What's Welsh for "now in a minute?"

What’s Welsh for “now in a minute?”

I am genuinely interested as it’s a phrase I use.

Diolch!

instinctively I would just say - nawr mewn munud and get get away with that, but this course teaches you “mhen munud” - so nawr mhen munud maybe right and my instinctive answer is wrong. Thing is though, they both sound ever so slightly different, but very similar and if you’re not writing it, then it isn’t going to make much difference.

I’m guessing it’s the same in Northern dialects except that nawr would be rwan.

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“in a minute” can be “mewn munud”, “yn y munud” or “mhen munud” - all are equally correct, just a case of personal preference.

The “now in a minute” is a particularly Wenglish phrase and doesn’t have an ‘official’ translation, but if you want to add a ‘now’ to ‘in a minute’, just add nawr or rwan (again, personal choice - nawr is more common in the S, rwan in the N) to the beginning of whichever version of ‘in a minute’ you prefer!

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I always see these as “within the next minute” and “after a minute” but both used as roughly the same thing usually. I remember (I think) years ago @aran and @Iestyn disagreeing on which one to use. I remember a lot of things that didn’t actually happen though. :roll_eyes:

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I’m picturing this being resolved by means of a gladiators style pugil stick duel. I’ll be dissapointed if that wasn’t the case

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Well as @Toffidil said, in the course it’s mhen munud - at least in the South version.
So either they settled for Iestyn’s for the South and Aran’s for the North, or we missed the gladiator style duel that brought mhen to victory! :rofl:

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Yes, Iestyn has quite strong feelings about ‘ymhen munud’… I’ve got to admit I’ve got my own red lines on ‘just because people say it doesn’t make it okay’, which is why we don’t have ‘lyfio chdi’ in the course…:wink: But ‘mewn munud’ doesn’t put my hackles up in the same way… :slight_smile:

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Dear God. How typically Welsh to have a typically Welsh saying sparking off a typically Welsh debate. Typical!

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And thank you for your replies!

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Time, of course, is subject to relativistic influences and it is well known that North and South Wales occupy entirely different frames of reference - even different speeds. :laughing:

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If “now in a minute” conveys the meaning “very soon”, then around Ebbw Vale “now just” means “very recently” :smile:

“And there it was, gone” is my latest favourite Wenglish.

My favourite - which I catch myself saying a lot - is “No, I haven’t done it yet, I’ll do it again” (with the option of adding “now in a minute” of course :wink: )

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I know that you experience different times in different places, e.g. a Caribbean minute is whenever they get around to it and a New York minute is the shortest unit of time possible, i.e. between the light turning green and the person behind you sounding their horn.

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Wenglish.

To me, Wenglish is basically Welsh with a lot of imported English such as “Dere 'ma cariad, cael kiss”, Or the classic I heard the other day “Popeth yn gwd” or my granddaughter’s “Dim quite”.

Most of the examples here (including mine) are, IMO, English with regional accents or dialects which you’ll find anywhere in the UK, Ireland and beyond. “There it was, gone” is often attributed to Ireland.

To my ear, however, Wenglish and dialect English both add to the richness of the languages. It doesn’t need to be logical as long as it is grammatical. :imp: :wink:

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Ah interesting. I always took Wenglish to be a Welsh dialect of English: Celticised English as in the Talk Tidy Books.

Although I can see now see how it could also be an Anglicised Cymraeg.

I suppose a third possibility could be the mid sentence drift between the two Languages.

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I would take it the same way as @HuwJones with a mixture of Welsh words and English words but generally within a Welsh grammatic context. The word itself, Wenglish, would suggest this, to a point. Although Wenglish does still irritate me a little (it used to a lot) I find that I use it to help keep the flow of my Welsh. I think I also understand the psychology too with me not feeling that use of an English word necessarily comments negatively on the Welsh I speak. Beth bynnag, jyst a comment bach.

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I guess there are different types of Wenglish too - there is some sort of a comedy strand which I’ve noticed - where people will flip to English with a bit of a silly voice (particularly a posh voice of some sort) for comedy effect…

…and also have some sort of crazy mix of English and Welsh in a sentence as a punchline or for joke-effect…,for example, mostly Welsh but having a couple of vaguely silly sounding, random English words thrown in (at least when it pops out in the middle of a Welsh sentence)…

I don’t know if you heard the Ofergoelus play/ story on Radio Cymru…which used this a lot…although I was meaning ‘in real life’…

( This is however different to regular Wenglish…at least I think so… :thinking:)

Rich :slight_smile:

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When I was young I used to think of the Kerdiff or Cardiff accent as very English, but I now think it’s much more heavily influenced by Welsh and would love to hear more Kerdiffians speaking Welsh with a Kerdiff accent - when Frank Henessy sings in Welsh it just sounds like how it should sound - well it sounds natural and great to my ear.

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A couple of decades ago, Cardiff school Welsh had it’s own distinctive school sound - I’m tempted to say “posh,” but when I asked on the old forum whether there was such a thing as posh Welsh, the consensus was probably not. :pensive:

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