Friday 25 September 2015

That Darn Welsh eto (again)

I was discussing with my dear ole Mum via email about the confusing bits of learning to speak Welsh.  It is not as tricky as it first appears. It just looks different to our eyes because some of the alphabet is different (letters like dd and ll spring to mind) as well as grammatically sentence structure is *completely* different from English. 

In English if it is a regular verb you just add -ed.  If it is irregular you might change the whole word (as in go becomes went.) Thankfully there are only 5 irregular verbs in Cymraeg (cael--to get or to have, mynd--to go, gwneud--to do or to make, dod--to come and bod--to be). Here are the verb endings and pronoun for past tense: (remember verb first then subject so coginiais i says cooked I but means I cooked)
-ais i
-aist ti
-odd e/odd hi
-on ni
-och chi
-on nhw

 So the verb darllen meaning to read would look like this in the past tense:
Darllenais i
Darllenaist ti
Darllenodd e/ darllenodd hi
Darllenon ni
Darllenoch chi
Darllenon nhw

As I said before if a pronoun precedes a preposition then it has to conjugate. The preposition may also make the word that follows mutate!

Endings for prepositions with pronoun:
-a i
-at ti (or -ot ti in the case of wrth)
-o fe/-i hi
-on ni
-och chi
-yn nhw

So becso am means to worry about so to say Worry about me,  worry about you, worry about him/her etc looks like this--
Becso amdana i
Becso amdanat ti
Becso amdano fe/becso amdani hi
Becso amdanon ni
Becso amdanoch chi
Becso amdanyn nhw

In a sentence that might look like this:
They worry about her.
Maen nhw'n becso amdani hi.

The more I do it, the easier it gets on paper. It is still incredibly difficult to say and to hear. But I keep telling myself Paid becso, bydd hapus.  Don't worry, be happy!

1 comment:

  1. YIPPY SKIPPY! BRAVO! KUDOS! and all that stuff.

    You have the best genes from both sides of your parentage!

    ReplyDelete