The Lampeter Blog - Part 3
Yesterday I really felt like giving up and coming home. My brain, I decided, was like an overstuffed mattress and the straw was starting to leak out of the sides. But today is...better, well a bit better. The stitching is holding. Not exactly good, but not not so bad either.
Anyway...I have discovered that there are some good points about the Welsh language. First the present tense seems to consist of just the infinite and the present tense of 'to be' - which although irregular isn't that bad. Second there are only about five irregular verbs in total. Well, that's what my teacher told me...but I suspect that she was trying to be encouraging.
However the mutations are worse than I though - occurring not just after certain vowels but when they kind of sounds right, which includes a lot of negatives. And the written form is different from the spoken form in many ways, particularly in the past tense so we are having to do both.
Also if you face west it is necessary to add 'o' to all nouns, and if it is raining the circumflex accent over the y in nouns such as ty should be ommitted. You should not attempt to speak Welsh if your name contains the letter sequence 'ain' or if you can trace more than three Normans or two Anglo-Saxons in your immediate (last twenty generations) ancestry.
Anyway...I have discovered that there are some good points about the Welsh language. First the present tense seems to consist of just the infinite and the present tense of 'to be' - which although irregular isn't that bad. Second there are only about five irregular verbs in total. Well, that's what my teacher told me...but I suspect that she was trying to be encouraging.
However the mutations are worse than I though - occurring not just after certain vowels but when they kind of sounds right, which includes a lot of negatives. And the written form is different from the spoken form in many ways, particularly in the past tense so we are having to do both.
Also if you face west it is necessary to add 'o' to all nouns, and if it is raining the circumflex accent over the y in nouns such as ty should be ommitted. You should not attempt to speak Welsh if your name contains the letter sequence 'ain' or if you can trace more than three Normans or two Anglo-Saxons in your immediate (last twenty generations) ancestry.
posted by Clare Dudman at 4:53 pm
3 Comments:
Well that's probably most of us then. And isn't everyone in Britain actually related to each other if we really get down to it? I shall admire your tenacity even more than I do already after this fortnight, Clare..Just hope the stitching holds!
Clare,
You seem to be covering in a matter of days what we did in a whole year's worth of terms at school! No wonder you didn't seem to notice the weather today... I'll wager a fiver the sheep were wet again though...
You'll be ffluent in the ffullness of the ffortnight.
Crimeficreader: Yes, that's what one person said in class today - apparently they've already covered the same ground as they had taken a year to cover in evening class - less time to foregeet inbetween. Apparently the course used to be described as 'can be stressful' but when they changed this to 'challenging' (I think) they found they got more people interested. I don't feel particularly stressed really, but it is exhausting. After class we have to do three hours homework on top of the day's work.
Jan: Yes, all one big spider web - I know a song about that. Sttitching holding up so far!
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