# Welsh: emphatic "how"



## Gavril

Hello,

One way of translating emphatic "how" (as in, _How funny!, How awful!, _etc.) in Welsh is to use the equative form of an adjective. For example, _gloyw _"bright" has the equative _gloywed, _as seen in _cyn loywed a'r haul _"as bright as the sun", and the same equative form is seen in the sentence _Gloywed y ser! _"How bright the stars are" / "The stars are so bright".

Some adjectives have irregular forms of the equative: _cystal_ is the equative of _da _"good" and _cymaint _is the equative of _mawr _"large". Here, the element _cyn, _which means "as" in an equative phrase (_cyn loyw a _"as bright as"), has been incorporated as part of the adjective, so you would say _cystal a _to mean "as good as" and _cymaint a _to mean "as big as" -- it would be redundant to include the separate word _cyn_ at the beginning of the phrase.

However, since emphatic expressions such as _Gloywed y ser _use the simple equative form, without any preceding element such as _cyn_, how would this pattern be generalized to forms such as _cystal _and _cymaint_, where _cyn _is a part of the word itself? In other words, how would you normally say, "How good ...!", "How big ...!" and so on in Welsh?

Diolwch!


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## Auflauf

Hi,

I'm afraid I can't really talk in detail about grammar, but I'll try giving you some native-speaker input. Regarding _cymaint a_, it is also correct to say _cyn fawred __â_ (=as big as) or more colloquially: _mor fawr â_. _Cymaint_ means "as much/so many" and would be more readily understood as such nowadays. (_Mae gen i gymaint o broblemau_ = I have so many problems; _Does ganddo fe ddim cymaint o arian â mi_ = He hasn't got as much money as me) 

All of the examples you've given are pretty old-fashioned, and I've rarely if ever encountered them in the spoken language. The usual construction in modern Welsh would be to say _mor X â_... (literally "so X as"): _mor fawr â_, _mor loyw __â_.

To answer your question: _Gloywed y sêr_ sounds like an imperative to me: "May the stars shine!". I would translate that as _Mor loyw yw'r s__êr!_ ="How bright are the stars!" On the same pattern, you can for example say _Mor dda yw'r bwyd! _(=How good the food is!), _Mor fawr yw'r ci!_ (=How big the dog is!) and so forth. Such stand-alone exclamations still sound quite poetic though, not particularly something you'd use everyday. For something like _how funny!_ _how awful! how shocking! _where you just have an adjective to deal with, _am ddoniol!, am erchyll!_, _am warthus! _would do the trick. You can't use _am_ in a comparative context though.

Oh wow, I don't think that made much sense.  Hope it helped though!


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## Gavril

Very informative, thanks. (I'm still curious about the original question, though I understand that it's difficult to answer in the context of modern-day Welsh.)

I'm always surprised at how quickly Welsh seems to be changing. I used several different grammar books when I studied Welsh, but I don't recall any of them teaching the construction you mention above with _am _(_am erchyll, _etc.) -- do you know if this construction is regional, or is it considered standard in modern spoken Welsh?


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## Cian87

I'm afraid I can't help with the original question in the same very literary register as your context, but the _am_ construction is what you would usually hear in spoken Welsh all over Wales. It's more versatile than just _how funny_ etc.; you would also use it to say _what a..._ e.g. _am ardd!_ (what a garden!), _am dafliad!_ (what a throw), _am ffordd o ddangos ei gariad!_ (what a way to show his love!) This last one especially could be also be used sarcastically, to show contempt (very similarly to in English).

Hope that's some help!


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