I think I understand now...
linguoboy wrote:Llawygath wrote:I looked at the sheet pertaining to 'can', and I'm puzzled by the "Do not use 'yn'" statement. Don't use it where? Not in front of gallu/medru? Not before the verbnoun? Not anywhere? Why not? Was my sentence not supposed to have an yn in it?
Because
gallu is not
bod and doesn't make use of the same construction. So, no, it's
Alla i ddim meddwl am (not
o!)
ddim byd i ddweud.
Why isn't it
o? (I know, dumb question.)
linguoboy wrote:(Fedra i ddim works equally well here and would be preferred (a) in the North and (b) among those who still make the historical distinction between physical capability [expressed with gallu] and mental capacity/permission [medru].)
Oh great, another dialectal difference thingy. It sounds like a fine distinction to make, but should I go making it? And what's the idea with having one verb that's used to mean 'mental capacity/permission' (eh?) and another that's used only for permission (yes, and lots of other stuff, but that's another story)? I feel like I missed something somewhere in there.
Hmm, I sound really obnoxious. I certainly don't want to come off that way. I'll try to tone it down.I have a couple of other things I'd like to ask you guys, if you don't mind:
1) According to
this, the conditional is formed using the stem
bas-. However, one of linguoboy's sentences (+ Yng's correction), which involves a conditional, goes like this:
Fyddai'r gath ddim yn cysgu ar wely nad ydy'n gynnes!
In other words, the conditional verb here is
fyddai, not
fasai or whatever. Is this another N/S difference? It could be, since the table I got the
bas- forms from looked to have been written by a Northerner. If yes, which should I use? In either case, how does the above conditional conjugation of
bod go? (Feel free to point me to a website and say "please use this instead of taking my time!".)
2) How come 'booklet' is the singulative of 'book'? I only just found out now that
llyfryn means 'booklet'; I used to think it just meant 'book', which led me to some pretty strange conclusions. Thankfully I've got that sorted out.
On a similar note, I've noticed several other words that seem to have a bare form, a singulative form
and a plural form. Sometimes they follow the relatively intuitive idea that the singulative is little, the bare is medium-size and the plural is, you know, plural, but other times I can't see the logic.
- ffaglen (singulative; 'torch') ~ ffagl (bare; 'blaze, flame, torch, firebrand; brand') ~ ffaglau (plural of
ffagl) [~ ffaglennau (plural of
ffaglen)]
- cabetsen (singulative; 'cabbage') ~ cabetsh (bare; 'cabbage') ~ [no plural form]
- taten (singulative; 'potato') ~ [no bare form] ~ tatw/tatws/tato (plural of
taten)
(In fact, it seems like there are just plain lots of words for 'torch' -- and I don't mean the flashlight kind.)