Emily Stout and Dr. Ronald Dennis, Spanish and Portuguese
The purpose of my project was to help create a website which could aid people in learning the Welsh language. Language resources for Welsh are difficult to find in most places, and generally restricted to a book and tape set. These sets have some positive effect, but learning the language would be facilitated by the use of videos. My initial role in the project was to videotape fluent Welsh speakers, mostly native speakers, speaking in Welsh. In order to do this, I traveled to Wales and enrolled in an eight-week intensive Welsh course in Lampeter, in South Wales. This was necessary because there are very few Welsh speakers, especially native speakers, outside Wales.
Attending the Lampeter course turned out to be important for more reasons than the original one, which was to find speakers for video taping and make other contacts. The main reason it was important is that my skill in the language improved dramatically. If I had not gone to the Lampeter course, I could not have done the transcription and translation work that was a later part of the project. Since my mentor, Ronald Dennis, was able to find a graduate student willing, and far more qualified than I, to do the camera work, this was actually a major benefit of the course. Though I knew the very basics from taking the Welsh classes at BYU, what I learned before going to Wales helped me more with pronunciation and having ready examples of the grammar I learned in Lampeter.
Some of the subjects in the videos were tutors from the Lampeter course, others were members of wards or branches in the area, and others were students from the nearby Aberystwyth University. The Welsh course was also beneficial in helping me gain a better appreciation of the Welsh language and culture, and a stronger determination to help others learn the language.
The real work began when I came back to BYU for Fall semester, however. The six videos needed to be watched and to have logs made of them, telling what was on each tape and what the contents could be used for. Working with the tapes was made significantly easier through the help of the people at the Instructional Technology Center in B34. After that, appropriate segments needed to be isolated and what the subjects of the clips said needed to be transcribed. Transcription is the hardest work of the process, as it involves playing the clips over and over until one has what they’re saying in Welsh. Translation is comparatively easy, because with a decent grasp on the language, one just needs a good Welsh-English dictionary and a copy of the transcription.
Once the transcription and translation work was done, it was necessary to put the clips and their accompanying text on the Internet. The people at B34 came to the rescue again, kindly allowing use of the template they used for their Swahili project, and showing how it worked. The Humanities Learning Resource Center allowed use of their website, and the clips as far as they have been completed can be seen at http://hlrc.byu.edu/welsh/welsh(frames).html.
There is plenty more work to be done on this project. At the moment, I am working on transcriptions and translations for two more video clips, and have footnotes (see next page) for Islwyn’s Joke, explaining grammar and idiomatic expressions used in the clip. The footnotes will be added as soon as we know how to make links work with the code, and we plan to do the same for each of the other clips as well. Now that we’ve done some of the work, we have a better idea of what to do with and for the rest.
Islwyn’s Joke: Welsh with Grammatical Footnotes
Islwyn:
Roedd na ddau1 ddyn yn cwrdd eu gilydd yn Llambed un diwrnod, a Jac oedd enw dyn cynta’
‘ma. Ac mae e’n gweud2 wrth Wil, ‘Wel, Wil,’ meddai Jac, ‘Mae’n ddrwg gen i glywed fod ti wedi colli dwy3 wraig yn ddiweddar4.’
‘Do,’ meddai Wil. “Dw i wedi colli dwy wraig. A dw i’n teimlo yn eitha drist, on’d do fe5. Ond nawr fe, mae bywyd yn dal i fynd yn y flaen.’
‘Wel, meddai’r gwr6 cynta’7, ‘Sut colliaist ti 8ddwy wraig mewn flywyddyn?’
‘Wel,’ meddai e, ‘Fe9 gollais i’r wraig gynta’ o wenwin bwyd.’
‘Wel, wel!’
‘Do. Fe fytodd hi gawl cyw iar.’
‘Wel, wel!’
‘Do, a fe fuodd hi farw10 o yfed cawl cyw iâr.’
‘Wel, gweith o fi11 ‘te, sut colliaist ti’r ail wraig?’
‘Wel, fe fuodd hi farw o ei wedi cael ergyd ar ei phen.’
‘A sut cath hi ergyd ar ei phen?’
‘Wel, roedd honno gwrthod byta’r cyw iâr.’
(Mae hi’n chwerthin)
Islwyn: Ie, a ti’n oes rhywun i chwerthin am honna.
1 ‘Dau’ is the masculine form of ‘two’. See how it causes soft mutation in the next word, ‘dyn’.
2 ‘Gweud’ is an alternate form of ‘dweud’.
3 ‘Dwy’ is the feminine form of ‘two’. See how it causes soft mutation in the next word, ‘gwraig’.
4 ‘Yn ddiweddar’ (lately) looks and sounds similar to ‘o’r diwedd’ (finally). Be careful of which one you use. For instance, if Jac used ‘o’r diwedd’ in this case, he would be congratulating Wil on getting rid of those meddlesome women at last. This is not the case, or at least we hope it isn’t.
5 Ah, the infamous ‘innit.’ We use ‘isn’t it’ and ‘didn’t you’ in conversation, but some people in Wales and Britain use ‘innit’ as an automatic phrase just tacked on the end of a sentence. In Welsh you sometimes hear ‘on’d ydy e’ and ‘on’d yw e’ used this way.
6 ‘Gwr’ is another word for ‘dyn’ (man).
7 Some words in Welsh end in ‘f,’ which is often dropped in conversation. ‘Cyntaf’ and ‘tref’ are both examples of this.
8 Remember that the short form past tense causes soft mutation after it.
9 ‘Fe’ is the affirmative marker. It causes soft mutation in the verbs after it. ‘Fe golliais i’ can also be said ‘colliais i’. It is not necessary to use the affirmative marker.
10 ‘Marw’ does not conjugate or decline on its own, but must be used with a form of ‘bod’.
11 ‘Gweith o fi’ is an idiomatic phrase, the meaning of which I am yet unsure since I don’t own a dictionary of Welsh idioms.