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Jonlang
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Questions about Welsh

Post by Jonlang »

I know that the word "yn" translates as "in" as in Mae'r plant yn chwarae pêl-droed yn y parc - The children [are] play[ing] football in the park.

But there are two forms of "yn" in that sentence, I have emboldened where I understand the translation of "in", but the first instance (plant yn chwarae) doesn't mean "in", even the PDF I have which translates the sentence says "Notice the linking word yn". So is this word basically obsolete in the sentence? Does it carry any actual meaning?
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by M Mira »

A short trip to Wiktionary tells me that the first is a particle marking the complement for the copula, the second is indeed the preposition "in".

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by linguoboy »

dyolf wrote:But there are two forms of "yn" in that sentence, I have emboldened where I understand the translation of "in", but the first instance (plant yn chwarae) doesn't mean "in", even the PDF I have which translates the sentence says "Notice the linking word yn". So is this word basically obsolete in the sentence? Does it carry any actual meaning?
The preposition yn and the grammatical particle yn are cognate, but already by the Middle Welsh period they were pronounced differently and had different functions. In modern Welsh, the former is pronounced /ɨn/, assimilates to a following consonant (e.g. ym Mangor), and traditionally takes the nasal mutation (though increasingly the soft mutation in colloquial contexts). The latter is pronounced /ən/, reduces after a vowel (e.g. y plant sy'n chwarae yn y parc), and takes the soft mutation only in certain contexts. (Cf. mae'r plant yn dysgu vs mae'r plant yn ddrwg.)

You ask "Does it carry any actual meaning?" Doe -ing carry any actual meaning in "The children are playing"?

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Salmoneus »

While I agree with your general point... yes, in that example "-ing" does have a meaning. "The children are play" says that the children themselves are a form of play, whereas "the children are playing" says that the children are engaged in a form of play. More generally, the -ing in 'are Xing' constructions turns the whole into a periphrastic construction indicating the progressive aspect, and makes the interpretation of "are" as an equation of identity much less likely.

So if that's the analogy, then it would seem fair to ask whether 'yn' has a meaning. (it may not... some morphemes have no identifiable meaning in themselves, but are simply lexically or syntactically required).
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

As far as I can see the first "yn" doesn't have any proper meaning, not in a way that is comparable to -ing anyway. Mae'r plant already handles "the children are" and chwarae yn y parc handles "playing in the park", at least to me it seems to be obsolete apart from simply being some form of requirement which hasn't been dropped.

But thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. I'm enquiring mostly because my conlang's grammar is modelled largely on Welsh, but not being a fluent Welsh speaker means I need to learn as I go.
Last edited by Jonlang on Wed Nov 25, 2015 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by linguoboy »

Salmoneus wrote:So if that's the analogy, then it would seem fair to ask whether 'yn' has a meaning. (it may not... some morphemes have no identifiable meaning in themselves, but are simply lexically or syntactically required).
You mean something along the lines of a minimal pair? Like:

Shwd mae'r plant yn chwarae? "How are the children playing?"

vs

Shwd mae'r plant chwarae? "How are the playing children?"

Something like that?
dyolf wrote:As far as I can see the first "yn" doesn't have any proper meaning, not in a way that is comparable to -ing anyway.
So "proper meaning" = "meaning that has a one-to-one equivalent in English"?
dyolf wrote:but not being a fluent Welsh speaker means I need to learn as I go.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

linguoboy wrote:
dyolf wrote:As far as I can see the first "yn" doesn't have any proper meaning, not in a way that is comparable to -ing anyway.
So "proper meaning" = "meaning that has a one-to-one equivalent in English"?
No, but you compared it to -ing, asking if the -ing has any real meaning, and it was pointed out that it does. But if I'm missing something then would it not be more constructive to say so and help out rather than attempt to insult me?
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Salmoneus »

linguoboy wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:So if that's the analogy, then it would seem fair to ask whether 'yn' has a meaning. (it may not... some morphemes have no identifiable meaning in themselves, but are simply lexically or syntactically required).
You mean something along the lines of a minimal pair? Like:

Shwd mae'r plant yn chwarae? "How are the children playing?"

vs

Shwd mae'r plant chwarae? "How are the playing children?"

Something like that?
Yes: I would think a reasonable, common-sensical interpretation of "does this element have a meaning?" would be:
a) does the presence or absence of the element change the meaning of any utterance? Are there any minimal pairs?
b) if so, does the presence or absence of the element predictably change meanings in analogous ways in all or most cases?

If no to the first, it should maybe be seen as a purely grammatical element. For instance, I'm not sure that the -s marker of third person singular verbs in English is really 'meaningful', rather than just being an agreement marker. Or a vague 'register' marker - I have no idea when and why I sometimes add "-st" to words like 'while' and 'among', or "-s" to words ending in -ward. It's probably more to do with the situation I'm talking in than with the meaning of the words.
If no to the second, it may be that there is more than one element in question, which happen to be homophonous with one another, or it may be that that the element is a non-productive form of derivation with an obscured semantic motivation.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by linguoboy »

dyolf wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
dyolf wrote:As far as I can see the first "yn" doesn't have any proper meaning, not in a way that is comparable to -ing anyway.
So "proper meaning" = "meaning that has a one-to-one equivalent in English"?
No, but you compared it to -ing, asking if the -ing has any real meaning, and it was pointed out that it does. But if I'm missing something then would it not be more constructive to say so and help out rather than attempt to insult me?
How exactly did I insult you here? If that's not the definition of "proper meaning" you're using in your reply, then perhaps you could explain to me what you do mean by the term.

Moreover, I did say something constructive. That's the part of the post Sal responded to. Feel free to join that conversation if it interests you.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Richard W »

Unless I'm sorely mistaken (quite possible - my knowledge of Welsh is both rusty and theoretical), there is both a meaning and a contrast. The meaning arises because the 'particle' _yn_ is followed by the infinitive of the verb, generally called the 'verbal noun' in more learned discussions, and the contrast arises because compound perfect tenses are formed by using wedi instead of _yn_. Reaching for a phrasebook (Welsh in a week?, price 1s), I find:

A ydych wedi gweld y Castell? 'Have you seen the Castle?' The verb is gweld.
Yr wyf yn ei adnabod o ran ei weld. 'I know him by sight.' The word weld is the soft mutation of gweld.

On-line in a grammar book, Anaphora in Celtic and Universal Grammar, I find

Ydy Siôn yn gweld Mair? 'Does Siôn see Mary?'
Ydy Siôn wedi ɡweld Mair? 'Did Siôn see Mary?'

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Richard W »

Salmoneus wrote:For instance, I'm not sure that the -s marker of third person singular verbs in English is really 'meaningful', rather than just being an agreement marker.
There is a subtle (often unnoticed, I suspect) difference between 'If it come to that...' and 'If it comes to that...'. The weird thing is that the extra meaning of implausibility inheres in the absence of -s.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Travis B. »

Richard W wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:For instance, I'm not sure that the -s marker of third person singular verbs in English is really 'meaningful', rather than just being an agreement marker.
There is a subtle (often unnoticed, I suspect) difference between 'If it come to that...' and 'If it comes to that...'. The weird thing is that the extra meaning of implausibility inheres in the absence of -s.
The lack of -s in the 3P present in English marks the present subjunctive, actually. (This is an aspect of English that is commonly looked over, or even is denied to exist by the idiots that claim that English does not have a subjunctive.)
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

Richard W wrote:Unless I'm sorely mistaken (quite possible - my knowledge of Welsh is both rusty and theoretical), there is both a meaning and a contrast. The meaning arises because the 'particle' _yn_ is followed by the infinitive of the verb, generally called the 'verbal noun' in more learned discussions, and the contrast arises because compound perfect tenses are formed by using wedi instead of _yn_. Reaching for a phrasebook (Welsh in a week?, price 1s), I find:

A ydych wedi gweld y Castell? 'Have you seen the Castle?' The verb is gweld.
Yr wyf yn ei adnabod o ran ei weld. 'I know him by sight.' The word weld is the soft mutation of gweld.

On-line in a grammar book, Anaphora in Celtic and Universal Grammar, I find

Ydy Siôn yn gweld Mair? 'Does Siôn see Mary?'
Ydy Siôn wedi ɡweld Mair? 'Did Siôn see Mary?'
So if someone (say a learner) were to ask a fluent speaker "ydy Siôn gweld Mair?" what would be inferred?
Richard W wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:For instance, I'm not sure that the -s marker of third person singular verbs in English is really 'meaningful', rather than just being an agreement marker.
There is a subtle (often unnoticed, I suspect) difference between 'If it come to that...' and 'If it comes to that...'. The weird thing is that the extra meaning of implausibility inheres in the absence of -s.
I've never heard anyone say "If it come to that...". I've heard "If it came to that..." and "If it comes to that..." which carry the same meaning.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Richard W »

dyolf wrote:So if someone (say a learner) were to ask a fluent speaker "ydy Siôn gweld Mair?" what would be inferred?
He'd probably know you were an English speaker, and try a word for word translation into English, and try to interpret that.

It's better, I think, to try "Ydy'r ci gweld Mair?". That leaves the possibility that you might be asking if the dog were Mary's guide dog. However, you should be better placed than me to ask a fluent Welsh speaker. I'm not knowingly in contact with one. Google translate is nowhere near being one.
dyolf wrote:I've heard "If it came to that..." and "If it comes to that..." which carry the same meaning.
No, they imply different assessments of the likelihood of it coming to that, and I would have expected a native speaker to be aware of the difference.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by linguoboy »

Travis B. wrote:(This is an aspect of English that is commonly looked over, or even is denied to exist by the idiots that claim that English does not have a subjunctive.)
It doesn't. At best, it has a highly-restricted irrealis.
Richard W wrote:He'd probably know you were an English speaker, and try a word for word translation into English, and try to interpret that.
Or assume that you accidentally dropped a word and try to interpolate what it was based on context. (Yn isn't the only possibility here; besides the wedi which Richard mentioned, there's also newydd [for immediate past], heb [for past negation], and probably some other alternatives I'm forgetting right now.)

What would you assume if someone said [not wrote], "Is Sean see Mary?" Would you naturally assume an -ing was dropped? Or might you completely misparse the entire sentence, e.g. "Is Shauncey Mary?", "Is Shauncey married?".

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Travis B. »

linguoboy wrote:
Travis B. wrote:(This is an aspect of English that is commonly looked over, or even is denied to exist by the idiots that claim that English does not have a subjunctive.)
It doesn't. At best, it has a highly-restricted irrealis.
All verbs in certain subordinate clauses in English can have the present subjunctive, even though this is only morphologically marked in the 3S except for the verb be where it is marked in all persons and numbers. (E.g. "I insist that she eat her dinner.")

Then there is the past subjunctive; while this is only marked morphologically on the verb be, this is still reflected in other verbs using the morphological past to indicate irrealis meanings. (E.g. had in the sentence "Had he booted the machine he would have seen it was running Windows 3.1" is an example of the past subjunctive even though have does not morphologically distinguish the past indicative and the past subjunctive.)
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by hwhatting »

Travis B. wrote:
It doesn't. At best, it has a highly-restricted irrealis.
All verbs in certain subordinate clauses in English can have the present subjunctive, even though this is only morphologically marked in the 3S except for the verb be where it is marked in all persons and numbers. (E.g. "I insist that she eat her dinner.")
Instead of "in English" I'd rather say "in a certain register / lect of English" - in my experience, many (most?) native speakers, on both sides of the pond, don't seem to have these subjunctive forms as part of their active grammar and use "insist that she eats".

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Jonlang »

hwhatting wrote:
Travis B. wrote:
It doesn't. At best, it has a highly-restricted irrealis.
All verbs in certain subordinate clauses in English can have the present subjunctive, even though this is only morphologically marked in the 3S except for the verb be where it is marked in all persons and numbers. (E.g. "I insist that she eat her dinner.")
Instead of "in English" I'd rather say "in a certain register / lect of English" - in my experience, many (most?) native speakers, on both sides of the pond, don't seem to have these subjunctive forms as part of their active grammar and use "insist that she eats".
As far as I can tell they're both used interchangeably. No one would ever correct someone for using one instead of the other.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Zaarin »

hwhatting wrote:
Travis B. wrote:
It doesn't. At best, it has a highly-restricted irrealis.
All verbs in certain subordinate clauses in English can have the present subjunctive, even though this is only morphologically marked in the 3S except for the verb be where it is marked in all persons and numbers. (E.g. "I insist that she eat her dinner.")
Instead of "in English" I'd rather say "in a certain register / lect of English" - in my experience, many (most?) native speakers, on both sides of the pond, don't seem to have these subjunctive forms as part of their active grammar and use "insist that she eats".
I'm not so sure. "I insist that she eats her dinner" sounds wrong to me; "I insist that she eat..." does not. Or at least, the first sounds like what is being insisted upon is the fact that she does eat dinner (contradicting a claim that she doesn't), whereas the second sounds like the intended meaning that eating her dinner is what is being insisted upon.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by hwhatting »

So Zaarin speaks a variant of English where the difference is maintained, while Dyolf has observed usages with and without a difference betwen subjunctive and indicative, I frequently have interactions with native speakers of English, and I've rarely met people who observe that distinction. I'd be interested in having more opinions on this - do other native English speakers on the board distinguish subjunctive and indicative in cases like this?

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Richard W »

dyolf wrote:
hwhatting wrote:
Travis B. wrote: All verbs in certain subordinate clauses in English can have the present subjunctive, even though this is only morphologically marked in the 3S except for the verb be where it is marked in all persons and numbers. (E.g. "I insist that she eat her dinner.")
Instead of "in English" I'd rather say "in a certain register / lect of English" - in my experience, many (most?) native speakers, on both sides of the pond, don't seem to have these subjunctive forms as part of their active grammar and use "insist that she eats".
As far as I can tell they're both used interchangeably. No one would ever correct someone for using one instead of the other.
I've had my use of the imperative (though it looked the same as a subjunctive) 'corrected' to the indicative. I say 'imperative' because it doesn't follow the sequence of tenses in my usage - I would say, "I insisted that she eat her dinner", which I'll probably be told is wrong.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by KathTheDragon »

hwhatting wrote:So Zaarin speaks a variant of English where the difference is maintained, while Dyolf has observed usages with and without a difference betwen subjunctive and indicative, I frequently have interactions with native speakers of English, and I've rarely met people who observe that distinction. I'd be interested in having more opinions on this - do other native English speakers on the board distinguish subjunctive and indicative in cases like this?
In my speech it's variable whether or not I use the subjunctive (and I'm not sure which is more frequent), but I'm far more likely to use it when writing.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Travis B. »

Richard W wrote:
dyolf wrote:
hwhatting wrote:
Travis B. wrote: All verbs in certain subordinate clauses in English can have the present subjunctive, even though this is only morphologically marked in the 3S except for the verb be where it is marked in all persons and numbers. (E.g. "I insist that she eat her dinner.")
Instead of "in English" I'd rather say "in a certain register / lect of English" - in my experience, many (most?) native speakers, on both sides of the pond, don't seem to have these subjunctive forms as part of their active grammar and use "insist that she eats".
As far as I can tell they're both used interchangeably. No one would ever correct someone for using one instead of the other.
I've had my use of the imperative (though it looked the same as a subjunctive) 'corrected' to the indicative. I say 'imperative' because it doesn't follow the sequence of tenses in my usage - I would say, "I insisted that she eat her dinner", which I'll probably be told is wrong.
No, it is still subjunctive. The terms "present subjunctive" and "past subjunctive" do not mean they actually are present and past tense, but rather are named based on their similarity to the present indicative and past indicative respectively. E.g. the English "present subjunctive" corresponds to the German Konjunktiv I and the English "past subjunctive" corresponds to the German Konjunktiv II, both of which are not actually marked for tense.
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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by M Mira »

Are the vebs in "(god) bless (you/the queen/America)", "sleep well", "fare well", "have a good day" subjunctive or imperative? They sounds more frequently used than the other examples of present subjunctive here.

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Re: Welsh "yn"

Post by Travis B. »

M Mira wrote:Are the vebs in "(god) bless (you/the queen/America)", "sleep well", "fare well", "have a good day" subjunctive or imperative? They sounds more frequently used than the other examples of present subjunctive here.
"Sleep well", "fare well", and "have a good day" are imperative, while "God bless you" is present subjunctive. "Bless you" by itself looks like an imperative, because it lacks a subject, but "you" is the direct object not the subject (where then it would be implicit were it actually imperative, and were there an implicit 2S subject then it would have a reflexive "yourself" not "you" for a direct object).
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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