Branwen, Daughter of Llŷr: text and comments

[megli]

This thread is for the text, and my commentary. These are the raw materials from which you should contruct your translation.

If I post the text up like this in sequence, we could have another thread for difficulties and queries, and a third thread for a collaborative translation.

[megli]

BRANWEN UERCH LYR

Line 1

Bendigeiduran uab Llyr a oed urenhin coronawc ar yr ynys hon, ac ardyrchawc o goron Lundein.

Pronunciation (try and do a Welsh accent): The symbol ð represents the th- in 'those'. The word in capitals are stressed. bendigaydVRAN vab HLEER a oyð VRENhin korONowg* ar er UHniss hon, ag arðERCHowg* o GORon LIND-eye**-n. * ‘ow’ as in ‘growl’ ** ‘eye’ like the English word ‘eye’.

Let’s go up to the comma to start with.

The first part of the line is in the Abnormal Order.
Here, the subject comes first, ‘Bendigeiduran uab Llyr’.

Check back with the 4 handouts if you are not sure about these terms.

Bendigeiduran is a compound word, that is, a word made up of two single words, like English 'sixpack' or 'railway'.

In Welsh, the initial letter of the second element of a compound word undergoes lenition. Here, b --> u-.

So Bendiegeid + Bran --> Bendigeiduran.

Remember the u- of uran is a v-, NOT a vowel.

Bendigeid comes from Latin benedictus, and means ‘Blessed’.

Bran means ‘Raven’ or ‘Crow’.

The whole is a proper noun: Bran the Blessed, Blessed-Bran, Blessed-Crow, Beindigeidfran, however you prefer to render it. Tastes vary.

(I often toy with the idea of a British mythic novel thing with a main character called ‘Benedict Crowe’, whose story would echo Bran’s.)


The next word is lenited. Its true form is mab, and it means ‘son’. Nouns which are in so-called ‘appositon’ to a proper name undergo lenition in Middle Welsh. ‘Apposition’ is a grammatical contruction in which two nouns are placed next to each other so that one adds to the meaning of the other; e.g. my friend Alice, Queen Elizabeth, Chairman Mao, Branwen daughter of Llyr. The two nouns are then referred to as ‘being in apposition’.

Llyr is a proper noun. Note that it has a circumflex in Modern Welsh, Llŷr.


So the subject was first.
Thus, according to the rule of the Abnormal Order, we must now have a meaningless particle a, followed by the verb. There it is. Dah-dah!

The verb is thus oed, which is the 3rd singular imperfect indicative of the highly irregular verb bod, ‘to be’. (As a lenites, the form could have been goed, but it isn’t.) Thus it means ‘(he)...was’.

The –d at the end of oed is really a ð, the th- sound in ‘those’. Remind yourself of the spelling/pronunciation rules if you feel at sea with this.

The word oed also happens to cause lenition. Thus the next word is lenited: its true or radical form is brenhin, and it means ‘king’.

coronawc is an adjective, 'crowned'. Notice that adjectives usually come after the nouns to which they are applying in Welsh, unlike in English.

ar yr ynys hon: literally ‘upon the island this’; the words this and that in Middle Welsh are used with the definite article as well (‘the cat this’, ‘the house that’ = ‘this cat’, ‘that house’.)

That brings us to a pause at the comma. Take a breath.






OK, we begin again.

Then we have a conjunction, ac. This means ‘and’; before a vowel it is ac and before a consonant it is a. It causes aspriation, but as vowels can’t be mutated, there’s nothing special here.

ardyrchawc is another adjective, and it applies to 'Bendigeiduran'. It is Modern Welsh ardderchog, ‘excellent’, but here it means something like ‘conspicuous’ ‘outstanding’ or even, best of all, ‘invested with’. (It contains a very ancient Indo-European root *derk-, which means ‘to behold’). You might want to repeat the verb 'oed' for clarity here: 'and he was invested...'

o is a preposition meaning ‘from, as a result of’, or here, 'with'. Like most prepositions, it causes lenition.

So what should you look up goron under? That’s right, it’s ‘real’ form is coron, ‘a crown’. Think of English ‘coronet’. It is a borrowing from Latin corona, ‘crown’. Welsh is chock-full of borrowings from Latin.

Lundein is the lenited form of Llundein, ‘London’.

You’ll notice that your chosen translation says ‘crown of London’ here, but the Welsh seems to have no word for ‘of’.

That’s because it doesn’t. To express ‘John’s bike’, ‘the bike belonging to John’, Welsh just says ‘bike John’, merely juxtaposing the two words. This is a fundamental rule of Welsh (and indeed Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, etc) grammar.

If the first element in such a construction happens to be feminine, as coron is here, the second one undergoes lenition, hence Lundein for radical Llundein.


So altogether we have....?

[Heron]

This gets things going nicely.

As you suggested Megli, I'll stand on the sidelines for a bit before commenting. But perhaps it's useful to point out to modern Welsh learners that 'lenition' is what is now usually referred to as 'the soft mutation'.

[megli]

Yes, thanks Heron! As far as I recall, the Grammar of Middle Welsh uses the term 'lenition' instead of 'soft mutation' so I wanted to introduce it from the outset. But either, of course, are perfectly fine.

[megli]

Line 2

I won't be giving you words which we have already met, like oed.


* * *

A frynhawngueith yd oed yn Hardlech yn Ardudwy, yn llys idaw.

A PHRINhown gw-eye-th uð OEð ern HARðlekh ern ArDIDoo-ee, ern HLEEES Iðow. Again, -eye- as in English 'eye' and '-ow' as in 'growl'.

Notes

The f- at the start of frynhawngueith is a wierd spelling for ff-, that is ph-, the aspirate mutation of initial p-. The first word, a, is the conjunction 'and', and it causes aspirate mutation, so that's why.

prynhawngueith means 'one afternoon'. It is a time phrase. Because the sentance has begun with a time phrase, and we are in the Abnormal Order, we expect the particle y(d) to appear next, before the verb. There it is. Check the two types of the Abnormal Order in Handout 4 if you have forgotten. (And remember that 'abnormal order' is a daft name - it's very normal indeed in Middle Welsh.)

Hardlech is modern Harlech, and literally means 'Fair (hardd) Rock (llech)'. Note the lenition of the second element in a compound, as is usual.

yn is the preposition 'in', pronounced rather like English 'urn'. It causes nasalisation (one of a very small number of words which do.)

Ardudwy is a placename, an area in Gwynedd in North-West Wales. (Not that anyone is likely not to know that!).

yn is again the preposition meaning 'in'.

llys means 'court'. Note that Welsh has no word for 'a' or 'an', so you have to insert it when you translate: thus yn llys is 'in a court'.

idaw literally means 'to him', but is best translated 'of his'. Thus absolutely literal 'in a court to him' really means 'in one of his courts'.

In other words, Bran has several courts, as one would expect of the high-king.

[megli]

I realise this is slow, but with a bit of practice we'll soon be doing several sentences in a go. Please holler if you don't understand anything. It might help to make a word-list as you go along also.


Ac yn eisted yd oedynt ar garrec Hardlech, uch penn y weilgi, a Manawydan uab Llyr y urawt y gyt ac ef, a deu uroder un uam ac ef, Nissyen ac Efnyssen, a guyrda y am hynny, mal y gwedei ynghylch brenhin.

Ag ern AY-steð uð OYðint ar GAReg HARðlekh, EEKH PENN uh OOL-ay-gee, a manaWIDan vab HLEER ee geed ag ev, a DIE* VRODer een VAM ag ev, NISHen ag evNISHen, a GWEERda ee am HUNny, mal er GWEðay ung HILKH BRENhin. *DIE like English 'die'.

A(c) = 'and'

yn: sorry this is going to be a fudge on my part I'm afraid. In strict grammatical terms, this yn isn't the preposition 'in', but just for now, please pretend that it is.

eisted 'sitting'. As yn eisted 'in sitting', is a prepositional phrase, therefore, as we are once again in the Abnormal Order, we expect the particle y(d) to follow before the verb. There it is.

oedynt: the 3rd plural imperfect indicative of bod, 'to be', meaning, therefore, '(they) were'.

So 'They were in a sitting' = 'they were seated, they were sitting'.

ar: a preposition meaning 'upon, on'. Like most prepositions, it causes lenition.

Therefore the next word, garrec, is really carrec, 'rock' (Modern Welsh carreg - note how the final -c denoters the sound -g here.)

carrec Hardlech is another of this situations where you have to imagine an 'of' - the Welsh just juxtaposes the two nouns. Thus '(the) Rock of Harlech'.

uch penn is a preposition, 'above'. 'But it's two words!', you may say. Well, it sometimes does appear as a single word, uwchben, but also as two words. It's just one of those things. Originally it was a prepositional phrase meaning 'higher than the head of', but has come to mean just 'up above, over'. In this, it's rather like English 'overhead'. It would be legitimate to translate it as 'overlooking', I think.

y is the definite article, leniting the following feminine singular noun gwleigi, 'sea, ocean.' This word appears to have some link to the word 'wolf', and so means 'the wild and wolfish sea', the 'raging sea', or something of that kind. I like 'the ravening sea', myself.

Manawydan uab Llyr I think you can work out!

y urawt: y is the 3rd singular masculine possessive pronoun, or in other words, the word meaning 'his'. It triggers lenition. Thus the following word could be brawt or mrawt. Since no words in Welsh begin naturally with mr-, it must be brawt, which means 'brother' (and is related to the English word.)

y gyt ac ef is a hugely common phrase in the Mabinogi, meaning 'together with (y gyt ac) him (ef).'

deu uroder: deu is the form of the numeral 'two' used before a masculine noun. Before a feminine noun, the form used is dwy. Both trigger lenition.

uroder = broder, the plural of brawt. Thus 'brothers'. This is slighty odd: normally in Welsh, both Middle and Modern, a numeral is followed by a singular noun, like English 'five foot tall', or 'ten stone'. But here the rule is broken and we have a plural after the numeral.

un uam: this is an 'of' phrase, with, as usual, the two nouns just being juxtaposed:

'two brothers [of] one mother'.

un means 'one' (like French!) and it triggers lenition upon a following feminine noun. It can also have the sense 'same, identical, one and the same', and it is good to translate it thus here.

mam means 'mother'.

ac ef: ac here is NOT the a(c) that means 'and'. There is an identical, and ultimately closely-related word a(c) which means 'with' in the sense of 'accompanied by' or 'by means of'. It also causes aspirate mutation.

ef is the 3rd singular masculine pronoun 'he' or 'him'.

So, literally, 'of one and the same mother with him', or, in better English, '[born] of the same mother as himself'.

The names Nissyen and Efnyssen may be updated to Modern Welsh forms as Nisien and Efnisien, or left as they are, as you see fit. (But be consistent!) Efnyssen would bring to mine the word efnys, 'enemy, hostile', and Nisien (which was a saint's name) could be take to be the opposite, 'peaceful, friendly'.

guyrda is a compound word, formed of gwyr, the plural of gwr, 'man', plus the adjective da, 'good'. Thus it literally means 'goodmen', but is usually translated 'noblemen'.

y am is a prepositional phrase meaning 'besides, in addition to'.

hynny is the plural demonstrative pronoun, meaning 'these ones'. (It's pronounced just like English 'honey'!).

mal is an adverb meaning 'like, as, in the way that'. It often appears lenited as ual. Thus this final clause is in the Abnormal Order, and because we've had an adverb first, we expect y(d) to follow before we get to the verb.

gwedei is the 3rd singular imperfect indicative of the verb gwedu, 'to befit, to be seemly'. Thus '[he/she/it] was seemly'.

ynghylch: 'around', literally 'in a circle' (yn + cylch - note the nasalisation caused by yn!).

brenhin: 'a king'.

[megli]

Line 4

Before going ahead with this, make sure you read and understand the section on Pronouns in the 'Handy Reference Grammar' thread.

Y deu uroder un uam ac ef, meibon oedynt y Eurosswyd o'e uam ynteu Penardun, uerch Ueli uab Mynogan.

Pronunciation (where a word is just like an English word I've put it in green) Uh die VRODer een VAM ag ev, MAYBon OYðint ee eye'r-OSS-oo-ið, oy VAM untie pen-AR-ðin, verch VELLee vab muh-NOG-an.

Those with the books should be able to tackle this without much ado: note that the books have a list of personal and place-names at the end, after the vocabulary.

This passage introduces the theme of the two different brothers.

This is really for the benefit of Blackbird, Littleraven, Stephen and any other readers!

The first phrase, Y deu uroder un uam ac ef, we have already met in the previous sentence, so see above for discussion of the forms. This is what is called a 'hanging subject' - the subject is stuck on the front of the sentence, dangling as it were, then there's a comma, then the sentence proper resumes. It's a way of drawing attention to the subject. We do it in English: 'Madeline McCann - what a crying shame.' 'Three pounds for a pint - that's a joke.'

So you might want to turn the comma after 'ac ef' into a dash when you translate. Or you could stick in 'As for...' on the front of the sentence.

meibon: this is really for meibyon, Middle Welsh spelling sometimes not being what it might be. It is the plural of mab, 'son'. Welsh plurals are complicated, and soon I will post a reference sheet on the different patterns.

oedynt: the 3rd person plural of the imperfect indicative of bod, 'to be' (notice how I am extremely specific.) Thus '[they] were'.

y: yet ANOTHER y. This is the preposition meaning 'to', and it triggers lenition. It is pronounced 'ee'. You may have noticed I am making a list of 'y's and 'a's under 'Useful Lists' elsewhere in the Middle Welsh subforum.

Eurosswyd: a man's name, possibly 'Golden Enemy'.

o'e uam ynteu Penardun: our first trickiness. o is the presposition 'from', which we have already met, and it causes lenition. Unfortunately in Welsh you can't put a little word like a preposition next to a possessive pronoun: in other words, 'from his mother' isn't 'o y uam'. The preposition and the possessive pronoun coalesce, here, into o'e, 'from his'. The 3rd singular masculine possessive pronoun still triggers lenition even in this somewhat reduced form, hence uam not mam.

Now you need to look over 'pronouns' on the Handy Reference Grammar. ynteu is the 3rd singular masculine independent conjunct pronoun, 'he for his part', but it is being used to shore up or bolster the 'his' which comes before uam. Literally is it 'from his mother he-for-his-part' but this is merely the Welsh idiom for 'from his mother'.

BUT - this is a nice illustration of the subtle differences in meaning between the simple independent pronouns and the conjunct ones. 'o'e uam ef' would also mean 'from his mother', but the 'his' would naturally refer back to the last-mentioned male person, here, Eurosswyd. This is clearly not what is meant - Nisien and Efnisien are not Euroswydd's sons by his own mother! Ynteu, on the other hand, refers a bit further back, often to a male person who was the subject of the previous sentence - here, Bran. Penarddun is BRAN's mother, as well as the mother of Nisien and Efnisien.


Penardun is in apposition to uam (check back to the first sentence we did if you feel shaky on 'apposition'). 'Penardun' = 'Lovely Head', perhaps.

Then we have a whole phrase in apposition to Penardun: uerch Ueli uab Mynogan. There is a lovely sequence of lenitions here. uerch (from merch, 'daughter'), is lenited because it is in apposition to a proper name, Penardun. A noun in an 'of' clause following a feminine noun is usually lenited, so 'daughter of Beli' comes out as uerch Ueli not **uerch Beli. (Note: this is why we see Branwen uerch Lyr (lenition) but Manawydan uab Llyr (no lenition)!)

uab is then in apposition to Ueli, and so is lenited in turn, because it is in apposition to a proper name.

[megli]

Line 5

A'r neill o'r gueisson hynny, gwas da oed: ef a barei tangneued y rwg y deu lu, ban uydynt lidyawcaf: sef oed hwnnw, Nissyen.

Pronunciation (as usual, words in green are pronounced like English) AR NAYlh or GWAYSHon honey, GWASS dah oeð: EV a BARay tangNEVeð uh roong uh DIE LEE, ban VUðint lidYOWkav: SEV oeð HOONoo [both 'oo''s as in 'book' not as in 'cool'], NISHen.

A'r is the conjunction a, 'and' plus the definite article, y(r).

neill is a pronoun meaning 'one' as opposed to 'the other': (As in English - 'One of the two prefers cats, the other likes dogs better.')

So: y neill...y llall, 'the one...the other'. The y llall occurs in the next sentence.

o'r is the preposition o, 'out of, from' plus the definite article, y(r).

gueisson is the plural of gwas, which means 'a lad' or a 'youth' or sometimes - but not here - 'a servant'.

hynny is the word that means 'those'. It follows the noun to which it applies.

da is an adjective meaning 'good', applying to gwas.

gwas da oed is actually in the Abnormal Order; strictly, it should be gwas da a oed, but it is permissible to leave out the a before oed. (But you can't do this with any other verb.)

ef a barei tangneued is also in the Abnormal Order. The subject comes first - ef, 'he' - then a, then the verb, which is lenited by the a. Thus the real form of barei is parei, and it is the 3rd singular imperfect indicative of peri, 'to bring about, to cause'. Thus 'he used to bring about'...

tangneued is the object, and means 'peace'.

y rwg is a 'bad' Middle Welsh spelling for y rwng, which means 'between'. The y on the front is optional.

y deu lu: 'the two hosts'. llu, 'host', is lenited by the preceding numeral deu, as with deu uroder which we met above.

Notice that you usually have a singular noun after a number in Welsh - literally, what we have here is 'the two host'. Wierdly, the definite article here seems to have very little force: translate as 'two hosts' not as 'the two hosts'. And see my note below.

ban is the lenited form of pan, 'when'. I am at a loss to suggest why it is lenited here. It may just be one of those things.

bydynt is the 3rd plural habitual present of bod, 'to be'. Bod has more forms that other, regular, verbs, and one of these oddities is that it has two distinct present tenses. This one is for ongoing situations: 'when they are (for an extended period of time)....'. However, it is more natural English to say 'when they were'.

llidyawcaf: 'angriest' - the ending -af in Welsh corresponds exactly to English -est, as in 'hard, hardest', 'long, longest'.

I might insert a full stop here.

sef is a difficult word to translate, yet a very common one. Its basic meaning is 'This is', but it's often best rendered as 'namely' in English.

Oed we know - '[he/she/it] was'.

hwnnw is the word that means 'that one', when referring to a masculine item. (It's honno when it refers to a feminine one.)

This phrase, sef oed hwnnw, is best rendered into English as 'this is who that one was -', or just 'that one was'...

This is a classic example of the truism that languages are all different, so an absolutely literal translation can sound awkward. We should aim to translate good Welsh into good English, but without adding or taking away from the text.

* * *

Note about y deu lu

This is one of the places where the other manuscript of the text actually says something different. We have two manuscripts: The White Book of Rhydderch (written c. 1350) and The Red Book of Hergest (written around 50 years later, and currently sitting about 100 yards from where I write.)


The text in our edition follows the White Book of Rhydderch, but the Red Book of Hergest has y deulu instead of y deu lu here. Since teulu is the word that means 'family' (of which deulu would be the lenited variant), the text could be taken to mean: 'he would bring about peace between a family when they were at their angriest' which some have seen as an anticipatory reference to the the fissure in the marriage of Branwen and Matholwch, the death of Gwern etc. After all, 'Branwen' is a story of national war, but that war is focused within a single family.

That said, the phrase is not very natural Welsh, and the 'two hosts' of the White Book reading corresponds with elegant balance to the 'two brothers' whom Efnisien can set at odds in the next sentence. Thus, I think the y deulu of the Red Book is just a medieval typo, and the White Book preserves the correct reading.

Incidentally, if you go to the following address, then select 'f. 10. r.' from the list on the left of the screen, you can see the White Book for yourself.

digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/RHY00001/physical?div=19&subdiv=0&locale=en&mode=reference

'f. 10. r' is the text we are working on. The big red B on the right is the beginning of 'Branwen', and you should be able to follow it using the red text on this thread.

[megli]

This is the last line of the first paragraph. To those of you who complete this, congratulate yourselves on having read a whole paragraph of Middle Welsh from a standing start! We'll have a breather after this. Any feedback would be much appreciated - I don't know who's following this.


Y llall a barei ymlad y rwng y deu uroder, ban uei uwyaf yd ymgerynt.

Pronunciation (approx.): uh HLAHL a BARay UMlað uh roong ['oo' as in 'book' not 'cool'] uh DIE VRODer, ban VAY VWEE-av uð umGAIRint ['GAIR' rhymes with 'air'].

y llall picks up y neill in the previous sentence. y neill...y llall means 'the one...the other...'

It is the subject here, in a phrase in the Abnormal Order. So we have our expected particle a, which as we recall triggers lenition, then the verb. See the previous sentence for barei.

ymlad is the object. The basic root is lladu, which is a verb meaning 'to fight', but this form has a prefix on the front, ym-, which adds the idea of 'mutual'-ness. Many, many verbs have prefixes in Welsh, just like in English (e.g. go : undergo : outgo : overgo, or view : interview : overview)
This is a noun derived from the verb, and so meaning 'mutual fighting'.

y rwng we had above, in the form y rwg.
Ditto y deu uroder and ban.

uei uwyaf is slightly tricky. uei is the 3rd singular imperfect subjunctive of bod, 'to be', normally bei, here lenited by ban.

Go back to the grammar handouts now if you can't securely remember what the subjunctive is.

Thus uei means 'he/she/it might be'.

Bei/uei causes lenition. uwyaf is really mywaf, which means 'greatest', 'most'. It is functioning as an adverb here, ''greatestly', most greatly'.

This last phrase is in the Abnormal Order, but the 2nd type, where we have something adverbial first (here uwyaf, 'most greatly'), then the particle y(d) , then the verb.

ymgerynt is from the verb caru, 'to love', but with the same prefix ym- which we saw in ymlad, above. Therefore it means 'mutually-loving', and this form is the 3rd plural imperfect indicative of ymgaru. (Note again that, as always, sticking two words together, like ym + caru, triggers lenition of the second element.)

So, literally the last phrase says: 'when it might be most greatly they were mutally-loving', but you can look at your chosen translation and see how to put this phrase into elegant English.

[Heron]

May 4, 2008 16:16:28 GMT -1 megli said:

Incidentally, if you go to the following address, then select 'f. 10. r.' from the list on the left of the screen, you can see the White Book for yourself.

digidol.llgc.org.uk/METS/RHY00001/physical?div=19&subdiv=0&locale=en&mode=reference

'f. 10. r' is the text we are working on. The big red B on the right is the beginning of 'Branwen', and you should be able to follow it using the red text on this thread.

Yes a wonderful resource - Andrew Green has done wonders in putting up the contents of of the Nat Lib's treasures on the web. I gather he's having a bit of bother with various modern authors who object to their magazine contributions being digitised (worrying that no-one will buy their books)

[megli]

From now on, I'll be posting slightly longer sections and it will become very tricky for those who don't have the books, but sadly this is unavoidable. Read the text through in Welsh, then the English translation of your choice, then read all the notes through once or twice before you start translating.

Ac ual yd oedynt yn eisted yuelly, wynt a welynt teir llong ar dec, yn dyuot o deheu Iwerdon, ac yn kyrchu parth ac attunt, a cherdet rugyl ebrwyd ganthunt, y gwynt yn eu hol, ac yn nessau yn ebrwyd attunt. 'Mi a welaf longeu racco,' heb y brenhin, 'ac yn dyuot yn hy parth a'r tir.


NOTES

In the first line, note the yn. This little meaningless particle is used to connect a form of the verb 'to be' to a verbal noun. It is accordingly hugely common. It causes no mutation, but is identical in form to the preposition yn which, however, causes nasal mutation. So oedynt...yn eistedd means 'they were sitting'.

wynt a welynt is Abnormal Order: subject (wynt, 'they'), meaningless preverbal particle a, then the verb. welynt is for gwelynt, the 3rd plural imperfect indicative of gweled, 'to see'. Note: verbs of perception tend to use the imperfect tense in Welsh ('they were seeing') whereas English uses a perfect ('they saw').

teir llong ar dec: teir is the form of tri, 'three', used before a feminine noun. With numbers in the teens, Middle Welsh splits the ten off from the single digit number, and then slots the noun in between them, so literally this means: 'three ships on ten' - or 'thirteen ships'.

Now you have a sequence of verbal nouns with yn in front of them: here the particle yn basically adds something like English -ing to the meaning - 'and coming...and making for....and drawing near...'

a cherdet rugyl ebrwyd ganthunt: an idiom. In Welsh, there is no word for 'to have' - you must say 'there is X with me', and so on. This phrase means 'and a motion easy swift with-them', or, in English, 'they had a swift, easy movement'.

attunt and ganthunt are our first examples of a hugely important class of words in Middle welsh - namely, the Conjugated Prepositions.

In Welsh, you cannot say 'for me, for you, to her, with us', and so on, as two separate words. It is impossible to apply a simple preposition like ar, 'upon, for', or o, 'from', or gan, 'with, (to name but a few) to a pronoun. Instead, the two words coalesce, often changing radically in the process. It's as though in English we had to say 'fmee, foo, ther, wuss' for 'for me, for you, to her, with us'.

I will post up a handout on this soon, but for now, just learn that ganthunt is gan 'with' + a 3rd plural pronoun, so 'with them', and attunt is at 'to' also + a 3rd plural pronoun, 'to them'.

parth ac at is an idiom which means 'towards'. It also occurs without the at, as in the last sentence of this extract.

yn eu hol: literally 'in their track'. yn ol as a phrase comes to mean 'behind' (remember that Olwen means 'white-track'!). to say 'behind me' you have to say 'in my track', 'behind you' is 'in your track', and so on. Note that the 3rd plural possessive pronoun eu (also appears very commonly as y) prefixes an h- to a following word which starts with a vowel.

Mi a welaf: Abnormal Order again. 'I see'...
Note that the object of the verb is lenited, because it's longeu not llongeu. Llong 'ship' is an ancient borrowing from Latin [navis] longa, 'long (sea-going) ship'.

heb y: one of the most characteristic phrases in Middle Welsh. heb is an unchanging word which means 'said'. It is usually followed by the definite article, even before a proper name. There is also a preposition heb, meaning 'without' and causing lenition, which may confuse you.

yn hy: this is yet another yn (we have had at least three so far.) This one turns a following adjective into an adverb, and so is equivalent to English -ly. (Slow : slowly). It causes lenition. hy means 'bold' so yn hy is 'boldly'.

[Heron]

It's good to see a slightly longer piece. It really is worth anyone who has any sort of proficiency in pronouncing Welsh just reading this straight through (aloud if possible) to 'hear' the rhythms of it and the internal rhymes (echoes of cynghanedd) even if it is not fully understood. Just for a sense of the liveliness of the text which it is easy to lose in the slog of translation.

[megli]

Ideally I want to get to the stage where we can do a paragraph at a time.

[megli]

Ac erchwch y wyr y llys wiscaw amdanunt, a mynet y edrych pa uedwl yw yr eidunt.' Y gwyr a wiscawd amdanunt ac a nessayssant attunt y wayret. Gwedy guelet y llongeu o agos, diheu oed ganthunt na welsynt eiryoet llongeu gyweirach eu hansawd noc wy. Arwydon tec, guedus, arwreid o bali oed arnunt.

NOTES

Bran is still speaking at the start of this extract.

Erchwch: the 2nd person plural ordering form (or imperative) of erchi, 'to request'. You request to someone in Welsh, hence the preposition y, 'to', causing lenition, which follows erchwch.

wiscaw: the verbal noun gwiscaw, 'to dress', lenited because it is the object of erchwch.

amdanunt is another of these conjugated prepositions - it is am, 'for, upon' with a 3rd plural pronoun, so 'for them, upon them'.

The phrase to'gwiscaw am' someone, literally, 'to dress upon' someone, actually means 'to arm, to put on armour'.

pa uedwl: pa, 'what', plus medwl, 'thought, intention'. Pa lenites.

yw is one of many forms of the 3rd singular present of 'to be' in Welsh. It more-or-less corresponsds to an '='.

yr eidunt: literally, 'the their-one'. Translate 'theirs'.

Y gwyr a wiscawd: Abnormal Order. wiscawd is the 3rd singula preterite/past tense indicative of gwiscaw, 'to dress'. (See above for this idiom.)

VITAL note: -awd is a very common 3rd singular preterite ending, and in its descendent form -odd, it is the standard Modern Welsh form. More common, however, is the ending -wys, and a number of common verbs have idiosyncratic 3rd person preterite forms. But learn -awd and -wys, as you will see them dozens and dozens of times in our text.

nessayssant: 'they drew near', 3rd plural preterite of nessau, 'to draw close'

y waeret: 'down, downwards'. This is an adverbial phrase, but in origin it is a fossilised preposition phrase meaning 'to a slope' (gwaeret). The opposite phrase, 'up, upwards', in Middle Welsh y uynyd, is similar, in that it means 'to a mountain' (mynyd)! Thus does terrain influence language.


Gwedy: 'after'

o agos: 'from close by'

diheu oed ganthunt: an idiomatic phrase, literally meaning 'undoubted was it with-them'. The preposition gan, 'with', is often used in Middle Welsh to express personal opinion or perspective. Translate: 'They were sure'

na: 'that....not'

welsynt: 3rd plural pluperfect of gwelet, 'to see' - therefore, 'they had seen'.

eiryoet: the normal word for 'ever'.

gyweirach is the lenited form of kyweirach, 'more fitted-out'. The -ach ending corresponds to English -er as in 'harder', 'longer' etc. It's lenited for a desperately obscure uncommon reason which you don't need to worry about at this stage.

gywierach eu hansawd: literally, 'more-well-equipped of their appearance', or, in better English, 'better fitted out in appearance'. eu (or y) the 3rd plural possessive pronoun, prefixes an h- to a following word, if that word begins with a vowel, like ansawd.

o bali: 'of brocaded silk'. o in Welsh corresponds to English 'of' only in this kind of phrase where '[made out] of' is what is really implied. Remember that in phrases like 'the hat of the girl', Welsh uses no actually word for 'of'. pali, the unlenited form of bali, is a borrowing from French 'pâle'.

arnunt is the preposition ar, 'upon', + the 3rd plural pronoun - 'upon them'.

[megli]

I'm going to have a go at getting this show on the road again. It's that or sit writing this tedious volume....

Ac ar hynny, nachaf un o'r llongeu yn raculaenu rac y rei ereill, ac y guelynt dyrchauael taryan yn uch no bwrd y llong, a swch y taryan y uynyd yn arwyd tangneued.

ar hynny: literally 'on these things', is an idiom for 'thereupon, then' - very common in the Mabinogi.

nachaf: an exclamation. 'Lo! Behold!'
un o'r llongeu, 'one [out] of the ships'
yn raculaenu: the particle yn (one of several, this one causes no mutation) transforms a verbal noun into a present participle. Both end in -ing in English. Translate 'outstripping, coming in front'

rac: a preposition, 'before, in front of' - we've already had it as a prefix on the verb.

y rei ereill: 'the other ones'; ereill is the plural of the adjective arall, 'other'

guelynt: 3rd plural imperfect of the verb guelet, 'to see': literally 'they were seeing'. Note that with verbs of perception, Welsh likes to use the imperfect tense (the 'was/were' tense) whereas in English we like the perfect tense ('they saw'). Often it's nice to translate the imperfect of a verb of perception with 'could': 'they could see...'

When the verb comes first in a clause, as it occasionally does, the non-mutating particle y is often placed before it.

dyrchauael: verbal noun, 'the raising up' (this is the word they use in Culhwch for lifting up Yspaddaden's eyelids)

taryan: shield

yn uch no: 'higher than' - yn is a particle that causes a following adjective to be turned into an adverb. (cadarn, 'strong', yn gadarn, 'strongly'). It causes soft mutation/lenition. Uch means 'higher': it is the comparative (the -er form) of the adjective uchel, 'high, lofty'.

no means 'than' after a comparative. ('Bigger than me, taller than you')
It causes aspirate mutation, but as b- can't be aspirately mutated we can't tell that here.

bwrd: literally 'board' but here translate 'deck'

Two nice genitive phrases here: bwrd y llong and swch y taryan. Notice how in welsh there is no word corresponding to English 'of' - you just say 'deck the ship' (= 'the deck of the ship') and 'point the shield' (= 'the point of the shield')

y uynyd, 'upwards'. Nice word, this - it literally means 'to a mountain' but has become fossilised as the way of saying 'up, upwards' - Modern Welsh i fyny. (e.g. wi 'di bod yn rhoi silfoedd i fyny yn yr estyniad trwy'r dydd, 'I've been putting shelves up in the extension all day').

yn arwyd: yet another use of yn. Here it means 'as' - 'as a sign'. Arwyd means 'sign, symbol, ensign, token' - we had it before to refer to the physical 'fair flags/ensigns' on the ships coming for Ireland. It's also the word for a sign of the zodiac, by the way.

tangneued: 'peace', a genitive dependent on arwyd.

[megli]

Ac y nessawys y gwyr attunt, ual yd ymglywynt ymdidan. Bwrw badeu allan a wnaethont wynteu, a nessau parth a'r tir, a chyuarch guell y'r brenhin. E brenhin a'e clywei wynteu o'r lle yd oed ar garrec uchel uch eu penn.

Comments

'And the men drew near to them, so that they might hear mutal conversation. They cast off rowboats, and drew close to the land, and greeted the king. The king heard them from the place in which he was on a high rock up above them.'

In the first sentence, the verb is first - nessawys. This is slightly unusal in Middle Welsh (but standard in modern welsh), and in such a construction the verb is preceeded by the meaningless particle y.

attunt: the preposition at, 'to, towards ' + a 3pl pronoun, so 'to them'.

ual: 'like, as' or here, with the following particle y(d), 'so that, in order that'.

I'll do more later!

[Heron]

Oct 16, 2008 12:14:15 GMT -1 megli said:

In the first sentence, the verb is first - nessawys. This is slightly unusal in Middle Welsh (but standard in modern welsh), and in such a construction the verb is preceeded by the meaningless particle y.

One thing I'm not entirely clear about with the abnormal order is whether it is likely to have been a literary device or stylistic fashion popular at the time of the prose that has come down to us (Simon Evans says it is less prevalent in the earlier poetry) or whether it is likely that it was a standard grammatical feature of the whole of this period. It would be nice to know how people actually spoke to each other. Is it just my impression that it's less prevalent in the dialogue in the tale? ("Mi a welaf longeu racco" not "Llongeu mi a welaf..")

[megli]

Well, 'mi a welaf longeu' actually is the abnormal order because the subject is first + a + verb, it's just that they subject in this case is a pronoun (which is fine.)

It's an interesting question and there are several schools of thought. The issue is (allow me to summarise for non-Welsh speakers); 'Why, if Old Welsh and Modern Welsh sentences have the basic order Verb-Subject-Object, does Middle Welsh use a quite different standard order in which the verb comes *third* in the sentence, after an intial element and a little particle, in the so-called 'Abnormal Order'?'

The 'Abnormal Order' is absolutely standard in written and spoken Cornish and Breton, by the way.

Koch has proposed that at the Common Neo-Brittonic stage, a tendency towards shunting the verb into third place must have already been present in speech, but when writers wrote Old Welsh down (we have very little of it) they used more archaic, verb-first syntax, like Old Irish. Welsh outgrew this style eventually, but Cornish and Breton didn't.

Mac Cana has argued differently, taking the position that the 'Abnormal Order' in Middle Welsh is a purely literary fashion that was always foreign to the spoken language. He notes that not only Breton and Cornish but also the moribund dialects of the extreme south-east of Wales still use the abnormal order; he argues that this indicates there was a 'southern' dialect in Brythonic in which this ordering of sentence elements was allowed, whereas the 'northern' dialect kept the old VSO order. In the MW period, this 'southern' order became fashionable and gradually crept into literary Welsh as a stylistic device, but as it was never part of the spoken language (except in the extreme south-east) it eventually faded in the 1500s.

In other words, Koch thinks they *did* use the abnormal order in medieval speech, and Mac Cana thinks it was just a literary fashion. I find Mac Cana more convincing.

[Heron]

Oct 17, 2008 7:08:19 GMT -1 megli said:

Well, 'mi a welaf longeu' actually is the abnormal order because the subject is first + a + verb, it's just that they subject in this case is a pronoun (which is fine.)

Oh - I was taking 'mi' to be a preverbial particle as in modern Welsh 'Mi welais jac-y-do' rather than the pronoun. I suppose with 'Mi welais' or plain 'Gwelais' where the the pronoun is part of the inflected form of the verb it's difficult to say whether the verb or the subject comes first! (though in speech the pronoun is often added after the verb (Mi welais i ...). I suppose I should have been alerted by the particle 'a' that this was not the case.

It's an interesting question and there are several schools of thought....

In other words, Koch thinks they *did* use the abnormal order in medieval speech, and Mac Cana thinks it was just a literary fashion. I find Mac Cana more convincing.

'

Thanks for this summary. I think I must have come across Mac Cana's view somewhere as it sounds familar so I probably half-remembered it.






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