Oh, whoops. See, I didn't know what mae was. (In fact, I still don't.) But if verb-nouns aren't counted as verbs in the word order, what are they counted as? White space? Adverbs?

????? Location-dependent? Why?? What for? Does "the fat cat was sleeping on the mat" mean different things in different dialects of English? I know Google loves to mine information about where you are, but what's that got to do with translations?

So if I tried to translate the same sentence a few months later, it would come out differently?

I'll try this again. Here's another sentence I got hold of: Yr arth dringo dros y bryn. (The bear climbed over the mountain.) This looks to me like SVO, but it's eminently possible I've read it wrong again.

True enough, but it's all I know about. I suppose I could dig around on Catchphrase for the better part of a day, but I'm not certain they have a translator.

That's correct. What you're referring to is sometimes called the "Celtic genitive construction" and, if my book on this is right, the same thing was done in Old French. (Not that that last matters.)

It's a form of the verb "to be". The most common single form, in fact.


From a grammatical point of view, they're nouns.

Terms like "VSO" and "SVO" are gross oversimplifications. The "V" gives the location of the conjugated verb. So German is considered SVO even though the word in second position is often an auxiliary and the main verb comes last, e.g. "Sie hat ihn gesehen". Hat is the third-person singular present tense form of haben "have", so this is the equivalent of saying "She has him seen" (a word order which was once possible in English as well).

The Welsh equivalent of this sentence is Mae hi wedi ei weld (lit. "Is she after his seeing"). Mae, the conjugated verb, comes first. Next is the subject, then a linking particle, then the object. The action is expressed by means of a verb-noun. You can see it's a noun by the fact that the logical object is treated as the possessor. "His seeing" = "the seeing of him" = "seeing him". So the basic order is considered to be V (mae) S (hi) O (ei). The presence of gweld is irrelevant.


What you have there isn't a complete sentence in Welsh. Dringo is a verb-noun, not a verb. To make it a full sentence, you need to add one. For instance, the auxiliary naeth "did":

Naeth yr arth ddringo dros y bryn. "The bear climbed over the hill."


Or you could, you know, actually learn the language. And of course you could always ask someone who speaks it (like me, Simon, or YngNghymru).


Thanks! You don't know how much your validation means to me.

I see.

So they're just ordinary nouns? Interesting.

Oh, dear. I didn't know there were so many auxiliaries all the time. That explains why I was misreading the sentences.

So what GT did wasn't SVO, it was just missing the auxiliary. And it thought a mountain was really a hill.

I could, and I may well. What you don't seem to understand is that you can use a translator program to learn a language, provided that it's good enough, and this is kind of what I had in mind initially. Maybe not the best method, but it could work.

I really don't need your sarcasm. What I originally wanted to say seemed too rude to me, hence my choice of words. The point was that you explained something I already knew.

(I'm done here now.)

I'm not going to speculate on where exactly GT went wrong in its translation. That's just one possible way to fix the sentence. I tend not to use gwneud as an auxiliary, so a more natural thing for me to say is: Fe ddringodd yr arth dros y mynydd. (Fe is an affirmative particle, dringodd is a simple past inflected form.)


Do you know anyone who has learned a language this way?

[/quote]
If you already knew it was a genitive construction, then why were you confused by my explanation?

No, but according to your logic I have to in order to make a valid claim about it. It's only logical that one should be able to learn a language just from exposure to enough different sentences of it. That's essentially how the elders used to teach Cree, and from what I've heard, that approach worked far better than "traditional" classroom lessons. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the precise article on Wawatay News, so I'm not going to post it here.

I wasn't. I'm sorry I gave that impression.

That's not "my logic". That's empiricism--the basis for all scientific thought.


That seems like a recipe for acquiring passive knowledge of a language, but we don't usually describe people as having "learned a language" unless they also have an active command of it. This means forming your own sentences and using them to communicate with other speakers. How will this method make it possible for you to do that?


Maybe you're talking about immersion? In any case, face-to-face interaction with fluent speakers is miles away from simply running sentences through an automatic translation programme.

All right, it's that too. Good enough. I will hold my peace.

If you acquire enough passive knowledge, you end up with enough information to put together your own sentences. At least, that's what I've reasoned out. You obviously haven't arrived at the same conclusion.

I wouldn't exactly describe it that way. Here's an example: you pick up a cup and say "the cup", then "my cup". Then you raise it to your lips and say "I drink from this cup" or something along those lines. Etc., etc. I suppose that's a form of immersion, but it's like calling Welsh a VSO language -- too simplistic (or maybe too generalistic).

I know. However, it's not like I can put up an announcement for a fluent Welsh speaker where I live and just find one. I suppose I could find somebody on Skype if I tried hard enough, but I don't see that happening any time soon. I could also check out an embassy, but I don't want to pester them and I wouldn't know what to say or do. (No, this isn't your cue to give me advice, either. Not every "I don't know" is a request to be told.)
I'm truly sorry I started this thread. It's getting no one anywhere, and the idea was fundamentally flawed to begin with.

I've reached my conclusion on the basis of having a solid passive knowledge of several languages which I cannot hold an effective conversation in. I've read a novel in Swedish, for instance, but my one attempt to chat in Swedish IRL was an utter failure. I literally couldn't answer the simplest questions.


That is what is known as the direct method.


Have you tried? You might be surprised; Welsh-speakers don't generally advertise themselves.


What idea? The idea of trying to acquire a new language and looking here for help? It's a fine idea. But Google Translate is a badly-flawed tool for language instruction. Take another look at those other resources I sent you links to and just see if one of them wouldn't be more effective.

ひらがながわかる, でもかたかなとかんじとわからない.
hiragana ga wakaru, demo katakana to kanji to wakaranai.
ぼくのにほんごはよくないだ: べんきょうしています.
boku no nihongo wa yokunai da: benkyou shite imasu.

(Because I don't know Japanese, and Google Translate is all I've got on hand as a translator, I'll just assume I'm replying to this: "Hiragana is known, but do not know and feel and Katakana. I'm not good in Japanese: I have been studying.")
I'm not good in Japanese either (read: I don't know more than diddly) and I don't know any of its writing systems beyond the の character. I haven't been studying it, but I have looked a bit at the Japanese book we've got lying around. If you want to talk to someone who actually knows Japanese, I'd suggest talking to gnunix. That is, unless I decide I'd rather fiddle with Japanese than Welsh, in which case you can talk to me as well (in Japanese) and I might be able to reply in the same language. Don't expect me to say a whole lot that isn't about magazines, dragons or Mr. Tanaka, though.