Mae'r gwningen ac yr wyf...

[Llawygath]

Sorry, another thread.

I was fiddling with Google Translate lately just to see the messes one can make with it. One of the languages I was using in it was Welsh -- always a nice one for throwing Google for a loop. Now, I don't always know how to correct the broken Welsh it comes up with, and this is the case with a particular sentence: Mae'r gwningen ac yr wyf angen padiau ci bach.

Well, I actually know how to fix that one sentence. It should be Mae angen padiau ci bach arna fi ac ar y gwningen. But I don't know how to correct the structure involved if we used a verbnoun in place of angen.

[Llawygath]

Sorry, another thread.

I was fiddling with Google Translate lately just to see the messes one can make with it. One of the languages I was using in it was Welsh -- always a nice one for throwing Google for a loop. Now, I don't always know how to correct the broken Welsh it comes up with, and this is the case with a particular sentence: Mae'r gwningen ac yr wyf angen padiau ci bach.

Well, I actually know how to fix that one sentence. It should be Mae angen padiau ci bach arna fi ac ar y gwningen. But I don't know how to correct the structure involved if we used a verbnoun in place of angen.

Here is what I meant:

Suppose you change the sentence to Mae'r gwningen ac yr wyf yn ymofyn padiau ci bach. (Kind of weird, but you see my point.) In that case, how are you supposed to write it? Anything beginning Mae'r gwningen ac yr wyf [...] or that kind of thing sounds too weird to me to be right. If you use a lower register I suppose you might get away with something to the effect of Mae'r gwningen a fi [...], but that doesn't tell us what you do if you want to keep the verb forms all technically correct.

For that matter, I don't know what one does with French either when you've got something like besoin. I have a feeling you don't say *Le lapin et j'ai besoin de serviettes chiot.

[Llawygath]

I'm quite sure there's a really simple answer to this and I'm just wasting everyone's time here.

[YngNghymru]

So what you want to translate is 'the rabbit and I', right?

Agreement in Welsh is always with the directly adjacent pronoun, or defaults to 3sg if there's a noun present or the subject is unstated in the clause (thus mae'r bechgyn and fi sy'n canu, etc). So you can say mae Pedr a fi isio mynd, for example. Here you can say mae'r gwningen a fi angen... You can equally say mae angen arnaf i a'r gwningen. There's nothing low-register about this, it's perfectly fine in literary Welsh too.

In French agreement is more like English, although the markedness of categories means that it's less transparent on first glance to an English speaker than it might otherwise be. Le lapin et moi is a group (thus plural) including the speaker (thus first person), so le lapin et moi avons besoin, I think.

[Llawygath]

Diolch yn fawr.

Here you can say mae'r gwningen a fi angen... You can equally say mae angen arnaf i a'r gwningen. There's nothing low-register about this, it's perfectly fine in literary Welsh too.

Sorry, nothing low-register about what? Using angen as a verb? I thought that was just wrong?

In French agreement is more like English, although the markedness of categories means that it's less transparent on first glance to an English speaker than it might otherwise be. Le lapin et moi is a group (thus plural) including the speaker (thus first person), so le lapin et moi avons besoin, I think.

You may be right. The sentence I came up with began le lapin et moi ont besoin though. I don't know which one of us I should believe. I am so fuzzy and uneducated about French grammar that I'm inclined to go with your analysis.

[YngNghymru]

There's nothing low-register about mae'r gwningen a fi, I mean. Using angen as a verb (although without yn) isn't incorrect either, in fact it's probably more common than mae angen ar, but both are used.