Talk:i

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Hello, Mahāgaja. Nine years ago, you deleted the page for the Welsh "conjugated" preposition iddof (the first-person singular form of i), giving the deletion reason "Created in error: no such word". Having used it my whole life, I was taken aback by this and went looking for evidence to prove that iddof exists. I found this prescription from 1883, but no uses as such. What I did find was a couple of documents pertaining to the WJEC GCSE Welsh language exam for the 2019–2020 academic year, which mark "iddof (f)i" as incorrect (, ). It seems, to my dismay, that I've been using a nonstandard colloquialism my whole life! That being said, I think this is evidence that iddof does exist, even if it isn't standard. Would you agree? If so, would you mind undeleting iddof, please? It could probably do with being tagged with {{lb|cy|nonstandard|_|colloquialism}}, too. 0DF (talk) 17:20, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

@0DF This is entirely up to you, but I dislike pairing “nonstandard” with “colloquial”, since it feels a bit superfluous while also being disparaging of colloquialisms. Theknightwho (talk) 17:45, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

I feel like prescriptive documents saying "don't do this" still don't count as uses. The Appendix Probi is useful for Vulgar Latin because it's otherwise so poorly attested, but Welsh has a pretty strong living speaker base, and even the colloquial register isn't hard to find in writing. Of course, final -f tends to disappear in colloquial Welsh, so perhaps it would be easier to find examples of people using iddo (f)i. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:53, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Google Books yielded two Welsh results for the string iddo fi without intervening punctuation, namely:

• “Pa beth bynag fydd clod ne anghlod y tesni a sugnis o’r tai nefol heno, nid ’iddo fi’r naill na’r llall.”

wherein ’iddo = eiddo (not iddo), and:

• “oedd ti ’di gweud iddo fi beth i neud.”

which the same source parses “was you perf say to+3sg I what to do” (small-caps mine) and translates “you had told me what to do.” This latter use is a transcription of a child's speech. The choice of how to parse and translate that speech would have been made by the author (Bob Morris Jones), not the child. Referring to Jones's conventions in his corpus examples and inferring from gweud that the child spoke in a South Welsh dialect, I reconstruct that child's sentence thus:

• /ˈoːið(ᵊ).ti.diˈɡwei.di.ðɔˈviːˈbeː.θiˈneid/

but it would be bizarre if I then respelt that:

• “oedd ti ’di gweu diddo fi be thi neud”

My point is that where to place word divisions is a matter of judgment; words aren't neatly divided at syllable boundaries. Jones chose to parse that child's i.ðɔ.viː as the ungrammatical “to+3sg I” (iddo fi), rather than as the grammatical “to+1sg I” (iddof i); I would dispute his interpretation. (Of course, wrth is the standard preposition for construing the indirect object of dweud, but that's neither here nor there.) 0DF (talk) 19:36, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Well, at the moment it doesn't look likely that anyone would run across it and want to know what it means. —Mahāgaja · talk 19:44, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Fair point. I'll keep an eye out for uses in print. I only need one, right? 0DF (talk) 20:05, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

For Welsh, yes. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:10, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

OK, thanks. 0DF (talk) 21:00, 28 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Hello again. I went looking for the rest of ap Emrys' forms of i (except the standard iddo, iddi, and iddynt, of course) and found one use each of iddot and iddoch, qq.v.
@Mahāgaja: Since you also deleted iddot and iddoch giving the reason "Created in error: no such word", would you be happy at this point to undelete those two entries, please?
@Theknightwho: I wouldn't say that "nonstandard" and "colloquial" are a redundant combination. There are many colloquialisms that are perfectly standard, but which simply wouldn't occur in writing (unless that writing intentionally represented speech, as in dialogue), although most colloquialisms are probably informal. In the case of iddot and iddoch, however, their contexts at least are nonstandard:
• “Mae hwn y peth mwyaf pwysig gofynnais iddot gwneud erioed.” → “Hwn yw’r peth pwysicaf y gofynnais iddot wneud erioed.”
• “Y mynedfa hyn rhôf iddoch I ofalu hyd yr oesoedd, Dros cynhedliadau dirifedi” → “Y fynedfa hon y rhof iddoch I ofalu drosti hyd yr oesoedd, Dros genedlaethau dirifedi”
Infer from that what you will.
0DF (talk) 22:36, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

I've restored iddot and iddoch. —Mahāgaja · talk 22:51, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply

Thank you kindly. My idiolectal usage actually differs slightly from the forms ap Emrys prescribed: I consistently use iddof and iddot, but I oscillate between iddom and iddym for the first-person plural and I only use iddych for the second-person plural. Accordingly, I may look into whether I can attest iddyf, iddyt, iddym, and iddych. 0DF (talk) 00:07, 31 December 2023 (UTC)Reply