When I read about someone who had made a computer program to generate new English words, I thought ...I want to do that with Welsh. Who wouldn't ?
What would I need? Well, surely I would need to know which letters would be likely to follow other letters.... what's the chance of T being followed by, say, a Y in a Welsh word? Or of an E being followed by a C ? What are the most frequent starting letters for a Welsh word? Can an S ever follow a T ( yes .. ots for a start!).? Now I expect that this information is easily available in English, but for Welsh ? No chance ! If I went to the immense trouble of working them all out, I would then have to incorporate all that data into a program of some sort. Crumbs. I considered putting it all on little cards .... quite a job I reckon. One thing is certain ...if I just picked strings of random letters, then the vast majority of the words generated would be utterly useless.... rteevsd, ydrfftwq, ieopp, rghjalerv and the like. I needed to think again.
Then I thought of a completely different and much simpler way of doing more or less the same thing. Surely a Welsh book is crammed with all that information already it's all there in the words..... and I could access it without any actual calculation or programming at all ... here's how ....
First I need a bit of text to show what what I did .... here's the start of a short story I got from the Clwb Malu Cachi site ....Un funud fach by Rhiannon Meleri .... here's the start...
Cymylau ewyn Guiness yn pwyso’n drwm ar y gorwel, sawr claear fodca ar y aer a’r stryd yn llonydd ac yn llwm fel unrhyw b’nawn arall am bum munud i bump. Braf fyddai gwylio’r
machlud yn arllwys ei dangnefedd yn gymysgedd o wirodydd amryliw i las y môr ar awr fel hon; clo perffaith ar ddiwrnod diflas arall fyddai hynny. Wyt ti’n cytuno?
• • • • •
At random, I'll start at the 3rd line, first word ... there's the M of machlud. M is my first letter ... I then scan along the line, ignoring any proper names or English words, until I find the next M. Aha ...there's "gymysgedd"...I pick the letter after the m which is a Y. I've got MY so far.
Then I scan along looking for the next Y .... it's just 2 words on, "wirodydd"and there's my next letter, dd, right after it.
OK ..so far I've got a perfectly plausible "new" Welsh word, MYDD. Maybe it IS a Welsh word... but it's not in YGM. So, we've generated, first go, a good-looking Welsh word totally live and unrehearsed. 'Rarglwyd!
But what happens if we carry on ... I don't know, let's see. I scan along looking for the next "dd" .... there it is, on the next line, in the word "ddiwrnod"followed by an" i". Had it been a dd at the end of a word it wouldn't count, because obviously there is nothing after it, and the first letter of the next word would have no relation to it statistically.
Ok, we've extended our word to "myddi" .... not promising .But that live blogging for you.
If you think about all this, you will realise that this process makes sure that the "what-follows-what" business is done for us ... it's all in the words of the text.
Plus...one of the amazing things about this, is that had we started ,say, on the 2nd line, or the 5th word of the first line, it would have turned out totally different..... in any welsh text there is an almost infinite number of possible "new words" buried inside.
So ... now you can do it yourself, I hope, if I've explained it OK. I'd be dead chuffed to hear if any of you have tried it ...and maybe even generated some new whizzo word that will catch on and embed itself in the Welsh language. Who knows?
Here's that smashing Band Pres Llareggub again with a souped up " Ysbeidiau Heulog" ...
I meant to put the words for Ysbeidiau heulog on here so you could sing along to their playing, seeing as how they seemed to have forgotten to sing them themselves ... but I couldn't find them. But now I have, on the Clwb Malu Cachu site ..here they are ...
Super Furry Animals - ysbeidiau heulog
fe gawsom ni
ysbeidiau heulog, ysbeidiau heulog
fe gawsom ni
ysbeidiau heulog, ysbeidiau heulog
ond ar y cyfan roedd hi'n dra cymylog
ga i hyd yn oed awgrymu un-donog
mewn cartre llaith a dim gwres calonog.
ysbeidiau heulog
fe deimlo'n ni
yr esgid yn gwasgu, esgidiau'n gwasgu
fe deimlo'n ni
esgusion yn tasgu, esgusion, tasgu
ond ar y cyfan roedd y camau yn weigion
y swigod coch yn llosgi fel gwreichion
um cam ymlaen am ddwy aneffeithlon.
ysbeidiau heulog
heulog oedd ein oariad ni
heulog tan ddaeth glaw yn lliff
ysbeidiau heulog