For many of us in the "World of learning Welsh" most of our learning comes through reading. And when you read Welsh there is a tendency to take more notice of those longer words like archfarchnad and gwasanaeth and unffurfiaeth , and skip by all that awkward dinky frothy stuff that floats around annoyingly between all the big stuff ... like i and 'r and ei and na and ga and 'u and am and sa and 'run and o and pa and bu and bo and ...and ... all those other frothy things.
So, I recommended then , and I recommend now, that Friday should be the day when you make a special effort to notice all that little frothy stuff and actually work out what it all means, and which ones cause a bit of SM or NM or whatever, and what the ones with ' in front really stand for .... because when it comes to SPEAKING the language you've got to stick all those bits in ... yes, actually they are very important.
One way to make this more exciting is to go deliberately froth-spotting, now I believe
under consideration as an official winter sport for the Syrian Olympics in 2278.
You can froth-spot at various levels of seriousness, but the real go-getters are always on the look-out for sentences with the maximum percentage of froth ( POF).
Particularly fertile territory for top POF ratings are those books which are full of real characters in tiny out-of - the-way-probably-fictional Welsh villages. They rarely use any words longer than 5 letters anyway. Here's a few choice high-scoring example ...
Yn union fel nad yw wy wedi'i botsio yn wy wedi'i botsio oni bai ei fod wedi cael ei ddwyn o'r goedwig ganol y nos !
Taking "froth" to mean 1 and 2-letter words, we have 12 tucked in there, from a total of 28.
That's 48% that is!
In the amateur ranks they tend to count 3-letter words as froth as well, and under that system we have 18/28 = 64% .. incredible result there.
Of course, there's always cheats and shysters who will try it on with really short sentences like ...
Fe af i â fe ! or maybe the more expansive Fe ofala i ar ei ôl e !
The first one scores 100% and the second one 86% even under professional rules, so the official body ( World Froth-Spotters United) had to make a ruling... after years of wrangling, bribery and brown envelopes under the table, it was ruled that the number of words in the sentence had to be 15 or more.
In later years the WFSU joined forces with another body with similar aspirations, the Frontal Apostrophe Spotters Guild. Their members have the much more rigorous task of finding sentences with the maximum number of words like 'sul and 'fi and 'swn ...... for a while I held the record for that . But I'll leave all that for later. Meanwhile, here's that nice Cerys Matthews with Awyrennau .. it's got the words as well ....