although I can't think of any that work like that right now. Some Northwestern speakers have plural forms for colours and a couple of other adjectives (ironically I have heard daon as a plural of da even though that particular adjective is invariable even in Literary Welsh). Northern dialects love preserving relatively high degrees of synthesis in a small number of irregular members of a given class (certain irregular verbs also tend to have periphrastic futures and sometimes preterites in Northern dialects, for some reason, but the morphology is not productive with most verbs).
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

Yng wrote:
Dyolf wrote:Something else which has bugged me about Welsh - when I was at primary school (so under 11 years old) we had to do certain things in Welsh, like ask for permission to visit the toilet, answer the attendance register, write the date (except in English lessons) etc. We were taught to ask the time by asking Faint o'gloch ydych chi? which appears to mean something like How much o'clock are you?. I have since learnt that most people say beth yw'r amser? which seems to make more sense. So is Faint o'gloch ydych chi? a more polite phrasing which doesn't translate properly into English?
This will be faint o'r gloch ydy hi? ('how much o' clock is it?'), which we all had to learn in school - you can say that or beth ydy'r amser. The latter is possibly more English-y, but both are used.
Actually the people I've heard tend to use beth yw('r?) amser?, but I'm not sure what the difference is. It's a bit of a Valley's thing to use the occasional Welsh phrase in English conversation, especially when asking for the time, as a polite disguise for telling someone you're going to the toilet, swearing ("cachu" frequently used) or addressing children - especially in older generations.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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dyolf wrote:
Yng wrote:This will be faint o'r gloch ydy hi? ('how much o' clock is it?'), which we all had to learn in school - you can say that or beth ydy'r amser. The latter is possibly more English-y, but both are used.
Actually the people I've heard tend to use beth yw('r?) amser?, but I'm not sure what the difference is.
North vs South dialectal difference. (King talks about this in the book you hopefully have in hand now.)

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Yng »

Yeah - if you know the Literary Welsh copula then it all starts to make sense. There is a strange, I think basically meaningless particle y(r) (which may be cognate to the relative pronoun) which appears before some declarative forms in Literary Welsh. Then on top of that, there's an optional yd- prefix which I think originally meant 'so' or something like that but ends up being prefixed to some forms of 'to be'. So you end up with two forms: yr ydyw and yr yw. Generally the yr seems to have been dropped entirely, though some Southern dialects preserve it as an (optional?) r- prefix on declarative forms; in any case the r- is preserved in the Cymraeg Byw forms you get taught in school, like rydw i, rwyt ti etc. And whilst Southern dialects generally went for the forms without yd-, northern dialects preserved (some of) the forms with yd-, so you get dw i, (y)dy o (< ydyw) in the North vs (r)w i, yw e in the South. The difference in stress (ydyw vs yw) seems to have allowed southern dialects to preserve the diphthong where northern dialects simplified it.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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linguoboy wrote:
dyolf wrote:
Yng wrote:This will be faint o'r gloch ydy hi? ('how much o' clock is it?'), which we all had to learn in school - you can say that or beth ydy'r amser. The latter is possibly more English-y, but both are used.
Actually the people I've heard tend to use beth yw('r?) amser?, but I'm not sure what the difference is.
North vs South dialectal difference. (King talks about this in the book you hopefully have in hand now.)
I do, and I've skimmed through it and read the introduction but haven't really had the time to properly become engrossed in it yet. Christmas time is a vey busy time at work and I'm having to do overtime on top so my time is not my own yet, as well as this I'm training for a new job. I may invest in King's Basic Welsh and then Intermediate Welsh books too.

Just a quick question before I turn in for the night: I understand that o is Welsh for "of" but can y/yr mean "of the" as well as "the"? I ask because you never see "o" on Welsh roadsigns. A very common sign is Canol y Dref / Town Centre, so this must either literally be "centre the town" or "centre of the town". I doubt the "o" would simply be dropped for simplicity.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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dyolf wrote:I do, and I've skimmed through it and read the introduction but haven't really had the time to properly become engrossed in it yet.
There is an index. Ydy/yw is discussed in section 223 and 227 of my edition. (You have the newer edition, which I covet but can't really justify buying.)
dyolf wrote:Just a quick question before I turn in for the night: I understand that o is Welsh for "of" but can y/yr mean "of the" as well as "the"? I ask because you never see "o" on Welsh roadsigns. A very common sign is Canol y Dref / Town Centre, so this must either literally be "centre the town" or "centre of the town". I doubt the "o" would simply be dropped for simplicity.
No word is "Welsh for 'of'". Some Welsh words can translate "of" in certain contexts. Sometimes there is no Welsh word corresponding to "of" in a given context.

I would say o more closely corresponds to English "from". It generally only corresponds to "of" in expressions of quantity, e.g. dwy botel o gwrw "two bottles of beer", un onon ni "one of us". In most possessive contexts, simply juxtaposing the two nouns is enough, e.g. tŷ 'mrawd i "my brother's house"/"the house of my brother", clerc siop "shop clerk"/"clerk of a shop", pen mynydd "mountaintop"/"top of a mountain". If the nouns are definite, the article will appear before the second one, e.g. clerc y siopa "the shop clerk"/"the clerk of the shop", pen y mynydd "the mountaintop"/"the top of the mountain", canol y dre "the town centre"/"the centre of the town". (Cf. canol dre "a town centre"/"a centre of a town".)

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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linguoboy wrote:
dyolf wrote:I do, and I've skimmed through it and read the introduction but haven't really had the time to properly become engrossed in it yet.
There is an index. Ydy/yw is discussed in section 223 and 227 of my edition. (You have the newer edition, which I covet but can't really justify buying.)
I've seen very cheap used copied on Amazon and eBay, but I wanted a nice new shiny one.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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dyolf wrote:I've seen very cheap used copied on Amazon and eBay, but I wanted a nice new shiny one.
It's revised and expanded as well, which is why I'd like a copy of my own. Maybe when the one I have finally falls apart completely.

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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After reading a bit of the BBC Learn Welsh PDFs again (I have my laptop with me, but not the King book) does the sentence Roedd y car yn las translate as Was the car blue? and if so, does "yn" mean something like "in the action of being" - was the car [in the action of being] blue? and without "yn" the sentence would translate more as Was the blue car?? Please tell me that I'm getting a handle on this "yn" thing...
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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dyolf wrote:After reading a bit of the BBC Learn Welsh PDFs again (I have my laptop with me, but not the King book) does the sentence Roedd y car yn las translate as Was the car blue? and if so, does "yn" mean something like "in the action of being" - was the car [in the action of being] blue? and without "yn" the sentence would translate more as Was the blue car?? Please tell me that I'm getting a handle on this "yn" thing...
Car is masculine in Welsh, so *car las would simply be wrong. But other than that, you've more or less got it.

Remember, though, that--as Yng explained--yr is an affirmative marker, so roedd (< yr oedd) means "[it] was", not *"was [it]?". That would just be oedd. So (substituting feminine wagen):

Roedd y wagen yn las. The waggon was blue.
Roedd y wagen las. "The blue waggon was..." (the listener is still waiting for you to finish the sentence)
Oedd y wagen yn las? Was the waggon blue?
Oedd y wagen las? Was the blue waggon...? (vide supra)

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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Okay, I think I'm getting somewhere with this... slowly.

Something else I got thinking about while a saw the bilingual signage at the supermarket... is siopa a verb-noun derived from siop? So siop means shop / a shop and siopa means to shop? The only example I used before this was Mae'r plant yn chwarae but seeing as there is no noun for "play" (unless I am mistaken, for all I know play(ing) and a stage-play could be different words in Welsh) like there is for "shop" because a shop is an actual physical object I'm assuming this means the verb-noun needed to be derived from it using -a suffix? Or am I completely off here?
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Yng »

Yep. Roedd y car glas is not a complete sentence, it means 'the blue car was.' (I am kind of OK with saying something like doedd y wagen las ddim yn newydd, ond mi oedd y car glas for 'the blue wagon wasn't new, but the blue car was' but I think you'd probably end up repeating the yn: mi oedd y car glas yn because people like to have a word in the approximate place of English 'was' that they can stress in the same way). But roedd y car yn las means 'the car was blue'.
Something else I got thinking about while a saw the bilingual signage at the supermarket... is siopa a verb-noun derived from siop? So siop means shop / a shop and siopa means to shop? The only example I used before this was Mae'r plant yn chwarae but seeing as there is no noun for "play" (unless I am mistaken, for all I know play(ing) and a stage-play could be different words in Welsh) like there is for "shop" because a shop is an actual physical object I'm assuming this means the verb-noun needed to be derived from it using -a suffix? Or am I completely off here?
You're right that siopa is a verbnoun derived from siop (I assume), which is an English loanword (obviously). There are loads and loads of possible verbal noun endings - -o, -io, -i, -a, -ian, -e, -ed are the product of two seconds of thinking and I could think of lots more. There's not much logic to which is used with which verb, which is part of the reason - along with the fact that the verbnoun is pretty much used all across the verbal system and the convention of learning infinitives - that people are generally taught the verbnoun first and ways to remove the ending to get to the stem second (you need the stem to produce synthetic forms). The verbnoun covers the English infinitive 'to shop' and also the gerund 'shopping' (but not the participle, which in English is also 'shopping' but needs to be translated in Welsh by yn + verbnoun or some other construction like wrth + verbnoun generally).
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by linguoboy »

Yng wrote:You're right that siopa is a verbnoun derived from siop (I assume), which is an English loanword (obviously). There are loads and loads of possible verbal noun endings - -o, -io, -i, -a, -ian, -e, -ed are the product of two seconds of thinking and I could think of lots more. There's not much logic to which is used with which verb, which is part of the reason - along with the fact that the verbnoun is pretty much used all across the verbal system and the convention of learning infinitives - that people are generally taught the verbnoun first and ways to remove the ending to get to the stem second (you need the stem to produce synthetic forms). The verbnoun covers the English infinitive 'to shop' and also the gerund 'shopping' (but not the participle, which in English is also 'shopping' but needs to be translated in Welsh by yn + verbnoun or some other construction like wrth + verbnoun generally).
Just the other day I stumbled across this pointer to a recent dissertation on the subject which settled on -io as the most productive ending for making verb-nouns from recent English borrowings.

(There are some phonetic rules for native words--like -u can only appear after certain stem vowels--but they're complex and I can't remember them. I also can't remember if King goes into them or if I read about them in Thorne.)

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Yng »

Yeah, there are some rules - but there's basically no point in learning them. I am vaguely aware of them intuitively in that I can work out what a verb's verbnoun probably is by looking at it. But I won't always be right.

-io and -iau are by far the most common endings for deriving verbnouns and plurals from loans respectively. I'm not entirely sure why this should be the case, although it may be related to the long-established (I mean, from the OE period) of English infinitives ending in -ian (lician, etc). It's even become a bit of a joke in that most anglophone Welsh people's impressions of Welsh will be that it is English with -io and -iau stuck on the end of every other word and an exaggerated accent.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

With regards to wanting my conlang's grammar to be inspired / influences by Welsh I have noticed something which I think I could do without incorporating.

Welsh seems to reiterate negatives:
(Ry)dw i
Dydw i ddim
Now it seems to me that I could throw away either the ddim in my conlang, as the dydw already shows that the sentence will be negative (as opposed to the (ry)dw for affirmative), so the ddim isn't really necessary.

Using the Welsh forms as an example I see no reason my why conlang can't use:

Rydw i yn chwarae (I know it's really i'n)
Dydw i yn chwarae

But here yn isn't positive or negative, it simply goes before the verb-noun chwarae to making it "playing" rather than "play".

The other option I can see is to keep ddim and get rid of the initial negative dydw:

Rydw i yn chwarae
Rydw i ddim yn chwarae

This time the lack of ddim makes it affirmative and ddim is negative with Rydw just meaning "is/does" which becomes "is not / does not" under ddim.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Yng »

Yes, Welsh uses double negatives (or negative conchord more accurately). There is no reason your conlang should not have just negative forms for the verb like Literary Welsh - nid ydwyf yn chwarae/ni chwaraeaf.

This isn't really a question about Welsh, though.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

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Yng wrote:Yes, Welsh uses double negatives (or negative conchord more accurately). There is no reason your conlang should not have just negative forms for the verb - nid ydwyf yn chwarae/ni chwaraeaf.

This isn't really a question about Welsh, though.
I know, but seeing as it is kinda linked to my previous questions about Welsh I'm assuming the same people who helped with that would be best to advise on this too. Thanks, by the way.
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Richard W »

Yng wrote:Yes, Welsh uses double negatives (or negative conchord more accurately). There is no reason your conlang should not have just negative forms for the verb like Literary Welsh - nid ydwyf yn chwarae/ni chwaraeaf.

This isn't really a question about Welsh, though.
No, but it raises interesting questions about the possible evolutionary routes. There are special verb forms for some or all of the categories of (1) positive, negative v. interrogative and (2) definite, indefinite, relative, or some other complicated combination of these semantic aspects. How the the initial part of the negative circumfix is being replaced by the final part is interesting for conlanging. It's a lot more complicated than the similar path in French, where we have the progression ne ... > ne ... pas > ... pas. The only interesting thing I can think of for French here is the rule that the equivalent of English 'to fear that X' marks 'X' with just ne, while 'to fear that not X' marks X with ne ... pas. I'm not sure that this is a rule of present-day French. This is a partial flip-flop from the subordinate clause's expressing what is desired, as in Latin, to its expressing what is feared.

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by linguoboy »

dyolf wrote:With regards to wanting my conlang's grammar to be inspired / influences by Welsh I have noticed something which I think I could do without incorporating.

Welsh seems to reiterate negatives:
(Ry)dw i
Dydw i ddim
Except that in colloquial speech the verb is often dw in both cases.

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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by marconatrix »

linguoboy wrote:
dyolf wrote:With regards to wanting my conlang's grammar to be inspired / influences by Welsh I have noticed something which I think I could do without incorporating.

Welsh seems to reiterate negatives:
(Ry)dw i
Dydw i ddim
Except that in colloquial speech the verb is often dw in both cases.
You need to look back to literary Welsh (or Middle Welsh for that matter). For example, dw i ddim I'm not expands to nid (yd)wyf i (ddim). Originally the negative particle ni(d) came at the start of the phrase, but was unstressed. Then the stressed ddim, lit. (not) a bit, was added to give emphasis, and in the course of time became stereotyped and took over the semantic load of indicating negativity, so that the weakly stressed nid became increasingly glossed over. Really the same process as with French ne ... pas.
Kyn nag ov den skentel pur ...

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marconatrix
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by marconatrix »

Ah, now I see you've got confused by the yd- prefix on present tense of the verb 'to be'. This is nothing to do with the negative and may simply have been mildly emphatic. In Welsh it has no semantic content as far as I'm aware. Whether it's added or not, and to which persons seems to depend on style and dialect. Hence dwi < yr ydwyf i vs. rwi < yr wyf i for I am; dan ni < yr ydym ni vs. rŷn ni < yr ym ni for we are.
Kyn nag ov den skentel pur ...

Yng
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Re: Questions about Welsh [was: Welsh "yn"

Post by Yng »

I think you've missed linguoboy's point - as I understand it he was just pointing out that actually you can't necessarily go 'I noticed Welsh has double negatives' from dw i vs dydw i ddim because actually in speech we say dw i and dw i ddim, i.e. with an identical verbal form. But this doesn't hold true for other forms like tydy o'm vs ma o, or (to a lesser extent) gweles i o.and weles i mohono (though I would say welish i and welish i mono anyway - it's more common to mutate the indicative forms too).
كان يا ما كان / يا صمت العشية / قمري هاجر في الصبح بعيدا / في العيون العسلية

tà yi póbo tsùtsùr ciivà dè!

short texts in Cuhbi

Risha Cuhbi grammar

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