Welsh MNers - pronunciation help please

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I believe there are a number of Welsh speakers on this board.

Please could you give me some guidance on how to pronounce the name Nêst?

@CastleTower , ê in Welsh is like é in French, but slightly longer.

I could be wrong but how I don't know but surely Nest is one of the easiest names to pronounce? It's like vest. The two I know say it this way if that helps.

The OP is asking about Nêst not Nest, @Guardsman18

I know a Helene who says her name as Helen but that isn't how one says Hélène

Yes it is! Cymraes yma. Be’ fasech chi’n deud?

I’m from North Wales. ‘Naist’ is completely wrong to me! I would pronounce hên as h-air- n.

When pronouncing Jên, nobody I know would pronounce it like Jane but as J-air-n with a long ehhhh sound. Very much like è in French as a pp said.

Not at all like é in French which is ‘ay’ as in hay or bray?

Nonsense. Jên is a transliteration of Jane, and Jane rhymes with pane not bairn.

You'll be telling us next that the Welsh pronounce Ann as Arne.

Your Welsh is not the best.

Please don’t be rude on my thread @DacwMamYnDwad. I don’t wish to be ungrateful and I am sure your Welsh is faultless but your explanations have been baffling and not terribly helpful.

Gwên doesn’t sound at all like gwain at all to me. It sounds like gw-ehhh-n. I’m saying it out loud here and I think it may be that our accents when speaking English are different. We may be describing a similar sound.

I know several Nêsts. And it’s always pronounced as I would pronounce air.

But Jên is pronounced in Welsh to rhyme with bairn- It's Welsh pronounciation is different to the English. I know of a few Jêns and none of them pronounce their name the same as you'd pronounce Jane. The pronounciation of Ann is the same in Welsh and English. Siw is a transliteration of Sue, but again, they're not pronounced the same. (Siw rhymes with few, Sue rhymes with zoo.)
To tell a PP that their "Welsh is not the best" is unkind and unfair. Bydd garedig.

You give Welsh speakers a bad name @DacwMamYnDwad, I’m not engaging with that. No wonder attitudes to the language can be poor. I won’t be responding any further to you.

Nobody who speaks Welsh as a first language would pronounce Jên like Jane!

OP, it’s great that you’re trying to pronounce the name well, but most people will just appreciate you trying, the quickest way to kill a language is to be elitist about it.

I think it’s likely that the rude pp is pronouncing the English word with a different accent than mine, hence the fact that we think the sound translates differently? Sorry this thread hasn’t been especially helpful for you! But if you just ask Nêst, she’ll tell you how it’s pronounced.

Exactly! None of the Welsh speakers I know (who don’t have an issue with my Welsh!) would pronounce Jên like Jane. Just like Huw isn’t pronounced like Hugh.

@sponsabillaries , you asked a straightforward question and I answered.
Posters then contradicted me.

One of them wrote such a reply in poor Welsh, saying that I was wrong.

It's not that unusual for people to welshify english names. Jane, Fred, Lucy, Mary, Davies, Vaughan etc get written as Jên, Ffred, Lwsi, Meri, Dafis, Fôn etc
or they might use the Welsh version e. g. Siân instead of Jane, Mair/Mari instead of Mary.

Jane calling herself Jên is highly unlikely to start saying it as J-air-n, surely.

Maybe @CastleTower could clarify the pronunciation of Hélène. I'd transcribe it into Welsh as Ê-len (with the stress on the len).

For the benefit of non Welsh speakers, my Welsh simply says ‘Welsh person here, what would you say then?’ - nothing rude. It was meant to be a ‘hey, I’m Welsh too, how do you pronounce it, this is how I do?’ Pronunciations do vary across Wales.

The Welsh is informal but not incorrect as far as I know, and if there is a mistake or a typo in it that I’ve missed tbh, who cares!

Born in Wales to English parents. My Welsh was completely fluent as a child. Totally fluent, same standard as my English, all education through the medium of Welsh. Did well. Socialised in Welsh, mainly.

Went away to England, didn’t use it for ten years.

On return to Wales, I have made an enormous effort to speak Welsh whenever possible, to start every conversation in Welsh and recover full fluency. I’m fairly close to that with spoken Welsh. Occasionally I mess up a mutation when speaking Welsh, which at first made me hesitate to send work emails in Welsh etc, or email the dc’s schools etc. I’ve sent my dc to Welsh medium schools.

So… In the past year I have pushed myself to use written Welsh. Knowing that there are a minority of Welsh first language speakers who love nothing more than to pick up a mistake and tell you about it. But how else would I regain confidence and fluency? I just have to use it.

The pp on this thread has just made me feel that there is no point in speaking or using Welsh at all. Because there are some Cymru Cymraeg who will never consider me ‘one of them’ no matter how good it is.

So that’s one less person speaking Welsh. Fewer services offered in Welsh in my workplace.

Congratulations to that poster for their contribution to the death of the language, I guess, as the amount used going forward will certainly be less. It really is no wonder that English people moving in don’t try to learn the language and that there is such a divide.

Sorry to derail your thread, OP!

Lisa Jên the singer absolutely doesn’t pronounce it like Jane, neither does the Jên I know!

Dacwmam is a pain in the arse. They were here under a different name previously I'm sure and they were just as annoying then. Rude, pedantic and absolutely refusing to acknowledge the fact that, despite being a tiny country, the language itself and some pronunciations vary regionally.
Ignore them.

For some reason people get really weird on here about Welsh pronunciation. I recently had some really rude people on a recent thread of mine about pronunciation and i had only asked for opinions on the actual name. Also a few years ago when asking opinions for DD2s name which is Welsh I had so many nasty comments from people. One in particular would be awful to most people. I wonder if it’s the same person 🤔It’s definitely got worse on here over the years. Nêst is a beautiful name.

It’s not a lot of people. I suspect it’s no more than a handful of posters, perhaps even one or two, with multiple aliases. I’ve been here a long time and their style is distinctive.

@FatGirlSwim Please don't let the bellends win! The vast vast majority of Cymraeg speakers will have nothing but appreciation for your efforts. Loads of people like me, whose first language is Welsh, who make a living through the medium of Welsh, mess up mutations sometimes. Your effort with Cymraeg really does make a massive difference, and tbf, the pp who was putting you down was wrong themselves (see Lisa Jên and every other Jên I've ever met in my entire life...)
If there are Cymry Cymraeg who will never be accepting of you, it's their problem and they're banging the nail into their own coffin. To me, and to loads of others, you are as Cymraeg as anyone else. And diolch yn fawr for your efforts. Mae pobol fel ti yn cadw'r iaith yn fyw! [Flowers]

Diolch o galon Bronnau, dwi’n wir gwerthfawrogi hynny!

The 'ês' is like she says it in 'es ti...?' in this

EXACTLY. Which sounds like ‘air’ as I say it.

I have no idea how you say air.
Someone (from Monmouthshire) was telling me about hayers, and I had to ask what were hayers.
Clue: they're a bit like rabbits.

I would say Nehhhst (North Wales). It's a lovely name. DacwMam is a twll din. Pronunciation varies very slightly with the accent in different parts of Wales. I don't know what DacwMam hopes to achieve by discouraging people who are trying to learn/improve their Welsh.