#byth

August 1989. The first chapter of Tim Truman's three-issue HAWKWORLD miniseries wastes no time in presenting its thesis statement. On the planet Thanagar, a young aristocrat Katar Hol, just out of military academy and not yet Hawkman, joins his world's paramilitary police force, the Wingmen, and quickly learns what the Wingmen really do: brutal raids into the slums of Downside, Thanagar's overcrowded ghetto — ostensibly to prevent insurrection and root out caches of weapons and other contraband, but really to maintain a climate of terror for an already oppressed population of conquered beings from many worlds. As Katar is already beginning to suspect here, his cynical commander, Byth (the one speaking, above), is actually running guns and drugs to Downside, and takes advantage of these raids to rid himself of rivals and no-longer-useful accomplices, lining his own pockets while perpetuating the social inequity and exploitation on which Thanagarian society depends.

Many elements of this miniseries are drawn from the Gardner Fox Hawkman stories of the Silver Age: Byth was the the villain in the first Silver Age Hawkman story in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #34, a statue of Kalmoran was seen briefly in BRAVE AND THE BOLD #43, and Illoral was a world the Hawks visited in HAWKMAN #6 in 1965. Truman (who originally intended HAWKWORLD to be a direct prequel to the Fox/Kubert stories) frames those elements in a new context, giving them much greater thematic weight.

Both mean ever/never, 'ever' in a question, never in negatives, replacing ‘ddim’ where it would occur in such a sentence. But they differ in which tense each can be used.

erioed/byth -> ever/never (adverb)

byth bythoedd/yn oes oesoedd -> for ever and ever (just an idiomatic phrase)

“Dwi ddim yn meddwl amdano fe.” I don't think about it.

Alternatively, you could use ddim, and then tack on byth/erioed at the end of the sentence.

Tenses and usage (Amserau a defnydd)

Erioed is used in “completed tenses in the past”, the present perfect, simple past and pluperfect (past perfect) tenses, replacing ddim in the negative.

“Dwi erioed wedi meddwl amdano fe.” I have never thought about it. “Dwi ddim wedi meddwl amdano fe erioed.” [Present perfect]

“Wnes i erioed feddwl amdano fe.” I never thought about it. “Wnes i ddim meddwl amdano fe erioed.” [Simple past]

*Note: Eriod, unlike ddim, does not prevent the soft mutation from occurring. “Wnes i ddim meddwl”, ond “wnes i erioed feddwl”.

“Do'n i erioed wedi meddwl amdano fe.” I had never thought about it. [Past perfect]

Byth is used with all other tenses: present, future, imperfect (past continuous), conditional.

“Dwi byth yn meddwl amdano fe.” I never think about it. [Simple present]

“Fydda i byth yn meddwl amdano fe!” I will never think about it! [Future]

“Do'n i byth yn meddwl amdano fe.” I was never thinking/never used to think about it. [Imperfect]

“Faswn i/fyddwn i byth yn meddwl amdano fe.” I would never think about it. [Conditional]

Erioed is an interesting word in its etymology, Wiktionary (fy ffrind gorau yn y byd, yn wir) says it comes from er (like ers, meaning since) + ei (3rd person singular basically) + oed (time, age). Literally ‘never’ = ‘since their time’.

If you've never had ice-cream, ti erioed wedi cael hufen-iâ, you've never had ice cream since your time (on earth, presumably), though why you wouldn't have ice cream ever is beyond me. Dwi'n mynd i fwyta hufen iâ nawr, in fact. Fel trît :)

(On the other hand, byth shares a root with the word ‘byd’, meaning ‘world’ but also used in the negative sense with dim to mean nothing: dim byd. Maybe it's the way French uses the word 'monde' meaning world, where ‘tout le monde’, literally the whole world, just means ‘everyone’ (dramatic much!), but I am just thinking out here.

Jedi Younglings and lightsabers from Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 5 Younglings arc

Katooni (Tholothian) and Gungi (Wookiee) by J.P. Balmet

Byth (Ithorian) and Zatt (Nautolan) by Darren Marshall

Ganodi (Rodian) by Randy Bantog