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- "Ysgrifennodd Saunders Lewis …
"Ysgrifennodd Saunders Lewis 'Tynged Yr Iaith'."
Translation:Saunders Lewis wrote 'The Fate of the Language'.
19 Comments
I thought that "The Destiny of the Language" would be allowed, but apparently not.
968
Tynged y Iaith was a famous radio broadcast by Saunders Lewis that woke people up to the danger that Welsh could become extinct. It led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, and looms large in the consciousness of Welsh language activists. Something Duolingo's Welsh language team were unlikely to leave out of this section.
'Fate of the language ' was refused. It's a literal translation: why is it wrong?
The word-for-word translation would be "fate the language" -- there's no word meaning "of" in there.
But English doesn't do this kind of possessive relationship by simply juxtaposing words in this order (thing possessed and then owner) -- if anything, we put the owner first as in "language fate" which is fate that belongs to language rather than being the language of fate.
So to translate that noun-noun construction to English, you can in your mind add a "the" before the first word and an "of" after it, to get "the fate of the language".
Did you include the single quotes around - 'Tynged yr Iaith' - ? Sometimes Duo seems to insist on the punctuation, sometimes not.
- 1570
I'm getting dinged on capitalizing Laith. It's not telling me I'm wrong, but just that I spelled it incorrectly.
Yes. That's because it is not clear from the type face that it is and initial i not and L.
The small L should have a little curl at the bottom while the capital i is completely straight.
At least that is so in the font they use on the website.
Compare: l I l I
Outside Wales, this is really obscure, so how can we be expected to spell everything correctly in a "revision" ("strengthening") session in this sentence if we've never come across it before? Sorry, but this is not a good sentence to have for Duolingo, IMHO
(for clarity - it was an audio dictation where it was first presented, not a written translation)
Why is "Fate of the Language" wrong? I see no word for "the" in front of "Tynged". This is really an incredibly difficult section to get right!
There is no word for "of", either :)
The definiteness as well as the possessive relationship comes from the construction with two nouns next to each other. Adding yr or the like before tynged would even be wrong in Welsh.
Pobol y Cwm (literally, "people - the - valley") means "the people of the valley"; cŵn Sioned ("dogs - Sioned") means "the dogs of Sioned = Sioned's dogs); and cwb ci ("kennel - dog") means "the kennel of a dog = a dog kennel, a doghouse).
Thank you for your explanation and examples. My problem is, I am a long, long way from thinking in Welsh - and this is an example of where thinking in English gets you nowhere at all!
Yes, English doesn't help much with this :) What helped me was having learned Cornish first, which also has this kind of noun-noun construction (unsurprisingly, as the languages are closely related), and doing drills on things like lost an ki "the tail of the dog = the dog's tail".
