Trying to write, asking for corrections - mostly on why I'm here

mynd yn iaith werin

a fyddai gyda’r bosibilrwydd o briodi rhywun nad oedd yn werinwr, tasen nhw’n siarad Ffrangeg yn dda.
(I’m not sure if that’s the best way of putting it, but one thing you can’t say is ‘sydd oedd’…)

gafodd eu gwahardd rhag ei siarad hi

Arrrgh! No, you’re quite right: even if I read it three times before pressing ‘post’, I still can’t get away with barbarisms like ‘sydd oedd’. Ye gods…

Yes, very much so… :slight_smile:

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Even without guarantees, looking things up again now to make sure I understand your suggestions, I can see that they’re a huge improvement – thank you++

Diolch o galon :slight_smile:

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Thank you again – the only bit of this I’m still puzzling over slightly is werin. Not that I’m disputing/rejecting it as improvement – I think it’s fairly clear by now that I’m not at that stage :slight_smile: – but I was struggling to find a word that clearly said ‘peasant’ rather than merely ‘demotic/popular’, when we don’t really have peasants in the UK. (I did write iaith werin and then altered it, because something made me fancy that werinol might be better. Now, I can’t think what led to that conclusion.)

Oh – also, is mynd just using the unmutated form because it’s out of context, or as a correction to i fynd?

Genethod… :slight_smile:

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Oes hogannod yn rhy ifanc i briodi, neu oes gwahaniaeth arall rhwng hogan a geneth?

Sorry, that was totally random on my part as I wasn’t familiar with the word ‘werinol’.

And yes, mynd in that sentence will of course be fynd. :slight_smile:

You’re clearly doing great! I hope you’ve got an unsuspecting person lined up to try it all out on!

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Nope, there’s just no such word as ‘hogannod’ - the plural of hogan is, unhelpfully enough, genethod - or, as you’ll usually hear in the spoken language by now, genod… :slight_smile:

[To be precise, geneth and genethod is girl/girls in the north, but somewhere along the way hogyn turned into hogan as an alternative to geneth, but without having a plural… :slight_smile: ]

Ah, now that is not what I’d read – though I’d sooner trust you :slight_smile: Someone tell the University of Wales!

Well that’s an eye-opener and no mistake - and it turns out that Bruce has a version, too, offering ‘hogennod’ - but I can promise you that in 15 years living in Gwynedd I’ve never heard anyone using either of them, or seen either of them written - genod is what you will always hear, or genethod if people are writing a little more ‘properly’… :slight_smile:

Fy mhroblem efo siarad Ocsitaneg oedd beth ddidodd Iestyn [quote=“Iestyn, post:35, topic:5938”]
the danger of getting sucked in to “I can read so I have learnt” that so many learners get stuck at, and never move on to speaking properly
[/quote] O’n i ‘di dysgu o lyfrau, ac oedd yr Ocsitaneg yn iaith ysgrifenedig i fi: pob tro y wnes i drio siarad oedd fel y tro cyntaf, achos bo’ fi ddim medru siarad y tro cynt. Ar ôl ychydig, er hynny, wnes i ffeindio allan pa mor agos oedd Ocsitaneg a Chatalaneg – mae rhai tafodieithoedd o’r Ocsitaneg yn wahanol iawn i’w gilydd, ac os wyt ti’n siarad tafodiaith Languedoc, mae Catalaneg yn fwy hawdd i ddeall na thafodiaith Gascon – a ges i’r cyfle i ddysgu siarad (a dw i’n meddwl siarad, nid dim ond darllen) Catalaneg. Mae Catalaneg yn iaith leiafrifol hefyd, ond mae’r cyfanswm o siaradwyr yn y miliynau. Os mae Cernyweg yn cael dadebru, mae Ocsitaneg ar cynnal bywyd; ac os mae Cymraeg angen ennill pwysau, mae Catalaneg dim ond angen gwneud yn siwr fod o ddim cael curfa gan ei gymydog. (Dw i’n gwybod, dw i’n gwneud o yn rhy syml: os nad oedd ganddi’r Saesneg fel cymydog, fyddai’r Cymraeg ddim angen ennill pwysau. Mae’r cyfanswm o siaradwyr Cymraeg yn eitha cymaint â siaradwyr Islandeg: os oedden nhw i gyd yn byw ar ynys i mewn y Môr Iwerydd, ni fyddai unrhyw broblem…) :wink:

A felly, achos o’n i’n medru siarad Catalaneg ac Ocsitaneg, des i yn gyfarwydd â rhai o’r materion sy’n effeithio ar siaradwyr ieithoedd lleiafrifol…

My problem with speaking Occitan was what Iestyn said here: [quote=“Iestyn, post:35, topic:5938”]
the danger of getting sucked in to “I can read so I have learnt” that so many learners get stuck at, and never move on to speaking properly
[/quote] I had learnt from books, and Occitan was a written language for me: every time I tried to speak it was like the first time, because I hadn’t been able to speak the time before. After a while, however, I found out how close Occitan and Catalan are – some Occitan dialects are very different from each other, and if you speak the Languedoc dialect, Catalan is easier to understand than the Gascon dialect – and I got the opportunity to learn to speak (and I mean speak, not just read) Catalan. Catalan is also a minority language, but the total number of Catalan speakers is in the millions. If Cornish is being resuscitated, Occitan is on life support; and if Welsh needs to put on a bit of weight, Catalan just needs to make sure it doesn’t get beaten up by its neighbour. (I know, I’m over-simplifying: if it weren’t for having English as a neighbour, Welsh wouldn’t need to put on weight. The number of Welsh speakers is about the same as the number of Icelandic speakers: if they all lived on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean there wouldn’t be any problem…) :wink:

And so, because I was able to speak Catalan and Occitan, I became aware of some of the issues affecting speakers of minority languages…

In place of “fwy hawdd” i normally hear “haws” and sometimes “hawddach” (think easier in comparison to more easy).

How formal do you want to be with your writing?

“Dw i’n gwneud o” - the grammatically correct would be “ei wneud o” - because of this I tend to find people say “Dw i’n wneud o” if they don’t say the ei they maintain the mutation.

Thank you – I wondered about that when reading back before posting, but wasn’t at all sure.

Not very, if at all – although I’m aware that what I’m trying to do is in some ways not very conversational, so that might force it to be a bit more formal. I know there are some really quite big differences between properly formal written Welsh and spoken Welsh, but I always think that those are somehow less of a big deal for me as a foreigner than they are for a native speaker. (By which I don’t really mean they’re easier, so much as that I have different expectations: when I was reading some Old French that I found really pretty easy – I just had to look up a few more words and bits of grammar than I would have if it had been modern – a French friend looked at it and was amazed I could understand it at all; I think just because they also would have had to look up a few of the words, and in their native language they weren’t used to having to do that at all!) So yes, I suppose I’ll want to tackle more formal Welsh at some point – say, if I want to read Ifor Williams writing about the Gododdin :slight_smile: – but for now I’d like to stay as close as I sensibly can in writing to what we’ve done with SSiW/what in your experience folks actually say.

Lovely – I’m very much still getting to grips with that. Having just finished the new Challenges, I was going back over Level 2 Challenge 25 on my way into work today, and heard both:
Byddai di’n gwneud o 'set ti’n medru, fysset ti?
and
Byddwn i’n deu’thot ti sut i wneud o, 'swn i’n medru.

So my understanding is that the second one is going to be mutated anyway, because of the ‘i’ of ‘sut i wneud’ ‘how to do’, but the first one could also be Byddai di’n (ei) wneud o. If so, do we know why @aran picked the unmutated version there, other than just exposing us to a range of options? Does this relate to your ‘how formal’?

That was probably ‘byddet ti’n gwneud o’ - with ‘gwneud’, we try to give the full range of what you’re likely to hear - it’s very much up to your personal taste which you go with for your own usage… :slight_smile:

That would probably be “sut i’w 'neud o” (sut i + ei = i’w (g)wneud (drop the world because most do in the north) --> 'neud)

To be fair, ‘sut i wneud o’ and ‘sut i’w wneud o’ and ‘sut i’w neud o’ (and ‘sut i neud o’!) all sound essentially indistinguishable from one another…:wink:

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Yeah true! Just thinking about written forms. But, yn union, it’s all splitting hairs in speech.

Ouch! :rueful face: My bad. Of course it was :slight_smile:

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OK, I can see one of @garethrking’s books looming in my future, but why ‘i’w’!? (To clarify: I understood ‘w’ to be plural, equivalent to ‘eu’.) Is it some sort of euphonic effect, in that ‘i ei wneud’ would all smoosh into one? (But then w + 'wneud is all kind of smooshy…) Or is ‘w’ effectively singular as well? (I’m back to gormod i’w yfed again, and it’s only mid-morning…)