This is quite a neat, "fun" sort of thing ...... it's educational as well.. and you can do it in two different directions which is always fun in most aspects of life (?). To get started, you need a Welsh sentence ... luckily I have a few handy so we can get started ....
Mae llawer o bobol yn siarad Saesneg yn Abergwaun.
Now, we're going to try to strip away this sentence right down to a single word ... BUT .... we can only remove 1,2 or 3 consecutive words at a time .... and after each "go" whatever is left must still make some sort of sense.....
OK .....I could start in several different ways, but I'm going to remove " yn Abergwaun" first .. that leaves the very sensible sentence ..
Mae llawer o bobol yn siarad Saesneg
Notice especially that there were loads of things I couldn't do because it has to make sense ... so I couldn't have removed just "bobol" or " Mae llawer" for example... you need to know what each word in the sentence is doing before you can start mucking about with it .
I have choices at the next stage as well.... but I think I will get shut of "Saesneg" to leave me with the perfectly sensible ..
Mae llawer o bobol yn siarad.
Next I'll get rid of " yn siarad" ...... that leaves ..
Mae llawer o bobol
We're nearly there ... but there are "issues" .... suppose I decide to remove " mae llawer o" to leave the single word "bobol." Bobol isn't really a stand-alone word .. it's pobol, but the preceding "o" has s-m'd it. I think it's OK to un-SM it, because otherwise there would be difficulties with probably a majority of Welsh sentences ... but the next issue is, "pobol" isn't a sentence ! so how can it "make sense?" Well, if you stuck to that rule, you could never get any sentence down to a single word. But you could sensibly use the single word "pobol" to a question such as " What are we?" or " What has made this terrible mess?" or " tell me a Welsh noun which is susceptible to soft mutation."
So, we have finished up with Pobol as our stripped-down meaningful single word. I said at the start that this was educational, in the sense that it takes a bit of thinking about, you need to identify the function of each word in the sentence for a start.
I also said at the start that you can do this in reverse ... that's a rather more creative and imaginative project .... it's generally known as "expanding headlines" or similar ... you start with a single word ( or a short newspaper headline) and gradually build it up into some sort of little story...... you get some fantastic stuff if several people do it from the same starter!
Headlines, by the way, are fascinating in their own right, and I'm sure to be writing about them sometime, if I live that long.
But, I've written enough for now, so here's the long-awaited music, it's a lovely Cerys Matthews song, or a sort of quiet, contemplative rap (!) ..... this is a words video by the way so you double your fun .... it's called I Drive, Adref and it's from Paid Edrych i Lawr .....