Hello everyone,
I have an old book of poems that I bought at the national Eisteddfod a few years back, and I've picked my way through it more or less; there is one stanza though that particularly held my attention and I'm wondering how you might translate this into English:

o'r gors wlybrog daeth defnyddiau tân,
teifl ei lewyrch ar yr aelwyd lân,
dichon daw hedd i fyd o faes y drin,
o riddfan daear daw defnyddiau cân.

I have an idea of what it means--or rather, what I *think* it means--but poetry is a notoriously slippery fish and one misread word can alter the meaning of the whole thing. Any insights from you would be great!

(The book is Dros Eich Gwlad / Cerddi Heddwch by T.E. Nicholas and while there's no official copyright page I think it was printed in 1920. I had no idea who he was when I bought the book. Interesting figure, that's for sure!)

This is really a question about the interface of Welsh and Wenglish.

My non-Welsh speaking mother, brought up in Swansea between the wars, used a lot of Welsh words and expressions, as is common. One of them was an endearment that has subsequently puzzled me: "'mlantes fach", which she glossed as "my little girl". What it looks like to me now is as if "plant" has been taken to be a singular and the feminine ending added to it.

Is this at all a common usage? Does it occur in colloquial Welsh or is it a Wenglish thing?

I'm sort of filing this under things the Welsh language might not natively do in the ways I'm hoping I can coax it into, but figured I'd ask just in case.

Say someone has a nickname in English that uses an adverb-noun construction like Singing Rat or Dancing Bird or -- in the specific instance I'm trying to work out -- Barking Dog. I know the Welsh word for dog (ci), and I'm reasonably sure I have the correct verb (cyfarth, for to bark or bay), but I'm feeling stymied on precisely which tense to use, and then how or whether I can construct this since our dear friend Teach Yourself Welsh doesn't seem to go into it at all.

I'm guessing it's a niche interest. ;)

Thoughts?

Hi!
A friend signed of an e-mail to me with:
Hwyl am y tro, a chofion cynnes,
I've tried to look up the various words but what I'm getting isn't making much sense. Can anyone help?!
TIA

Bore da, bawb.

Could somebody please explain to me how Welsh describes amounts of money?  The book Teach Yourself Welsh is -- as I think we've all agreed -- not very good at explaining certain things, and the whole 'when to mutate' thing surrounding numbers and the words ceiniog and punt confused me so much that I've not actually looked at it properly again since I bought the book back in 2005!  If I remember correctly, the chapter in TYW focussed on grammatical number after numerals (as in, dwy gath, "two cat", but dauddeg cathod, "twenty cats" * and how the numerals cause mutation on what follows (e.g., un gath, dwy gath, tri chath, etc., if I remember correctly).

Also - just had a thought - are there particularly strict rules about how you pluralise certain nouns? Does it depend on the noun itself? I'm on holiday in Anglesey at the moment, and went to visit South Stacks with my family yesterday (gorgeous place; the geology is interesting too - Precambrian metamorphosed volcanic ash deposits!) and noticed that the sign warning of dangerous cliffs had clogwyni - or something similarly spelt - for "cliffs", whereas the canolfan ymwelwyr had clogwynau as an alternative plural on its information boards.

____________
* Is dauddeg right, given that cath is feminine? Should it be dwyddeg?

My very short ramblings about the weather. Any corrections?

Mae tywydd yn ofnadwy

Sut mae´r tywydd yn y Ffindir heddiw? Mae hi´n oer, y tymheredd yn -18 gradd Celsius. Roedd hi´n -24 neithiwr. Bydd hi´n oer yfory hefyd.

Dw i ddim yn hoffi tywydd oer, mae´n well da ´fi tywydd twym. Yn ffodus mae hi´n heulog.

[How do you say "There is/ We have lots of snow"? ...llawer o eira...]


 

noswaith dda!

dywedwch, os gwelwch yn dda -
pa mor enwir Cymraeg 'strawflower, immortelle or sandy everlasting' (http://www.google.com/images?client=gmail&rls=gm&q=strawflower&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=YehSTfeQDIOCOuatqPEH&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CEIQsAQwAw&biw=1232&bih=826)

diolch )

Hiya, new here. And here´s my beginner´s question. My book Teach Yourself Welsh gives examples on how to say how difficult or easy something is: 

Mae hi´n anodd.
Mae hi´n eithaf anodd.
Mae´n ddigon hawdd.
Mae´n rhy anodd.

But again it doesn´t explain what the difference is between the first and the last two! Are the mae hi´n and mae´n interchangeable in this or what?

Not a question about the Welsh language, but about English as spoken by the Welsh - I figured this community was the best place to ask.

I'm doing some research for a fantasy novel that will feature at least two characters originally from Gwynedd. I'm an American, but while living in Devon two years back, I visited Cardiff and Monmouthshire, and I feel somewhat comfortable with that accent (by which I might just mean that I've watched Torchwood!) I also know the basics of the Welsh language and its sounds and grammar. But the North Wales accent is very new to me; I listened to some recordings this afternoon and realized that the differences really are audible even to my American ear.

Any suggestions on how I can become more familiar with this accent? My characters have traveled a great deal and might have lost their accents to some degree, which means that I have some leeway, but they still speak Welsh with one another and identify strongly with their country of origin. I'm not going to try to represent anything phonetically, so I am really most concerned with sentence structure and word choice - I don't know how much these aspects will differ from South Wales accent(s), beyond being more strongly influenced by the Welsh language.

Recommendations of films and novels to aid my ear would be especially helpful, as would any general suggestions.

I'm trying to translate "shoot first, translate later" into Welsh. My attempt at translation is "saethwch unfed, cyfieithwch diweddarach" but I'm sure that's wrong. When I asked at I was directed here - I didn't post here first for rather silly reasons.

I think the person I'm trying for is second person singular.