CHAT: silly (Welsh place) names

At 6:45 pm -0600 17/3/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Sat, Mar 17, 2001 at 05:46:20PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
>> At 8:03 pm +1100 17/3/01, D Tse wrote:
>> >Can someone tell me if such agglutinations are meant to be common in Welsh?
>>
>> *Pwllgwyngyll would not be odd as a place name.  After all, _pwll gwyn
>> gyll_ as perfectly grammatical and acceptable Welsh as "white hazels pool"
>> is in English.
>
>"White hazels pool" is not acceptable, in my idiolect. It has a plural noun
>in apposition with a noun ("hazels pool"),
No it does not!

"white hazels" is an _epithet_, i.e. the phrase is adjectival, defining the
pool.  Nothing whatever to do with apposition.

And a plural noun can quite well act as the epithet of a following noun in
all versions of English that I know of, otherwise we'd not have "nice
little girls school" quoted as an example of ambiguity so often.

OK - add an apostrophe after "hazels" if you must.  "White hazels' pool" is
'pwll gwyn gyll' in Welsh also.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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