For those people that have got onto reading, there’s quite an interesting article here about the use of ti or chi in Welsh:
(Tip: if you click on the ‘vocab’ button at the top right-hand corner you’ll see dotted lines appear under some of the words - if you hover your mouse over those words English definitions for them will pop up.)
7 Likes
Ah thanks - I noticed that this morning and had forgotten I wanted to read it at lunch time… so time to stop browsing the forum! 
2 Likes
My Welsh isn’t at the level of fully understanding the article, even with the vocabulary helps. Is it suggesting that there is a drift to wards “ti”? I take the point regarding the English “thou”, but wouldn’t that be a drift in the opposite direction: towards the formal “you”, rather than the informal “ti”?
On social media, as in French, and probably all languages where a ti/chi distinction exists. Being a native Dutch speaker, using ti/chi has never been a problem for me, but I find it very hard to enumerate the rules, they vary from situation to situation - the articles considers respect and power as factors.
3 Likes
Oh, that’s cheating! 
And, (in my experience, for what it is worth) that respect could be a close, loving respect as well as a cold, distant one.
3 Likes
Indeed! Using chi (as the article mentions, I think) can be used to create an emotional distance. I was once in a bar…
1 Like
The English example seems very far out. Thee seems to have become reserved for the Almighty in the south, and you could not find anyone more worthy of respect than God! In Yorkshire, as a child, I was ‘thee’. That may still be true (I mean for children now!)! My only problem now is that my age means I’m probably more likely to need ‘ti’, but mentally, I’m still geared up to ‘chi/you’ anyone new!! SSiW helps because I managed to miss most of what was said about ‘chi’, so ‘ti’ is what I come out with! And it’s all academic because my chances of meeting a Welsh speaker are vanishingly small!
1 Like
yeah, yeah…
1 Like
Well, we left York in spring 1956, so that’s 60+ years ago. However, when I went to Harrogate in '69, dialect speakers still used ‘thee’ quite a lot.
N.B. Yma, dwi ‘ti’ os gwelwch yn dda!
1 Like
They still do in the bit of Yorkshire I was a teenager in (rural west yorks)… (‘eeeh, I’ll tell thee summat, lass’) or more usually as ‘tha’ (what’s tha doing?)
I “chi” my mother-in-law and we have a very good relationship. I use chi because she uses “chi” with her father (and did with her mother). She’s from y Gogledd, maybe it’s a regional thing? It doesn’t feel stilted or distant to use chi with her.
3 Likes
[quote=“HowlsedhesServices, post:12, topic:6095”]
But then seeing as you´re all one big family here
[/quote] So, do you not see yourself as part of this family?
Just one experience … I was in theatre Clwyd on Wednesday morning in a chat session and was talking to a lady called Ann (her ex-husband started siop y siswrn in Mold) and when I addressed her as chi (she is, shall we say, at ‘retirable’ age) she told me, in no uncertain terms to use ti because chi made her feel old and she didn’t like it. I’ve been told a fair few times to use ti instead of chi by people after starting with chi, but I’ve only ever been told to use chi once by some guy in Saith Seren after he heard me use ti with a lady. The lady in question had told me to use ti several months previously but he was insistent, over and over, that I use chi with her. Who was more disrespectful in that case?
2 Likes
From my experience as well -in parts more south!- “chi” can show a close, warm respect as well as a cold, distant one.
3 Likes
He was, no question about it.
It was a rhetorical question but I appreciate your backing. 
He was one of those ‘I’ll correct everything but am never wrong’ kind of people. We’ve all met one.
2 Likes
That was almost the exact phrase I had to have repeated three times by a group of stable-lads exercising racehorses in York in 1952! It was actually, “Wha’d’the’call tha?”. Light dawned at last! “Oh,” I cried triumphantly, “You are asking my name!”
p.s. @aran: I defy anyone in Wales to have quite as much difficulty as that with a ‘first conversation’! Divided by a common language is not limited to Cymru!
1 Like
Should rhetorical questions be allowed on the forum?
2 Likes
I don’t think it was. he could have been the lady’s husband,who did not know she’d asked to be ‘ti’ and needed to be explained to!
Would it be right of me to answer your rhetorical question?
1 Like
Well, it was a rhetorical question, but I appreciate your interest…
1 Like