Tiny questions with quick answers - continuing thread

You were spot on with what you said in your question above:
“I had seen” is O’n i wedi gweld
(And wrth gwrs “I had been” is O’n i wedi bod)

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No problem. I shouldn’t answer when my brain isn’t working right anyway. :smile:

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And of course, if @JohnYoung had been asking about I had been seen (which he wasn’t!), then that would be:

O’n i wedi ngweld or (to sound slightly more fussy) O’n i wedi cael ngweld

which is also interesting, isn’t it? :slight_smile:

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because medru includes mental ability, while gallu (essentially) does not

Mind. Blown. I always thought medru was Northern dialect with gallu being the same in the Southern dialect. So would “dw i’n gallu darllen llyfr yn almaeneg” be a wrong way to use it too?

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I thought the same:
S: Gallu for able to and permitted to
N: Gallu for permitted to; medru for able to
Written: Medd(+ ending) for say, speak or think.

Happy to be updated.

The mouth isn’t necessarily an aber. I’m thinking of Barmouth or Abermaw, or y Bermo to locals. Although this started with an Aber, the English corrupted the maw to mouth and the aber to Bar. Makes you wonder about some of the places in Cornwall that end in mouth and how they might have come about, when you see this sort if thing going on.

So how about Y Bormo for Bournemouth - payback time for corrupting Abermaw?

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The Maw in Abermaw is derived from Mawddach, the river that runs into the estuary, so Abermaw is “mouth of the river Maw(ddach)”.

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interesting - i wonder if there are or were rivers with names like mawddach anywhere else outside Wales, that could possibly have been corrupted to mouth

No it would be fine @Kerstin, because with ‘ability’ there is often overlap or fuzzy boundary between mental and physical ability - I do NOT think I would dare claim that

Dw i’n gallu darllen llyfr yn Almaeneg and
Dw i’n medru darllen llyfr yn Almaeneg

mean different things or have different connotations in Welsh. (They don’t!)

Just that sometimes you do spot the original difference between them, like in medru gyrru (for example) = know how to drive

Medru essentially means (or meant) know how to…

Over the centuries such nice distinctions have largely blurred anyway. :slight_smile:

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Yes - but add S medru = know how to

By the way, remember that medd / meddai / meddwn etc is nothing to do with medru - I’m sure you knew that anyway.

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Do you know the etymology of mawddach - I found bawdd or mawdd links with boddi to drown or maybe flood. Might fit with the geography of Barmouth and perhaps Cockermouth in the lakes, which is always flooding these days.

Ive given up on all the South Coast and Cornwall places ending in Mouth since the English derivations all look pretty solid and it would be contrived to imagine any other source.
There are a couple in Scotland in Moray or moireibh in Gaelic, like garmouth - with etymology described as Gaer and Mouth.

Not off the top of my head, but I’ve got some books I can check when I get home - I’ll see if there’s any explanation in those.

In the meantime…
In the 1887 book “HANDBOOK OF THE ORIGIN OF PLACE-NAMES IN WALES AND MONMOUTHSHIRE by The Reverend THOMAS MORGAN, DOWLAIS, MERTHYR TYDFIL.”
we have the following:

Ach, a stem, a pedigree, a river; ddu, inflection of du,
black. We find ach in Clydach, Mawddach, &c.

Barmouth. — An Anglicized form of the Welsh name, Abermaw, which signifies a place situated at the mouth
of the river Maw. Bar is a modification of Aber, and mouth of Maw, or Mawddwy. Maw means broad,
expanding. Mawddach, according to Dr. Owen Pughe, means overflowing water. " Oedd maw ei rhydau,"
broad were its fords. The Anglicized name was adopted in 1768 by the seafaring fraternity in order to have
an English name inscribed upon the vessels. English name — Broadmouth.

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wow, you have a lot of interesting info there. Im currently drawn to Cockermouth because the Cocker river, comes from a Brythonic word kukra for crooked and it seems possible to me, that the mouth could be a corruption of a Brythonic word as well (maybe something like mawddach, which togetheras kukra mawddach would give a meaning of crooked overflowing river, which describes the place perfectly).

ok, well I’ve checked the place name “bible” (Dictionary of the place names of Wales, Hywel Wyn Owen & Richard Morgan, 2007) and this is what that says -
Barmouth, Abermo
‘mouth of (the river) Mawdd’, aber, river name Mawdd
Abermau 1284, Abermowth 1410, The Mouth of Maw Ryver 1536-9, Bermo 1587, Abermouthegh 1695, Barmouth 1714, Barmouth o Abermowthech 1741, Bermaw or Abermawddach 1795
Originally, the river name was Mawdd (probably a personal noun) and seen in the name of the area Mawddwy ‘the territory of Mawdd’ (the river or the personal noun); compare Dinas Mawddwy. The estuary was ‘Aber Mawdd’, which, with loss of the final -dd, became Abermaw and then Abermo and Y Bermo (where the first syllable of Abermo is taken to be the definitive article y). An anglicized version ‘Aber Mawdd’ similar to the 1410 form) became Barmouth, possibly influenced by the mouth of the river. Today the river is called Mawddach, but originally that was the name of a tributary of the Mawdd (with the diminuitive suffix -ach, ‘the little Mawdd’).

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Very good, I like the brevity of that!

Thanks sumsmeister, keeping fit and well. Glad to occasionally check in to the forum. All the best to you also

There probably is an old Welsh name for Bournemouth (unless it was founded after the Welsh types were pushed further down the peninsula towards the Tamar

…Portsmouth has the old Welsh/Devonian name “Llongberth” as it is written in Welsh records of a Devonian king dying to Saxon encroachment at some significant battle there (Devon comes from the Devonian Welsh/old Welsh - Dyfnaint (well that’s the modern spelling)- hardly any Welsh seem to know this sadly)

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fC1ZAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=llongberth&source=bl&ots=jShZmM6eUU&sig=q1bR_5wkczdSSUeiUV2gya45o0M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwip_OmI1e3aAhVCPsAKHRXXCeYQ6AEIKzAA#v=onepage&q=llongberth&f=false