Talk:iddych

Discussion regarding conjugated forms of the Welsh preposition i

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iddof

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 ([1], [2]). 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)

@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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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)

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

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)

How should we label this form?

@Mahagaja, Theknightwho: Further to our recent conversation, I was able to attest the form iddych, as you can see from the four quotations at Citations:iddych. Accordingly, I created an entry for it. At the moment, it just has the pronunciation and grammatical gloss. Do you think it also needs one or more labels (cf. iddoch)? If so, which? The uses in the quotations I gathered do not have nonstandard contexts, unlike those of iddot and iddoch. As for a {{lb|cy|colloquial}} tag, I don't know. Thoughts? 0DF (talk) 15:42, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Everything on the citations page is from the 19th century, so maybe "dated" or "obsolete"? If it's still used nowadays, then maybe "nonstandard" as well. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:46, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: Well, I still use it, FWIW. I'm sure it sometimes comes across as a bit formal or old-fashioned when I use it in text messages and personal emails, but its meaning is transparent to anyone familiar with conjugated prepositions. That may suggest "dated", but not "obsolete". As for "nonstandard", it's hard to say: Was it nonstandard then, or just now? What makes it nonstandard? 0DF (talk) 16:24, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

I'd say what makes them nonstandard is that the reference grammars (John Morris Jones's A Welsh Grammar for Middle and early modern Welsh, David A. Thorne's A Comprehensive Welsh Grammar for the literary language, Gareth King's Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar for the modern colloquial language, to name three sitting on my bookshelf) make no mention of them, even though all three aim to be descriptive rather than prescriptive grammars. Another option instead of or in addition to "dated" and "obsolete" would be "rare", considering the difficulty you're having finding examples of use of some of them. —Mahāgaja · talk 18:08, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Mahagaja: {{lb|cy|rare}} seems fitting, or at least {{lb|cy|relatively|_|rare}}, with the implication that it's rare relative to the frequency of iddynt. 0DF (talk) 19:47, 2 January 2024 (UTC)