The future direction of Welsh???

[alice]

I noticed this bilingual description of a programme on S4C in my EPG:

<names of presenters> sy'n crwydro tref lan mor Fictorianaidd Llandudno y tro ma. <names of presenters> explore the VIctorian town of Llandudno this time.

Now my Welsh is not up to much, but I do know that (1) Welsh is typically VSO, (2) sy is a special relative form of "to be", and (3) this looks like it should be Mae(n) <names of presenters> yn crwydro.... Which, then, of the following is true?

• alice is not down with contemporary Welsh culture and does not understand that under the influence of English this has become an unremarkable idiom.

• alice is quite correct and has noticed a lazy translation by an ignorant Saesneg or Saesnes.

• alice has not considered a third possibility.

[missals]

I have no expertise in Welsh, but on the linguistics subreddit I've seen some discussions among Celticists expressing concern that Welsh, despite its relative vitality, is starting to suffer from the same disease that's afflicting Irish; that is, English-native learners of Welsh, who never fully acquire Welsh phonetics, syntax, and idiom, are becoming so influential (and are producing so much media in Welsh) that A) There is no longer significant pressure for them to imitate native models, and B) Their output is affecting the variety of native Welsh speakers and what they perceive to be the prestige variety in Welsh.

Irish is in this situation, but to a much more extreme, terminal degree, in which almost all written and spoken Irish (including hundreds of thousands of pages of translations and most Irish-language media) is "English in Irish drag", bearing little resemblance to traditional Irish, produced by people who incompletely acquired Irish in an educational setting - and apparently this has even affected the Irish of ostensible Irish-native children in gaeltacht areas, who imitate the English-inflected Irish of their English-dominant peers, as it is perceived as prestigious, being associated with national media and more economically prosperous areas of the country.

[Linguoboy]

I noticed this bilingual description of a programme on S4C in my EPG:

<names of presenters> sy'n crwydro tref lan mor Fictorianaidd Llandudno y tro ma. <names of presenters> explore the VIctorian town of Llandudno this time.

Now my Welsh is not up to much, but I do know that (1) Welsh is typically VSO, (2) sy is a special relative form of "to be", and (3) this looks like it should be Mae(n) <names of presenters> yn crwydro.... Which, then, of the following is true?

Mae <names of presenters> yn crwydro. (Maen is only ever used when nhw immediately follows.)

• alice is not down with contemporary Welsh culture and does not understand that under the influence of English this has become an unremarkable idiom.

• alice is quite correct and has noticed a lazy translation by an ignorant Saesneg or Saesnes.

• alice has not considered a third possibility.

I don't know that you can say this is English influence. Focused sentences with sy are an unremarkable part of Welsh grammar and have been for centuries. (Sy(dd) is used in some relative constructions but that's not its sole use by any means[*].) Is it the same presenters every time or do the personalities vary from show to show?

[*] For more on the use of sy(dd), see the chapter on wh-constructions here: http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/12 ... 30.pdf.pdf.

[Ketsuban]

The description for this week's episode (Llandysul) calls them [y]r criw "the gang" so I'm guessing they're a regular cast.

[Linguoboy]

The description for this week's episode (Llandysul) calls them [y]r criw "the gang" so I'm guessing they're a regular cast.

Heledd Cynwal also presents other S4C shows (such as Côr Cymru) so leading off with her might be intended to get the attention of would-be viewers who know her other work. Perusing the descriptions, I found another one that begins with this same construction:

Cas-gwent sydd dan sylw y tro hwn wrth i griw Cynefin deithio i dde-ddwyrain Cymru i ddarganfod cyfrinachau'r dref hon ar lannau'r Hafren.

("It's Chepstow that's under consideration this time by the Cynefin crew travelling to the southeast of Wales to discover the secrets of this town on the banks of the Severn.")

Obviously it makes a little more sense to put focus on the locale, which changes every episode, rather than the cast, which seems to be pretty consistent. But again there's nothing particularly odd in English about saying "It's Heledd, Iestyn, Ffion a Siôn who are wandering the Victorian seaside town of Lladudno this time", is there?

[KathTheDragon]

That makes me think more that the cast changes every time, and the location stays fixed. In particular, that the audience already knows what the location is, but does not know who the cast is.

[Creyeditor]

I don't know about Welsh but the English construction "It's X, who is/are ..." on television confused me when I was in the UK because I couldn't identify topic and focus and couldn't think of a corresponding construction in German.

[alice]

It looks like the answer is number 3: alice's Welsh is lacking.

[Linguoboy]

I don't know about Welsh but the English construction "It's X, who is/are ..." on television confused me when I was in the UK because I couldn't identify topic and focus and couldn't think of a corresponding construction in German.

Isn't it the case that German has cleft constructions too?

(The Welsh construction isn't identical to an English cleft but it serves a similar function.)

[WeepingElf]

I don't know about Welsh but the English construction "It's X, who is/are ..." on television confused me when I was in the UK because I couldn't identify topic and focus and couldn't think of a corresponding construction in German.

Isn't it the case that German has cleft constructions too?

It is!

[hwhatting]

I don't know about Welsh but the English construction "It's X, who is/are ..." on television confused me when I was in the UK because I couldn't identify topic and focus and couldn't think of a corresponding construction in German.

Isn't it the case that German has cleft constructions too?

It is!

Yes, but they work differently from English. Doing it the English way looks clumsy in German, which prefers those little function words like denn, nämlich, gerade, eben, genau etc. for setting the focus:
It's Peter and Paul who'll host the show tonight.
(*)Es sind Peter und Paul, die heute die Show moderieren. - Grammatical, but clumsy, and over-the-top; you would expect that only after some kind of leading question (Wer sind die beiden da? Wer steht da auf der Bühne?)
The natural way would using particles, or word order putting the hosts at the end of the sentence:
Heute moderieren nämlich Peter und Paul die Show.
Die Show moderieren heute Peter und Paul.

[Creyeditor]

Better late than never and sorry for derailing the thread any further but I thought I'd clarify what I meant. I think the concrete construction was sonething like:

Next up, it's John and Mary (who are) looking for the best bread in the UK.

My problem was not really the cleft itself. As HW pointed out, you can do clefts in German, even though they are rare. The problem is the information structure, i.e. I would expect 'John and Mary' in the above to be either a topic (i.e. pre-mentioned in the context) or a focus (i.e. contrasting with something or answering some important question in the discourse). Neither of these seems to be true. These sentences usually are out of the blue, with only 'next up' linking them to the previous 'discourse'. And that's also the question answered, i.e. 'what's up next?'. So the rest of the sentence should be in focus. That's why I would express the sentence in German with a fronted ('topicalized') als nächstes 'next up'. So something like this.

Als nächstes suchen Jan und Marie nach dem besten Brot in Deutschland.
as next search John and Mary after the best bread in Germany

I would never expect to use a cleft of part of the focus material in this context.

#Als nächstes sind es Jan und Marie, die nach dem besten Brot in Deutschland suchen.
as next are it John and Mary REL after the best bread in Germany search

As mentioned by HW this would work in other conexts, e.g. if there is a list of couples who are looking for the best bread one after the other and therefore "Jan und Marie" would get focus.

Going back to the original question. Maybe English influence led to this construction occuring in a wider variety of contexts in Welsh?