Hi, what does os ti’n mwyn, becaue my dictionary translates as …if you are meek.
I think it’s os ti’n moyn “if you want” (Southern).
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Yes, I think I realised my mistake about 10 seconds after pressing reply. Should have said the sentence out loud before asking question!!! Diolch yn fawr
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And I should have said “…byddi di’n etifeddu’r daear,” but it’s only just occurred to me now.
(And, contrary to the usual spirit of the forum, I’m not going to translate that straight away because it’d spoil the joke, such as it is. I’ll translate it if I get told off, I s’pose 
)
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HA Ha, I did need to look up etifeddu. Not a word I’ve seen before.
Is this the north Walian teacher? I have a friend here from the north (maybe Môn) who has the same attitude, and gets really irate with her kids for using gyda. But it’s a dialect thing. To her “gyda” means “together with” (it’s literal meaning). But to say that “gyda” is worng is like falling out over “medru” and “gallu”, which should both mean different things, but don’t generally in speech.
In thsi case, the French is a good guide for nabod / gwybod. It’s an easy rule fo thumb to talk about people and things, but adnabod can also correspond to recognise, and have a deep knowledge of something. So you can adnabod a road that you have driven along every day for years, or adnabod a village that you were brought up in.
I would see the connaitre in your sentence, Richard, as “recognise” rather than “know”, actually - but that may be me shading the French according to my Welsh…
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So did I! (I’m afraid the play on words occurred to me in English - my ability to think of bad jokes in Welsh is mercifully still limited by insufficient vocabulary.)
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@RichardBuck has it right. It’s “os ti’n moyn” and it means “if you want”. Misstyped and a bit missthought. I sometimes type and think too fast and stick “w” where it shouldn’t be and don’t put it where it should be. 
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Actually it’s my daughter who says this, more than the teacher! She’s fairly keen on superciliously correcting me, so I don’t take it too seriously! (I prefer them to speak Welsh, but point out anything they don’t like the sound of, than not speak Welsh. Also the ‘corrections’ are interesting!)
@Iestyn, I always imagined that your parents were first language speakers, so I was surprised to hear on the radio the other day that your mum learnt imperfectly when you were a kid. That made me wonder whether your dad spoke Welsh as a first language? Just curious / nosey!
Aha - the skeleton in the closet…
No, my mother was English - from East Anglia - and spoke no Welsh until she learnt when I was 7 or 8. My father was brought up in Port Talbot and London. His mother (my Nana) spoke perfect Ceredigion Welsh (she was from Glynarthen, a few miles from Tresaith, but her father was from a Morriston / Landore family). Unfortunately, his father was from Newport, Gwent, and his only Welsh was “Mae’r iaith Gymraeg yn anodd iawn”, sung to a tune that ended “Tarara boom di ay”.So while my dad speaks Welsh, he’s never been particularly confident in it. Happy to preach in Welsh (in chapel, that is), but not really have very wide ranging conversations.
So, my Welsh is a combination of Nana’s Ceredigion / Swansea Welsh, a big dose of the beautiful Welsh spoken by the old people of Rhymney when I used to spend time there with my father, as well as all the activities and Welsh speaking friends that my far-sighted parents steered me towards.
Bet you’re glad you asked now!
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Wow, diolch Iestyn, that’s really interesting - thank you very much for sharing it!
It kind of fits in with my theme of trying to figure out where my kids’ Welsh is going! (Although I guess everything these days is a bit more of a melting pot with so much TV and radio influence.) I wonder if that means that you were at some point making more of a conscious choice to adopt more local dialect-type language, for aesthetic / nationalistic reasons?
Edit: I listened to the programme again and I have to say that your way of speaking sounds completely standard of course, with a rather lovely southern flavour. (I’m trying to work out why I felt surprised by the accent the first time, in a voice that I know so well! Maybe I tend to notice Northern accents more than southern ones normally, as they are more different to how my kids speak. I was probably just surprised to notice a difference at all.)
I am now utterly confused as I had been convinced that you came from the valleys to the east. All due to dropped h’s and some of your vowels. I was very used to varients of Cymraeg Abertawe and, to me, you sounded much more like my relatives from Gwent, although, to be fair, they were monoglot English so I wasn’t really comparing like with like! I went off to learn gog-speak for personal reasons, but it doesn’t really come naturally, so I may start again where I left level 2 and follow you to the end, so to speak! I may still use ‘mae’n drrwg gen i’ and a few other bits of gog from way back when your dad was a baban bach!
Saw this on a mother’s day trinket yesterday and I’m a bit stumped about what it means:
Mam
… ordu’r…
byd
Anyone know?
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Coud the d actually be an a? orau, from gorau - best? The world’s best mum?
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oh yes, that would more than make sense and explain why they had so many left.
diolch yn fawr
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That’s an interesting one. I think I must have consciously chosen “hoffi” over “lico / licio / leicio” at some stage - quite young, I think - and there are certain Gwenhywseg patterns that I know I adopted consciously, and went looking for in local speakers, but most of my Welsh is picked up subconsciously from the people I spoke Welsh with most, which is why I am slowly but surely morphing into a Ceredigion-ista now!
Oh yes - my Welsh and English accents were “from the same mother” - ie both very much Gwent / Eastern Morgannwg, and used to be closely linked to each other. Now both are developing in separate directions as I speak mostly Welsh with Ceredigion people, and mostly English with real-life English people. There are all sorts of English twangs in the kids’ English, because they have friends from London and other places in England that they speak English with, as well as the Americanisms that they pick up from the internet. The influence of the English language in this area would be really interesting if it weren’t so destructive to centuries, possibly millennia, of culture.
But that is a discussion for another thread, I think…
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I’ve always found strange how in north Wales , Welsh speaking communities speak with Welsh accents , but generally when the Welsh language gets lost in a community then the communitie’s accent switches to an English one , whereas in south Wales , where Welsh has been long lost in a lot of communities , the accent is still a Welsh one.
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Parts of Gower have an accent with quite a lot of North Devon in it due to lots of interchange during the period of lime trading. That having ended, I’d predict the accent would be just like Abertawe (Swansea) before long! I think I noticed more ‘Gower’ among those older than me (now deceased) and less in the next generation. As to gogledd Cymru, a sort of Welsh version of northern, I tended to think, with a very ‘choked’ sounding accent in places. I used to say I couldn’t talk gogledd Cymraeg without swallowing my epiglottis!
On a sort of related point.
In Asda Swansea a fellow shopper asked me a question in English but with a Pwllheli type accent. Would it be normal to answer in Welsh? Not something I would normally do to a stranger.
If that happened to me @JohnYoung, before answering the actual question I’d probably go with something like “Oh, I love your accent - wyt ti’n siarad Cymraeg?”
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