Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Warning: scattered amidst the daffodils, substantial allusions to some technical linguistics)

From John Wells, a greeting for the day, March 1st:

(#1) Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus! ‘Happy St David’s Day!’ (word by word: ‘Day Festival Davy happy’)

(Note on spelling and pronunciation: the spelling DD represents the voiced fricative /ð/, while the spelling D represents the stop /d/; the spelling Ŵ represents a long vowel, while the spelling W represents a consonant or a vowel, depending on context (see John Wells’s comment below); the spellings Y and U represent a high unrounded vowel — back ɨ or front ɪ, depending on your dialect.)

(Yes, hapus — seen also in Penblwydd hapus i chi! ‘Happy birthday to you! — is a borrowing from English.)

On the day, see my 3/2/15 posting “St. David’s Day”, on:

Saint David, patron saint of Wales. Land of the leek and the daffodil and the Red Dragon national flag (see my 3/1/12 posting “Take a leek” for some discussion of these symbols).

With an image of Fluellen and his leek:

(#2)

On the nickname Dewi, from Wikipedia:

Dewi is an alternate or diminutive form of the Welsh masculine given name Dafydd (“David”) [anglicized as the slur name Taffy for a stereotypical Welshman]. It is most famously borne by the patron saint of Wales, Saint David (Welsh: Dewi Sant).

And now the descent into some of the technicalities, from a language lesson on the BBC Wales website:

This week it’s St David’s Day – Dydd Gŵyl Dewi. But sometimes you will hear people saying Dydd Gŵyl Ddewi, where they mutate the name Dewi. In fact, both versions are correct – the first version Dydd Gŵyl Dewi refers to the fact that it is the festival of Dewi –

Gŵyl pwy? – whose festival
Gŵyl Dewi – Dewi’s festival of course!

The second version – Gŵyl Ddewi – describes the actual festival rather than explain whose it is [that is, it picks out a particular type of festival] and could be loosely translated as ‘the Dewi festival’. Gŵyl is a [feminine-gender] word, so any adjective [modifying] it would have to take a soft mutation [a systematic morphophonological alternation affecting the initial segments of words in connected speech] –

gŵyl dda – A good festival [da ‘good’]
gŵyl ddiflas – A boring festival [diflas ‘boring, tasteless’]
Gŵyl Ddewi! – Well – a David festival!

We all know that Dydd Gŵyl Dewi falls on March the 1st. But in the same way that we can say in English either March the first or the 1st of March we can say in Welsh – Mawrth y cyntaf or y Cyntaf o Fawrth. Of course if you use the second pattern – y Cyntaf o Fawrth – you must remember to mutate the [name of the] month after the preposition ‘o’. So Mawrth becomes Fawrth [the spelling F represents a /v/].

Further technicality, inserted into my nostalgic 2/16/19 posting “President’s Day weekend in Berkeley”:

A significant part of [“The general case: basic form versus default form” (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1986)] was taken up with what I call shape alternations in [morpho]phonology (largely in connection with Welsh mutations) … Here’s a brief post-1986 statement, from my “Some choices in the theory of morphology” (Levine, Formal Grammar, 1992), where it follows a lengthy and intricate discussion of (inflectional) forms of lexemes [at this point there comes a reproduced passage on shape alternations, as in English a ~ an for the indefinite article] — “related to what has been labeled, in other contexts, external sandhi, phrase phonology, postlexical phonology, and precompiled lexical phonology, inter alia”]

Now go out and smell the daffodils (perhaps in the snow).

(#3)

This entry was posted on March 1, 2019 at 5:59 am and is filed under Holidays, Language and plants, Morphophonology, Nicknames, Spelling, Welsh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.