Reminds me, I came across the word “kraken” the other day. This was in a German context, but it turned out that it was the same in English.
Google tells me that it was an enormous mythical sea monster said to appear off the coast of Norway (although one online German-English dictionary I looked in the other day gave it as an octopus).
Diolch … my family used to speak Welsh not long ago … been learning good ebychiadau/interjections … yet many young people around me now arent using them
Daro! - damn! … O fflam! O hec! … lot of the tiny bits that make Welsh rich are being shed like melting snow off a sunny roof! … so I can only try to learn myself.
Diolch eto! … pych is another string to my bow or what ever the phrase is!
Iestyn says this in the listening exercises. When I first heard it I thought, “I’ve never heard Iestyn say that”, and the very next time I was having a conversation with Iestyn he said it!
Ooo I love that question but I am working and cannot answer. I am sure somebody else will have answered by the time I can get home, ha, ha. I am sure I will love the answer just the same.
The ‘w’ is ‘ei’. The sentence is theoretically Dw i’n moyn gwbod y peth gorau i ei neud wythnos nesa but you can’t have “i ei” together, so the ‘ei’ turns into ‘w’.
So in this situation it is “ei”. The gwneud here refers back to “peth gorau”. Word for word what is said is “the best thing to do it”. It’s called reflexive.
Kraken = giant mythical squid that leave large scars on whales.
Mythical until one came up in a trawlers net off New Zealand,
(only 60 feet long, so maybe a tiddler).
It’s not, though - in examples like that, the second (or third, depending on how you count!) verb kind of inherits the time marker of the first - it’s just one of those ways in which languages work differently - in Welsh, dywedodd y llall wrtha i bo ti’n mynd i ddechrau could be either ‘you’re going’ or ‘you were going’ - in most cases, it doesn’t matter all that much - if it caused uncertainty in meaning, you’d circle back and go into more detail.
This kind of stuff is almost impossible to learn from lists or books or rules - you can only really pick it up through exposure and usage…
It’s almost certainly almost always just better to learn the Welsh patterns in themselves, but… They’re actually really different structures in Italian & English, too - it’s just that you don’t notice until you find Welsh being even more radical about it.
In English and Italian, in the first sentence you have a subordinating link word (that, che), followed by a new subject and a new verb (you were going). In the second one your linking word (who, chi) is the subject of the next verb (wanted). It’s probably more obvious in English because we have to have explicit subject pronouns, but I reckon the Italian is basically doing the same thing.
So I think they fundamentally just are different types of sentence - it’s just rather more obvious in Welsh.
ETA: tl;dr version – in (1) ‘me’, ‘that’, and the subject of ‘were going’ (you) are three different things, in English and Italian; in (2) ‘someone’, ‘who’, and the subject of ‘wanted’ are all the same person. (1) and (2) are really very different from each other.
That’s another great question @gisella-albertini . I think if I made some bingo cards with my questions as I was going along you’d have some cards which are getting pretty full by now.
I’ve heard it explained in two very good ways - both of which work for me. One is the ‘inheritance’ of the tense - as per Aran’s explanation. The other is that when the person in the sentence said the thing, when they said it - ie in the past - this is literally what they said at the time (e.g. present tense).
I have come to think of these types of constructs as a ‘little bit cool’ because these are sentences where Welsh comes into its own and has its own way - it is not simply a translation of something else.
It feels like once you understand and can use them you are really speaking Welsh and not something translated from another language. (I am still working on this along with everyone else ie this is still an aspiration - so I’m not being a smart-arse here! )
I struggled with too for awhile then it clicked. Aran describes it well, but this is how I figured it out.
In the first example, Using ‘were’ in English is proper but not so in Welsh. The event being described hasn’t happened yet. You have not started yet, merely you were supposed to start. If the speaker wanted to clarify the starting was supposed to begin in the past, he/she could add, ‘ddoe’ for example, indicating the beginning point.
For the second sentence the ‘wanting to speak with you’ has already occurred in the past. It’s over, hence the past tense.