I’m confused. Just met this. Female voice says hi- na male hu-na (north) Are both correct?
Male and female.
Now you’re going to ask me which one is which…I think hwnna is female and hynna is male. I cheat and say 'na most of the time 
honna is the female version, hwnna is the male version and hynna is the ‘neutral’ version 
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If I’m reading the question right, it’s about something I’ve noticed as well… the difference in pronunciation of the word “hynna”. I go with the female version, mainly because it’s easy to remember. It’s the kind of tattoo that my daughter gets at music festivals.
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I agree with @Bobi here, I think the question was about the pronunciation of ‘hynna’. Neither are wrong. 
Yup, both correct, choose whichever you like most…
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You might notice that at some fairly early point in the Challenges @aran comments on the fact that his accent and @CatrinLliarJones one aren’t quite the same – this is one of their fairly small number of consistent differences. You’ll hear it in loads of words spelt with a -y- – llyfr (‘book’) is one that comes to mind, where Catrin’s version of something like ei lyfr (‘his book’) would sound like she was talking about someone’s liver, while Aran’s sounds more like they’ve got a lover
This is a weakness of mine, and I wouldn’t offer those two as legitimate variants - it should be ‘lliver’.
Hinna/hunna is different, though, genuinely both okay…
Aah – I think I’ve always believed llyfr to work like the first syllable of, say, hyfryd – but then, Catrin wouldn’t say hifrid, would she? So does that mean that llyfr is ‘officially’ a monosyllable (in line with the spelling), with a y that’s ‘supposed’ to be like mynd rather than mynydd?
Ti’n dysgu rhywbeth newydd bob dydd…
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Could be - you get the same shift with llyfr -> llyfrgell…
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Yes, I believe llyfr is monosyllabic, as is gafr, ofn, cefn, etc. Dodrefn has two syllables. I guess you would need a vowel to create a syllable.
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Yeah, I was thinking about the sound really, rather than the spelling - the Icelandic word for a man (pronounced ‘maddr’, if I respell it as Welsh) has gone from being spelt ‘maðr’ to modern ‘maður’ with no clear difference in pronunciation. I guess that to be really clear about it you’d need to see how it’s treated in modern & mediaeval poetry - and then maybe back that up with a linguist, a spectroscope, a time machine, & a viking
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Are they pronouncing a slight “u” between the d and the r, though.
Just wondering, as my Swedish friend tells me that he pronounces Hello(a) in the same way that I do - as I have just written it rather than Hellow.
Although I’ve lost my NE England accent, I still tend to dipthong or tripthong at will.
Well, there’s some sort of sound there: whether you think it’s a ‘u’ (as the modern spelling indicates) or the ‘r’ acting as a vowel makes precious little difference. (In the same way, if you look up a word like ‘little’ in an English dictionary, some will give the pronunciation as something like ‘lıtəl’ - with a neutral ‘uh’ sound before the second ‘l’, and others as something like ‘lıtḷ’, with the second ‘l’ working as a vowel, like it sometimes does in Czech.)
By chance, I recently tried to look up hynna. Wasn’t in the Modern Welsh Dictionary, so I tried GPC. They say that hynna is a contraction of hyn yna. Makes perfect sense, and would explain Catrin’s pronouciation - she’s pronouncing: hyn 'na. I recall noticing other examples of compound words that follow the pronounciation as if they were still multiple words instread of all smashed together, but can’t think of any off top of head.
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Also explains “this here” in many English dialects (South Wales, parts of the states)
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‘’'and apparently “yon” in the north of Britain.
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Round Aberdeen where I was brought up, you hear “thon”
eg “thon loon” = “that boy over there”,
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And maybe also “yonder” ( = “over there”). (Supposedly Germanic, but who knows, really).
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“ginder” in Dutch, with a voiced “ch”, which turned into “y” in English
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