Hello! Can anybody help me with the following (rather linguistic) questions?: 1. Use of mae/ydy/oes I'm still troubled by these forms of _bod_: Say, we've got a sentence containing a 3rd sg present tense form of _bod_ which is part of a periphrastical construction with a verbal noun (bod yn VN); the subject is the indefinite pronoun _rhywun_, and it's a question. E.g. "Someone's coming." > "Is someone coming?" Affirmative: Mae rhywun yn dod. [Correct?] Question: a. Oes rhywun yn dod? [? oes with indef. subj., but with yn + VN?] b. Oes rhywun sy'n dod? [Better than a.? "Is there someone who's coming?] c. Ydy rhywun yn dod? [??Like: Ydy Sion yn dod? Indefinite subject?] Which is the correct/better construction? From the grammars I haven't got a clear answer to this yet. b. seems to be OK, but this isn't quite the same as the English sentence above. 2. I've recently come across the form _dwn i ddim_ 'I don't know' on this list. Is this a correct form? 3. This concerns vowel length in South Wales. a. As I learn from Gw.M Awbery's article "Phonotactic Constraints of Welsh" (IN: Welsh Phonology. Ed. gy M.J. Ball et al.) in South Wales a stressed vowel is long before _s_ if it is in a word-final syllable (or monosyllabic word) and short if in the penultimate (or before). So, there would be a long _o_ in _nos_, but a short one in _noson_. Is this true? b. This concerns words like _bwrw_, _marw_, _garw_ etc. Is there a long or a short stressed vowel in these words? Or the other way round: does _w_ count as a consonant, so that there's virtually a consonant cluster at the end of these words which would trigger a short vowel? c. What about the _a_ in _dal_ 'to hold'; _e_ in _brenin_ 'king'? I would be grateful for any help I could get. Oh, yes: Teimlwch yn rhydd i ateb yn Gymraeg hefyd [ac dwi'n gobeithio yn wir mai Cymraeg cywir yw y frawddeg 'ma! :-] Pob hwyl Ingo (mittendi@mailer.uni-marburg.de)