Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 September 29

= September 29 =

Welsh translation
In Dame Margaret - The Life Story of His Mother. Richard Lloyd George quotes the following lines - Y fraich fu'n hollti'r môr, Sy' 'nawr yn dal y gwan. C. E. Could anyone help with a translation? Google translate suggests "The shovel was gutting the sea, Now holds the weak", which is perhaps not entirely correct. Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 21:58, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I think it's from a hymn by Baptist Minister Christmas Evans (1766 - 1838) (usually sung to Carmel, Claudia or Louvain). This source, suggests:

The arm which divided the sea, Is now holding the weak.
 * Martinevans123 (talk) 22:09, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Many thanks, that would make perfect sense in the context. DuncanHill (talk) 22:28, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
 * If you're feeling very keen, here's the conjugation for the verb hollti ("to split"): . Martinevans123 (talk) 11:37, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Blimey! DuncanHill (talk) 14:56, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * That explains a lot. I have a friend who is a native Welsh speaker but always takes notes in English because he says it's easier to translate than to write in Welsh! -- Q Chris (talk) 15:55, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * They have an obscure counting system too - Richard Lloyd George, a native Welsh speaker, said he never quite got the hang of it. DuncanHill (talk) 15:59, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * It's really not much worse than the French one. The one that you've really got to watch out for is the Welsh version of Yan Tan Tethera! Martinevans123 (talk) 16:15, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Danish counting is a pig too, made even harder by them using different words for numbers on banknotes to those used in everything else. DuncanHill (talk) 16:17, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Don't worry, Theresa says we'll soon have a wonderful deal. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:24, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * There is a modern decimal counting system in Welsh - see our Welsh numerals article - which can be used instead of the traditional vigesimal system. I haven't been able to find out when this was introduced, but Count Us In: How to Make Maths Real for All of Us (Ch, 6) by Gareth Roberts suggests that it was connected with the introduction of Welsh-language-medium schools in the 1940s and 1950s. He also points to "threescore years and ten" as evidence of vigesimal use in English. Alansplodge (talk) 17:23, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Further down the same chapter quoted above, it says that the Welsh decimal counting system was devised by 19th-century Patagonian Welsh businessmen in Argentina. It was recommended for use there in the first Welsh language secondary schools by Richard Jones Berwyn in a book published in 1878. I will add this to our article - a question on the talk page about the origins of the system has gone unanswered since 2012. Alansplodge (talk) 17:53, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Well done Alan. Could have been worse, I guess. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:02, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * My friend had a daughter Glenys (who sadly died in childbirth later, though her daughter was saved) who used to read beautifully from the Welsh New Testament, though she admitted that she had no idea what the words meant. 86.131.233.235 (talk) 16:07, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Alas, I suspect that may be true of many English people reading from the English New Testament. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:11, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Happy birthday, Theresa. 2A00:23C0:7F00:C401:8146:108A:8AB1:1E5C (talk) 10:36, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

hurdles to numeracy
Speaking of difficult number systems, I heard once that in Hindi the number-terms up to 99 have been so altered by context-dependent sound-shifts that they have to be learned separately, you can't simply concatenate the word for 30 with the word for 8 (just as in English you can't concatenate 10 and 5). Is there any truth in that? —Tamfang (talk) 05:11, 1 October 2018 (UTC)


 * What makes anyone think English is easy and logical? Where is the logic in the 'thir" part of "thirty"? Not to mention "twen", "for" (without the "u"), and "fif". It gets a bit better after that. HiLo48 (talk) 23:46, 1 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Here's where "twenty", "thirty", "forty" and "fifty" came from. Basically, the culprit is Old English. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:19, 2 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Anyway, English decade names may not be "logical", but the names of numbers from 20 to 99 in English are predictable -- the decade word ("twenty" through "ninety") plus an optional following singletons word ("one" through "nine"). The claim is that Hindi names of numbers are not so predictable... AnonMoos (talk) 08:57, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
 * That's it, thank you. —Tamfang (talk) 00:01, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
 * See Hindustani numerals.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:34, 5 October 2018 (UTC)