My Welsh speaking rugby season ticket neighbour was trying to find the exit to the loos. . He wasn’t sure if he should go up or down the stand to find it. His daughter started shouting Llawr,Llawr for him to go down stairs.
Lawr / i lawr (one l) means down. Llawr (two ll) means floor.
Therefore, i lawr ar y llawr would mean down on the floor.
Llawer means many or several.
There are many people down on the floor would translate as - Mae llawer o bobl i lawr ar y llawr.
What you probably heard in this case is lawr, lawr, indicating that they needed to go down to the next floor/down the next flight of stairs. Had his daughter seen low flying ducks coming towards her father, she may well have shouted llawr, llawr indicating that they should drop to the floor.
Re previous discussion of ‘gwlith’, which I said I’d never heard pronounced before, and was unsure whether it’s realised as one syllable or two (sorry, everyone, for coming back to this!)
Having listened to the sound file, that’s how I hear it too.
I definitely hear deall as two syllables but English ‘deal’ (in most regional varieties) as one, though I guess it can be pronounced as two in some regions, or if pronounced slowly or emphatically and you break up the diphthong - I’m guessing that’s how your manic-looking emojee would pronounce it!
Hi, Peter. No, not at all.
I guess what I’m saying is that in the NE (of England), some diphthongs are un-diphthonged.
So deal is “dee-al”. As everyone knows, boat is “bo-at”. Even Hello is hello-a for no good reason as there isn’t an a in it, although there is a trace in the Swedish Hallo(a).
Anyway back to Welsh -
I love the vowel separation and also the lack of vowel shift in the “a” so all "a"s are as in apple.
Just wondering if this can be used in the same two contradictory ways as the English translation – i.e. lots of different things (there was a variety of different things on offer) or one particular kind of thing (Viognier is a grape variety). I know that you can do both in Greek – and I was a bit surprised when I realised, because it seems like one of those things that you shouldn’t necessarily expect to work the same in another language – but with Welsh and English existing a bit more cheek-by-jowl I did wonder. I tried looking at the citations in the GPC, but I wasn’t convinced I’d understood them clearly enough to be sure…
ETA: looking up grape varieties on Wikipedia & ending up with Cyltifar on Wicipedia plus further checking of the GPC seems to suggest that while amrywiaeth can mean ‘type, kind, sort’ the usual biology word is amrywiad
Ah, yes, now you mention it, they definitely are prone to that in the NE.
Yes, admirable clarity in Welsh vowels! Not unique in that, of course, but always notable from an English speaker’s point of view.
Don’t know if you know any Irish but they reduce all short, unstressed vowels to the neutral ‘uh’ (and variations thereof), so the opposite end of the scale to Welsh in that sense.
Yes this is spot on for ‘variety’ in terms of biology. You will also hear simply math which means type. More technical is isrywogaeth meaning subsbecies or variety.
Apologies for going slightly off-piste, but this thread reminds me of Tudor Owen’s Gair Cymraeg y Dydd segment that he used to do as part of his Radio Cymru show.
