#Shw’mae fy enw i ydy Digori Grêfs

[crwbannwen]

So one way I keep Welsh (Cymraeg) alive in my brain is by translating Hello from the Hallowoods into Welsh. So far I’ve only been sticking to season 1 intros because actually doing the story would be quite the commitment and come with some complicated decisions.

But out of curiosity, I’d like some opinions on:

(If anyone is interested in more about Welsh and why I’m asking this, here’s my very very long ramblings below)

Welsh translations I’ve read often translate names which I’m not fussed on since it can change the intended ethnicity of a character and diminish diversity. The Welsh alphabet is different though (and we often translate names into the English alphabet, too), we don’t have ‘x’ ‘k’, ‘v’ or ‘z’. We have the sounds for ‘x’ ‘k’ and ‘v’ through ‘cs’ ‘c’ and ‘f’ (‘ff’ makes the english ‘f’ sound) but we don’t really have a ‘z’ (but we have ‘s’ which is the same just voiceless), it’s also very debated whether or not we have a ‘j’ (which makes the Wickers a frightening concept to translate). We had no ‘j’ sound so we added ‘j’ for loan words like ‘jiraf’ (giraffe). But some people think that’s us just tweaking our language to suit English. But quite frankly: if you speak welsh you know English well enough to know what the name ‘Kate’ is without making it spelt with a ‘c’. So the only names I’m planning to translate are object or verb ones like the mendes (and maybe the indies)

Some other questions I have: Like what type of ‘you’ should I use (it’s not always clear in english when someone is addressing a singular individual or multiple people or being polite or impolite, it actually makes English particularly effective for marketing)? Should I translate ‘Moth’ and moths pronouns to ‘Gwyfyn’ or keep it in English? Welsh doesn’t have a gender neutral object pronoun (we have a ‘they’ equivalent but no ‘it’ equivalent), so how should I refer to Creep? I’m not aware of any Neopronouns in Welsh, so what do I do then?

Here are welsh pronouns:

Female: hi / Ei + aspirate mutation

Male: e/fe/ef/o/fo/of / Ei + Soft Mutation.

(The many forms of ‘he’ come from dialect (o/e) and complicated rules about vowels (where the ‘f’ goes)).

They: nhw/eu (until the LGBT+ movement, I don’t know if ‘nhw’ was used for singular but it is now)

Objects are reffered to by their grammatical gender, welsh speakers rarely know grammatical gender (some people I’ve spoken to didn’t even know we had grammatical gender) so we just use masculine because the mutations are easier: so should Creep be changed to ‘nhw/ein’ to keep it gender neutral or to the grammatical gender of ‘amalgam of flesh and bone’?

There’s one cheat you can do with this, and that’s ‘mae’n’ is an abbreviation used for both ‘mae e’n’ and ‘mae hi’n’, (roughly means ‘it is’), but that means I’m heavily restricted to one tense and can’t talk about Creep in the past tense.

I could experiment and drop the pronoun, I suppose. Welsh is a pro-drop language. Dropping it in every tense and instance would be interesting at the very least. (Creep pronouns going to be: dim/diolch)

I was gonna delete all this but honestly? No, I enjoy ranting about the Welsh language, no one needs to read it if they don’t want to.