Sorry; I didn’t realise that this phrase had an existing usage and baggage behind it – I didn’t want to disparage any particular regional usage, but to refer to something that nobody considers correct – the equivalent not of “He ain’t big” but “Is big not he”.
Or Ich möchte ihn zu wissen in German which is a literal translation from “I want him to know” but makes no sense there (where you would have to say the equivalent of “I want that he knows” instead, to be grammatical).
There are some phrases where the structure, I think (but I’m open to correction if I’ve misinterpreted), does have an English influence, such as ‘edrych ar ôl’ for ‘to look after’, where the Welsh has a word ‘gofalu’ that also means the same thing. I have heard people call that ‘bad Welsh’, but personally I don’t think it is - it’s just how people speak. I wouldn’t use the phrase in a formal document, but I think it’s what I’d most often hear around me.
What you will find is English-speakers using the wrong prepositions (because they’re always tricky in a new language) when the Welsh uses something we don’t expect. So, for example, in English we ‘listen to’ something, but in Welsh it’s ‘gwrando ar’ (listen on). But the good news is that SSiW does a fantastic job of getting these in your head without banging on about them, so in the end you just say them because it sounds wrong if you don’t.
Which is a very longwinded way of saying that IMO it’s OK to trust what the course says … they know what they’re doing
I think I understand why you are wondering about this kind of thing, because I used to wonder about the same kind of question.
Somewhere or other, I have either heard Aran say, or have read him writing, that generally speaking, one can string words together in Welsh. (A good example of that is where two nouns appear together, and that indicates a possessive construction e.g. “wyneb dyn” “face of a man”).
It could be two verbs “dechrae canu” “begin to sing” - with nothing in between to represent the “to” that English has.
However, some verbs do usually come with an “i” (meaning more or less “to”), and “mynd” is one of those. I think there are other ones, but I can’t call them to mind at the moment and there are other verbs that take other prepositions (and “mynd” can take other prepositions).
As you know, SSiW doesn’t encourage reading to begin with, and still less reading grammar books. But there comes a time (probably after the end of course 1 or level 1), when some of us feel the urge to delve deeper into the grammar etc, and Gareth King’s books are a good choice for SSiWers, as he manages to combine a respect for the grammar with a respect for the spoken language (not regarding it as a “lesser form” of the language).
It’s not a perfect analogy, but I sometimes compare it with driving a car. With modern cars especially, one can drive them without knowing hardly anything about how they work or what lies under the bonnet. But there will always be some people who like to know a bit more, and perhaps open up the bonnet and “get their hands dirty”. It’s an optional extra so long as one has a good “garej”. (Perhaps the “garej” in this case is the website and fforwm ).
Diolch yn fawr, Gareth!
To @philipnewton I am sorry if I seemed fierce. I didn’t mean to! Croeso to the forum. Most people sre really nice and helpful. I am sure you will learn very quickly, you clearly are a polyglot!
I can’t comment on what’s good or bad grammar-wise, but this does make me think of when I was watching the TV series Parch recently and had to cringe every time one of the characters said “ti’n OK?” or - even worse to my ear: “ti’n alright?” Ugh… I’ve got no right to cringe when hearing that but what the heck is wrong with “ti’n iawn?” (which rolls so nicely off the tongue, as opposed to those other “more modern” variants).
But those characters also said ‘ti’n iawn’ from time to time, didn’t they? This is how people talk - they use a variety of patterns; they borrow words from other places and adapt them for their own use (English is the language most likely to do this, by the way). A language that changes and develops and is creative is one that is lively and, most importantly, living. Which is what we want
which addresses this bit, saying that something like “be dych chi’n weld?” is the colloquial form for something like “beth yr ydych chi’n weld?”, which itself is more colloquial than something like “Pa beth yr ydych chwi yn ei weled?”.
It reassures me to see the “ei” in there which matches what I had learned in Cornish It’s just been “optimised out” in spoken Welsh, apparently, possibly leaving behind a soft mutation.
If it’s any help, my friend who is fluent in both Cornish and Welsh says that Cornish is very like Middle Welsh - and he uses that when he teaches Cornish through the medium of Welsh.
Ooh, excellent. That makes a lot of sense when you think about it, given that most speakers of Revived Cornish learn a language based on documents from the 15th/16th century or thereabouts.
So it makes a lot of sense that Welsh will be broadly similar to it in some respects (it’s still a Celtic language) but rather different in others (it’s had several centuries’ worth of natural evolution while Cornish has been preserved in artificial stasis).
Thanks for that comparison!
And I wonder what Cornish would have been like if it had survived as a community language until now…
(Even Revived Late Cornish uses a model which is about 200 years old by now, I think, so we’re missing quite a bit of natural evolution.)
And there are some who want to defer that evolution indefinitely.
I got an email just the other day from one Cornish group with a little booklet attached containing errors found in the writing of some Cornish speakers which should be avoided, based on the fact that that grammatical construction is not found in the ancient texts (and so is not authentic); that a particular suffix is not needed; or that a word has been borrowed or calqued from Welsh, Breton, or English when a Cornish synonym exists.
sigh
Is Cornish a performance art where we reenact medieval passion plays? (Authenticity would make quite a bit of sense here.)
Or is it supposed to be a living community language that non-academics can use every day?
I’ve never studied Cornish (although have briefly played with SSiC), but from reading around I’d got the impression that progress in Cornish had stalled in the past over disagreements about orthography or whatever. A shame, but perhaps inevitable given that it has been in a sort of “dark age” for so long.
I think that a big part of it was that spelling simply wasn’t standardised back then, nor of course was the spelling designed to be a phonemic orthography or something helpful for a second-language learner.
So there’s a bit of competition between people who want something regular and phonemic on one side (that is both easily teachable and that will enable students to produce a correct pronunciation based on the spelling), and something that captures the ambiguous and inconsistent but “authentic and traditional” spelling of old on the other.
Also, because the old spelling did not always represent different sounds differently, there can be differences of opinion how this word or that is supposed to be pronounced. (Or even how many distinct vowel sounds there are.)
and there are other verbs that take other prepositions (and “mynd” can take other prepositions).