.

I hope it's OK to ask for a translation; I was referred over here from linguaphiles.

This is a newspaper report in Welsh from 1876, and I'm looking for help in fine-tuning the translation as some of it appears to make no sense at all! There may be some typos as the text has been OCR’d, but I have corrected the text to the original as best I can. The words ‘bailiff’ and ‘service’ are italicised in the original, so I’m guessing they really are the English words they appear to be.

This is for some family history background research so it doesn’t have to be perfect or even beautifully grammatical. It's Mrs Tarraway I'm particularly interested in, so I would appreciate understanding exactly what the judge is saying about her. Is he really saying she isn’t to be believed? This doesn’t make sense given that he then throws the case out, having originally agreed to refer it upwards.

Original Welsh Text

Y Ilys sirol.-Dydd Iau, o flaen y Barnwr Terrel. David Jones, r. E. H. Cheney. Achos oedd hwn am golledion ag oedd wedi eu gwneyd i gnydau yr achwynydd gan wningod yn ystod y flwyddyn ddiweddaf. Yr iawn a ofynid oedd lOp. 5s. Ym ddangosodd Mr. David Lloyd dros yr achwynydd, a gofynodd am i'r achos gael ei obirio hyd y cwrt nesaf, yr byn a ganiatawyd yn ebrwydd.

David James, r. Richard Northy Tarraway, ac A. A. Tarraway, ei wraig. Nwyfau wedi en gwerthu, 4p. 3s. Mr David Lloyd dros yr achwynydd. Ni ymddangosodd y diffynwyr. Dywedodd y bailiff iddo adael y wýs gyda y wraig, yr hon a'i hysbysodd fod ei phriod wedi ei gadael er's pedair blynedd yn ol, ac nad ydoedd wedi clywed oddi wrtho er hyny. Penderfynodd y barnwr fod y service ar Mr. Tarraway yn ddiffygiol; ac yr oedd yn dymuno rhoddi rhybudd i'r cyhoedd i beidio rhoddi coel i Mrs. Tarraway. Taflwyd yr achos allan.


Google Translate plus a few guesses

The sirol. a court-Thursday before Judge Terrel. David Jones, representing E. H. Cheney.

This was the case with losses to crops that had been done with the complainant by rabbits in the last year.The very ofynid was 10p. 5s.

Mr. David Lloyd appeared for the complainant, and asked for the case to be referred up to the next court, the request being granted immediately.

David James, representing Richard Northy Narraway, and A. A. Tarraway, his wife. Laurels after en sell, 4p. 3s.

Mr David Lloyd for the complainant. The Defendants did not appear. Bailiff said he left the summons with the wife, who informed him that her husband had left four years ago, and she had not heard from him since. The judge decided that the service upon Mr Tarraway was flawed, and he desires to give notice to the public not to give credence to Mrs. Tarraway. The case was thrown out.

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.