Tiny questions with quick answers - continuing thread

Would ‘gwasanaeth mewn car’ be too long?

i think hawddu pawddu has been mentioned a few times - slort of works with coffi

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I was getting double entendres with that one. Another one that just came to mind was cadw mi glou, a play on cadw mi gei

Hey @neilrowlands - one for your Welsh whoopsies article!

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Mae’n ddrwg gen i! Blame my age! I like tra’n car!

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Back to my obsession with road signs -
The ones in West Wales seem more chilled and poetic than those around the Metropolis. Here’s an example:
"Pan fo’r golau coch yn dangos … very Ryan & Ronnie :slight_smile:
I assume it’s short for Pan fyddo yr golau coch yn dangos … (when the red light shows…).
Anyway my tiny :slight_smile: question is: why the “o” in fyddo and the “y” in yr please?
Edited:
Aaaargh, I meant the “r” in yr followed by a consonant.

Or maybe fyddo’r golau?

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I’m going to be controversial with this and say that the translation isn’t what struck me as wrong, I think it’s ok and as Aran said it’s something that will become the accepted norm soon enough. I’d like to know why the Welsh doesn’t come first on the sign?

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I was assuming that the apostrophe was showing the missing y (?)
eg fyddo’r = foddo yr (?) I’m probably wrong

Ah, sorry. I didn’t explain very well. I assumed that it was correct, but was just trying to learn why. I wondered if “fyddo yr” was a different construction/tense/aspect from plain “fydd y”. Perhaps conditional or something? :confounded:

Strangely, I think it was Cymraeg first, then English. It seems to go that way once you get past Carmarthen. Or perhaps I just ignore the English now.

Incidentally, has anyone noticed this with the motorway matrix signs? Monolingual Welsh, then the message comes up in English further down the motorway.

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Gareth King gives pan fo angen as when needed, with the fo being the subjunctive (and mutated form) of bod. Another example - Lle bo angen - where need be,
The 'r is the definite article following a vowel not preceding a consonant.
I think…
:slight_smile:

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I was wondering about this today as we were asked to put our job titles in Cymraeg on our e-mail signatures.So often i am coming across words asnd especially road sign phrases that make sense as a learner but do not seem to have evolved naturally, like the words seem a little bit forced into Welsh.

So the word i was given: Cynorthwy-ydd for assistant seemed strange to me, especially the hyphen, though this was professional translated.

I made sense of it though, Cymorth I know as to support, so they m changes to an n in this form, fine, then the ending is strange. -wyr seems to mean in my understandings something like ‘person doing a thing’, like in dysgwyr (learner), so if it’s cynorthwyr ‘supporter’ that would make perfect sense to me. However an assistant is not simply a supporter, but part of all the things that do the support, so perhaps needs something else to suggest activity and I know some job roles often end with -ydd, like ysgrifennydd ‘secretary’.

So do hyphens have a similar function in Cymraeg? it could be cynorthwyydd, but having the letter y twice seems odd, so the hyphen?

I think @cat-1 has explained yr to 'r perfectly. Fyddo y sounds awful. Fyddo’r rolls gently off the tongue!

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Indeed. If fact so easily that I started singing the words on the sign to this tune :slight_smile:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=pan+for+nos+alys+williams&view=detail&mid=40A155BA4E4CD6F62EF840A155BA4E4CD6F62EF8&FORM=VIRE

Yeah, that, really - often (for my money) a sign of something that’s a bit translatey rather than naturally grown…

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I guess words that are “a bit translatey” can become normal usage very quickly - “cynorthwyydd dysgu” is just as ubiquitous (and possibly odd) as “teaching assistant”, these days…
(Maybe the hyphen is a bit translatey-pedantic.)

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Just saw this …

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I thought so, though ‘Tim Prynu Adwerth’ is growing on me.

Ah, I was getting mixed up with an English rule.

Anyway, as if by magic. I arrived home this evening to some roadworks outside my house, with this sign writing variation.
Pan fo’r golau 'n goch…
I think it means: When the light is red… but the English was still:
When the red light shows.

Is there no end to the freehandedness of these translations? :slight_smile:

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