Tiny questions with quick answers - continuing thread

Haha, thanks! @AnthonyCusack I actually can’t remember now where I saw it - on a bilingual leaflet or something.

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I just remembered where I saw ‘Sir Penfro’ - I knew I’d seen it somewhere that looked like it should be a reliable source of correct Welsh. It’s in the title of the council’s website: http://www.pembrokeshire.gov.uk/content.asp?language=CYM :dizzy_face:

Astounding :confused:

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Is there any chance that the word Cyngor (Council) alters it?
Sir Benfro, but Cyngor Sir Penfro seems pretty wide spread even within the same articles from the BBC.

No - the Sir and the name are in apposition (to use the technical term) and there is a mutation accordingly. It would be like saying Sir Môn for Sir Fôn - sounds just wrong.

I will unkindly and undiplomatically mention that Pembrokeshire has long been known as ‘Little England in Wales’! :slight_smile:

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It COULD be a marketing decision (though an idiotic one in my view) - try and make the ‘brand’ clear by doing away with variants (i.e. the mutated form) in all official documents. :confused:

Good God alive.

And yet they have http://www.sir-benfro.gov.uk/ (correctly) as their alternative url. Genuinely shocking.

Secretly I am quite happy that my Welsh is good enough to spot this anomaly :smile:

Despite being ‘little England beyond Wales’, Welsh comes first in road signs in Pembrokeshire. It is also widely spoken in the northern half of the county, above the so-called landsker line. Even below that line, Welsh seems to be more dominant than it used to be when I was growing up - e.g. there is now a very popular Welsh medium primary school in Tenby, which is really the heart of non-Welsh speaking Pembs. As a result, lots of my old (non-Welsh-speaking) school friends have children who are fluent Welsh speakers. I would have KILLED to be able to chat to my friends in a language my parents couldn’t decipher as a kid :joy:

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Or maybe they are trolling us little Englanders :wink:

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‘Sir Penfro’ is also in the council’s logo, which you can see on the website. A major cock-up if not deliberate.

I believe I’ve found an 1847 reference to Sir Penfro:

https://books.google.com/books?id=3plOAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq="sir+penfro"&source=bl&ots=j_W74SetmM&sig=evl5HGhfib9FBq0VQAijOt7aPMM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_rJz37vvUAhUC5yYKHSPzDX04ChDoAQg1MAY#v=onepage&q="sir%20penfro"&f=true

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Oh that’s interesting - so perhaps a historical explanation for the decision. I tweeted at the council to ask them - will report back.

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You beat me to it!! It seems to me a very good excuse to be bad at Welsh, although I thought it was ‘little England beyond Wales’! :wink: :sunny:
To @Bobi just seen your posting. Back then, I believe spelling was a pretty moveable feast in any language. Far fewer people were literate.

Or just the absence of official standards of spelling etc … according to this website, the first Welsh dictionary only began to be compiled in the 1950s http://www.welsh-dictionary.ac.uk/history/

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Yes, that is undoubtedly true even in the last twenty years - I know this because my old friend Dewi Rhys-Jones is prominent in spreading and promoting the learning of the language in this beautiful corner of Wales. :slight_smile:

You’re right, of course. My bad! :wink:

The more I think about it, the more I lean to my earlier theory that it might be a stupid marketing decision.

I mean, I’m not a native speaker, but I can tell you Sir Penfro sounds just wrong wrong to me. I would probably correct it in class, I think…

Gareth, are you able to explain this rule in less technical language? How would I recognise when two words are in apposition? I assume this is not the same as a common old “contact mutation” (which I think is mostly caused by prepositions). Are there any other words (like Sir) which can cause this kind of mutation?

Thank you!

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I was going to say Mike that it’s not a contact mutation (the word Sir doesn’t trigger the mutation, it’s simply that when the two words Sir and (for example) Penfro are used together to mean a single idea, then you get SM joining them…in much the same sort of way as stepmother is llysfam = llys + mam.

But I’ve been thinking a bit more about this overnight (I’m that sad), and it suddenly occurred to me that we always say Sir Gwynedd and not ‘Sir Wynedd’ - so now I am wondering if there really is a hard-and-fast rule for this…

Certainly ‘Sir Penfro’ sounds wrong to me, and Sir Benfro totally right. And I don’t believe anyone would say ‘Sir Câr’ instead of Sir Gâr. But then ‘Sir Wynedd’ on the other hand sounds totally wrong as well. Also, with a different word, everyone would say Ynys Môn and nobody (I’m pretty certain) would say ‘Ynys Fôn’.

And it’s not about gender: sir and ynys both feminine, but definitely Sir Fôn and Ynys Môn.

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I’ve never really seen it as this, normally Just Morgannwg, but its Sir Forgannwg.

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