Literary Welsh morphology
Encyclopedia
The morphology
of the Welsh language
shows many characteristics perhaps unfamiliar to speakers of English
or continental European languages like French
or German
, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages
: Irish
, Scottish Gaelic
, Manx
, Cornish
, and Breton
. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, tense and mood with affirmative, interrogative and negative conjugations of some verbs. There are few case inflections
in Literary Welsh, being confined to certain pronouns.
Modern Welsh can be written in two varieties – Colloquial Welsh or Literary Welsh. The grammar described on this page is for Literary Welsh.
Initial consonant mutation
is a phenomenon common to all Insular Celtic languages
, although there is no evidence of it in the ancient Continental Celtic languages
of the early first millennium. The first consonant
of a word in Welsh may change
depending on grammatical context (such as when the grammatical object
directly follows the grammatical subject
), when preceded by certain words, e. g. , , and or when the normal word order of a sentence is changed, e.g. Y mae tŷ gennyf, Y mae gennyf dŷ "I have a house". Welsh has three mutations: the soft mutation, the nasal mutation, and the aspirate mutation. These are also represented in writing:
A blank cell indicates no change.
For example, the word for "stone" is , but "the stone" is (soft mutation), "my stone" is (nasal mutation) and "her stone" is (aspirate mutation).
* The soft mutation for g is the simple deletion of the initial sound. For example, "garden" becomes "the garden". But this can behave as a consonant under certain circumstances, e.g. "gellir" (one can) becomes "ni ellir" (one cannot) not "*nid ellir".
Common situations where the full soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive:
In some cases a limited soft mutation takes place. This differs from the full soft mutation in that words beginning with rh and ll do not mutate.
Situations where the limited soft mutation occurs are as follows.
The occurrence of the soft mutation often obscures the origin of placenames to non-Welsh-speaking visitors. For example, is the church of (Mary
), and is the bridge on the Tawe
.
speakers to pronounce. However, in fact they are generally pronounced as an aspirated nasal followed by h, and this does not in practice result in a large cluster of consonant sounds because it is preceded either by the vowel
ending of , or a form of where the -n is possibly replaced with -m or -ng to match the first letter of the mutated word. For example: + → , pronounced as + → , pronounced as
Note also that the form often used instead of after vowels does not cause nasal mutation. For example:
(not *i'm ngwlad)
The aspirate mutation occurs:
. The definite article, which precedes the words it modifies and whose usage differs little from that of English, has the forms and . The rules governing their usage are:
Note that the letter w
represents both a consonant /w/ and vowel /u/
and a preceding definite article will reflect this by following the rules above, e.g. /ə ˈwal/ "the wall" but /ər ˈʊˑɨ/ or /ər ˈʊi/ "the egg". However, pre-vocalic is used before both the consonantal and vocalic values represented by i
, e.g. /ər ˈjaːr/ "the hen" and /ər ˈiŋ/ "the anguish". It is also always used before the consonant h
, e.g. /ər ˈhaːv/ "the summer".
Is should also be noted that the first rule may be applied with greater or less frequency in various literary contexts. For example, poetry might use more often to help with metre, e.g. "The same power is in my God" from a hymn
by William Williams Pantycelyn
. On the other hand, sometimes its use is more restricted in very formal contexts, e.g. "Behold, these are the ungodly" in Psalm 73.12.
The article triggers the soft mutation when it is used with feminine singular nouns, e.g. "(a) princess" but "the princess".
; in this case, masculine or feminine. A noun's gender conforms to its referent's natural gender when it has one, e.g. "mother" is feminine. There are also semantic, morphological and phonological clues to help determine a noun's gender, e.g. "milk" is masculine as are all liquid
s, "wedding" is feminine because it ends in the suffix
, and "theatre" is feminine because the stressed vowel is an e
. Many everyday nouns, however, possess no such clues.
Sometimes a noun's gender may vary depending on meaning, for example when masculine means "work", but when feminine, it means "occasion, time". The words for language
s behave like feminine nouns (i.e. mutate) after the article, e.g. "the Welsh language", but as masculine nouns (i.e. without mutation of an adjective) when qualified, e.g. "good Welsh". The gender of some nouns depends on a user's dialect, and although in the literary language there is some standardization, some genders remain unstable, e.g. "page".
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number
. Singular/plural
nouns correspond to the singular/plural number system of English, although unlike English, Welsh noun plurals are unpredictable and formed in several ways. Some nouns form the plural with an ending (usually ), e.g. and . Others form the plural through vowel change, e.g. and . Still others form their plurals through some combination of the two, e.g. and .
Several nouns have two plural forms, e.g. the plural of "story" is either or . This can help distinguish meaning in some cases, e.g. whereas means both "tribe" and "load", means "tribes" and means "loads".
The other system of number is the collective/unit system
. The nouns in this system form the singular by adding the suffix (for masculine nouns) or (for feminine nouns) to the plural. Most nouns which belong in this system are frequently found in groups, for example, "children" and "a child", or "forest" and "a tree". In dictionaries, the plural is often given first.
Attributively after feminine singular nouns, adjectives receive the soft mutation. For the most part, they are uninflected, though there are a few which maintain distinct masculine/feminine and/or singular/plural distinctions. Compare, for example, uninflecting "small" and inflecting "dirty" with the masculine noun and the feminine noun , both meaning "table":
Adjective comparison in Welsh is fairly similar to the English system except that there is an additional degree, the equative (Welsh y radd gyfartal). Adjectives with one or two syllables usually receive the endings "as/so", "-er" and "-est", which change final b, d, g into p, t, c by provection
, e.g. "fair", "as/so fair", "fairer", "fairest". Generally, adjectives with two or more syllables use the words "as/so", "more" and "most", e.g. "sensitive", "as/so sensitive, "more sensitive", "most sensitive". There are a number of irregular adjectives, e.g. "good", "as/so good", "better", "best". The literary language tends to prefer the use of endings if possible.
These are the possessive adjectives:
The possessive adjectives precede the noun they qualify, which is sometimes followed by the corresponding form of the personal pronoun, especially to emphasize the possessor, e.g. "my bread", "your bread", "his bread" etc.
, and feminine add an h
a following word beginning with a vowel, e.g. "name", "her name".
The demonstrative adjectives are inflected for gender and number:
These follow the noun they qualify, which also takes the article. For example, the masculine word "book" becomes "this book", "that book", "these books" and "those books".
The Welsh masculine-feminine gender distinction is reflected in the pronouns. There is, consequently, no word corresponding to English "it", and the choice of or depends on the grammatical gender of the antecedent.
The English dummy
or expletive
"it" construction in phrases like "it's raining" or "it was cold last night" also exists in Welsh and other Indo-European languages like French, German, and Dutch, but not in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or the Slavic languages. Unlike other masculine-feminine languages, which often default to the masculine pronoun in the construction, Welsh uses the feminine singular , thus producing sentences like:
Note that there is no gender distinction in the third person singular.
"(It was) Thou that createdst us."
"Did I not choose you?"
Less formal variants are given in brackets. Mutation may also, naturally, affect the forms of these pronouns (e.g. minnau may be mutated to finnau)
The emphatic pronouns can be used with possessive adjectives in the same way as the simple pronouns are used (with the added function of distinction or connection).
In certain expressions, may represent "now" and may represent "then".
The preterite, non-past (present-future), and imperfect (conditional) tenses have forms that are somewhat similar to colloquial Welsh, demonstrated here with 'pay'.
To these, the literary language adds pluperfect, subjunctive, and imperative tenses:
In less formal styles, the affirmative/indirect relative , interrogative/direct relative , and negative particles have a particularly strong tendency to become infixed on the front of forms of , for instance and for and . Although the literary language tends toward keeping the particles in full, affirmative is optional before .
Reduplicating the negation of the verb with (which in the literary language strictly means "any" rather than "not") is generally avoided.
Certain other verbs with in the verb-noun are also to some extent irregular. By far the most irregular are ("to know (a fact)") and ("to recognize/know (a person)"); but there also exists a group of verbs that alternate (in the preterite and pluperfect) and (in all other tenses) stems, namely ("to perceive"), ("to acknowledge"), ("to meet"), ("to perish"), ("to discover"), ("to be obliged"), and ("to descend/issue from").
Therefore presented below are and in the tenses where they do not simply add or to forms of . Note that they both, like , separate the present and future tenses.
Firstly those in -a- (at, am (stem: amdan-), ar, tan/dan):
Secondly those in -o- (er, heb, rhag, rhwng (stem: rhyng-), tros/dros, trwy/drwy (stem: trw-/drw-), o (stem: ohon-), yn). All apart from "o" add a linking element in the third person (usually -dd-, but -ydd- in the case of trwy/drwy, and -t- in the case of tros/dros):
Thirdly, those in -y- (gan and wrth). Gan includes both vowel changes and a linking element, whilst wrth has neither:
Finally, the preposition "i" is highly irregular:
All inflected prepositions may optionally be followed by the appropriate personal pronouns, apart from "i", where this is only possible in the third person, thanks to its proper endings in the other persons sounding the same as the pronouns. In slightly less formal Welsh, the endings are split off the first and second persons of "i" to be interpreted as pronouns instead, although this creates the anomalous pronoun "mi".
The majority of prepositions (am, ar, at, gan, heb, hyd, i, o, tan/dan, tros/dros, trwy/drwy, wrth) trigger the soft mutation. The exceptions are â, gyda, and tua, which cause the aspirate mutation; yn, which causes the nasal mutation; and cyn, ger, mewn, rhag, and rhwng, which do not cause any mutation.
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
of the Welsh language
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
shows many characteristics perhaps unfamiliar to speakers of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
or continental European languages like French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
or German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct...
: Irish
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
, Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic language
Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language native to Scotland. A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish, and thus descends ultimately from Primitive Irish....
, Manx
Manx language
Manx , also known as Manx Gaelic, and as the Manks language, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, historically spoken by the Manx people. Only a small minority of the Island's population is fluent in the language, but a larger minority has some knowledge of it...
, Cornish
Cornish language
Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...
, and Breton
Breton language
Breton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany , France. Breton is a Brythonic language, descended from the Celtic British language brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. Like the other Brythonic languages, Welsh and Cornish, it is classified as...
. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, tense and mood with affirmative, interrogative and negative conjugations of some verbs. There are few case inflections
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
in Literary Welsh, being confined to certain pronouns.
Modern Welsh can be written in two varieties – Colloquial Welsh or Literary Welsh. The grammar described on this page is for Literary Welsh.
Initial consonant mutation
- Related article: LenitionLenitionIn linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
Initial consonant mutation
Consonant mutation
Consonant mutation is when a consonant in a word changes according to its morphological and/or syntactic environment.Mutation phenomena occur in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages...
is a phenomenon common to all Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct...
, although there is no evidence of it in the ancient Continental Celtic languages
Continental Celtic languages
The Continental Celtic languages are the Celtic languages, now extinct, that were spoken on the continent of Europe, as distinguished from the Insular Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland. The Continental Celtic languages were spoken by the people known to Roman and Greek writers as Keltoi,...
of the early first millennium. The first consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
of a word in Welsh may change
depending on grammatical context (such as when the grammatical object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
directly follows the grammatical subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
), when preceded by certain words, e. g. , , and or when the normal word order of a sentence is changed, e.g. Y mae tŷ gennyf, Y mae gennyf dŷ "I have a house". Welsh has three mutations: the soft mutation, the nasal mutation, and the aspirate mutation. These are also represented in writing:
| Radical | Soft | Nasal | Aspirate |
|---|---|---|---|
| p | b | mh | ph |
| t | d | nh | th |
| c | g | ngh | ch |
| b | f | m | |
| d | dd | n | |
| g | * | ng | |
| m | f | ||
| ll | l | ||
| rh | r |
A blank cell indicates no change.
For example, the word for "stone" is , but "the stone" is (soft mutation), "my stone" is (nasal mutation) and "her stone" is (aspirate mutation).
Soft mutation
The soft mutation (Welsh: ) is by far the most common mutation in Welsh. When words undergo soft mutation, the general pattern is that unvoiced plosives become voiced plosives, and voiced plosives become fricatives or disappear; some fricatives also change, and the full list is shown in the above table.Common situations where the full soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive:
- adjectives (and nouns used genitively as adjectives) qualifying feminine singular nouns
- words immediately following the prepositions "for, about", "on", "to", / "under", / "over", / "through", "without", "until", "by", "at", "to, for", "of, from"
- nouns used with the number two
- nouns following adjectives (N.B. most adjectives follow the noun)
- nouns after the possessives , informal singular "your", and when it means "his"
- an object of a simple verb
- the second element in many compound words
- when an adverbial phrase comes between two elements, the second element is mutated (e.g. "it is necessary to go" becomes "it is necessary to me to go")
- verbs after the interrogative particle (e.g. "you walked", "did you walk?")
In some cases a limited soft mutation takes place. This differs from the full soft mutation in that words beginning with rh and ll do not mutate.
Situations where the limited soft mutation occurs are as follows.
- feminine singular nouns with the definite article or the number one
- nouns or adjectives used predicatively or adverbially after
- adjectives following or , both meaning "so"
- after the prefixes can- and dar-
The occurrence of the soft mutation often obscures the origin of placenames to non-Welsh-speaking visitors. For example, is the church of (Mary
Mary (mother of Jesus)
Mary , commonly referred to as "Saint Mary", "Mother Mary", the "Virgin Mary", the "Blessed Virgin Mary", or "Mary, Mother of God", was a Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee...
), and is the bridge on the Tawe
River Tawe
The River Tawe is a river in South Wales. It flows in a principally south-westerly direction for some from its source below Moel Feity in the Old Red Sandstone hills of the western Brecon Beacons to the Bristol Channel at Swansea. Its main tributaries are the right bank Upper and Lower Clydach...
.
Nasal mutation
The nasal mutation (Welsh: ) normally occurs:- after "my" e.g. "a bed", "my bed"
- after the locative preposition "in" e.g. "Tywyn", "in Tywyn"
- after the negating prefix , e.g. "fair", "unfair".
Pronunciation
The aspirated nasals may appear at first hard for EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
speakers to pronounce. However, in fact they are generally pronounced as an aspirated nasal followed by h, and this does not in practice result in a large cluster of consonant sounds because it is preceded either by the vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
ending of , or a form of where the -n is possibly replaced with -m or -ng to match the first letter of the mutated word. For example: + → , pronounced as + → , pronounced as
Grammatical considerations
Note that meaning "in" must be distinguished from other uses of which do not cause nasal mutation. For example:- In the sentence , trwyn has undergone nasal mutation.
- In the sentence , plastig has undergone soft mutation, not nasal mutation.
- In the sentence , cynnwys is not mutated.
Note also that the form often used instead of after vowels does not cause nasal mutation. For example:
(not *i'm ngwlad)
Aspirate mutation
The aspirate mutation (Welsh: treiglad llaes) turns the unvoiced plosives into aspirated fricatives. It is easiest to remember based on an addition of an h in the spelling (c, p, t → ch, ph, th), although strictly speaking the resultant forms are single phonemes which happen to contain an h as the second character.The aspirate mutation occurs:
- after the possessive when it means "her"
- after "and"
- after "with"
- for masculine nouns after the number three
- after the number six
Mixed mutation
A mixed mutation occurs after the particles (before a vowel ), (before a vowel ) and (before a vowel ) which negate verbs. Initial consonants which change under the aspirate mutation do so; other consonants change as in the soft mutation (if at all). For example, "I heard" is negated as "I did not hear", "that I did not hear" and "did I not hear?", whereas "I said" is negated as , and .The article
Welsh has no indefinite articleArticle (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
. The definite article, which precedes the words it modifies and whose usage differs little from that of English, has the forms and . The rules governing their usage are:
- When the previous word ends in a vowel, regardless of the quality of the word following, is used, e.g. ("the cat is outside"). This rule takes precedence over the other two below.
- When the word begins with a vowel, is used, e.g. "the bear".
- In all other places, is used, e.g. ("the boy").
Note that the letter w
W
W is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
represents both a consonant /w/ and vowel /u/
Close back rounded vowel
The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is u....
and a preceding definite article will reflect this by following the rules above, e.g. /ə ˈwal/ "the wall" but /ər ˈʊˑɨ/ or /ər ˈʊi/ "the egg". However, pre-vocalic is used before both the consonantal and vocalic values represented by i
I
I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...
, e.g. /ər ˈjaːr/ "the hen" and /ər ˈiŋ/ "the anguish". It is also always used before the consonant h
H
H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....
, e.g. /ər ˈhaːv/ "the summer".
Is should also be noted that the first rule may be applied with greater or less frequency in various literary contexts. For example, poetry might use more often to help with metre, e.g. "The same power is in my God" from a hymn
Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
by William Williams Pantycelyn
William Williams Pantycelyn
William Williams Pantycelyn , also known as Williams Pantycelyn and Pantycelyn, is generally acknowledged as Wales' most famous hymn writer. He was also one of the key leaders of the 18th century Welsh Methodist revival, along with Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris. As a poet and prose writer he is...
. On the other hand, sometimes its use is more restricted in very formal contexts, e.g. "Behold, these are the ungodly" in Psalm 73.12.
The article triggers the soft mutation when it is used with feminine singular nouns, e.g. "(a) princess" but "the princess".
Nouns
Like most other Indo-European languages, all nouns belong to a certain grammatical genderGrammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
; in this case, masculine or feminine. A noun's gender conforms to its referent's natural gender when it has one, e.g. "mother" is feminine. There are also semantic, morphological and phonological clues to help determine a noun's gender, e.g. "milk" is masculine as are all liquid
Liquid
Liquid is one of the three classical states of matter . Like a gas, a liquid is able to flow and take the shape of a container. Some liquids resist compression, while others can be compressed. Unlike a gas, a liquid does not disperse to fill every space of a container, and maintains a fairly...
s, "wedding" is feminine because it ends in the suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
, and "theatre" is feminine because the stressed vowel is an e
E
E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
. Many everyday nouns, however, possess no such clues.
Sometimes a noun's gender may vary depending on meaning, for example when masculine means "work", but when feminine, it means "occasion, time". The words for language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s behave like feminine nouns (i.e. mutate) after the article, e.g. "the Welsh language", but as masculine nouns (i.e. without mutation of an adjective) when qualified, e.g. "good Welsh". The gender of some nouns depends on a user's dialect, and although in the literary language there is some standardization, some genders remain unstable, e.g. "page".
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
. Singular/plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
nouns correspond to the singular/plural number system of English, although unlike English, Welsh noun plurals are unpredictable and formed in several ways. Some nouns form the plural with an ending (usually ), e.g. and . Others form the plural through vowel change, e.g. and . Still others form their plurals through some combination of the two, e.g. and .
Several nouns have two plural forms, e.g. the plural of "story" is either or . This can help distinguish meaning in some cases, e.g. whereas means both "tribe" and "load", means "tribes" and means "loads".
The other system of number is the collective/unit system
Collective number
In linguistics, singulative number and collective number are terms used when the grammatical number for multiple items is the unmarked form of a noun, and the noun is specially marked to indicate a single item...
. The nouns in this system form the singular by adding the suffix (for masculine nouns) or (for feminine nouns) to the plural. Most nouns which belong in this system are frequently found in groups, for example, "children" and "a child", or "forest" and "a tree". In dictionaries, the plural is often given first.
Adjectives
Adjectives normally follow the noun they qualify, e.g. "(a) young son", while a small number precede it, usually causing soft mutation, e.g. "(an) old son". The position of an adjective may even determine its meaning, e.g. "(a) lonely son" as opposed to "(an) only son".Attributively after feminine singular nouns, adjectives receive the soft mutation. For the most part, they are uninflected, though there are a few which maintain distinct masculine/feminine and/or singular/plural distinctions. Compare, for example, uninflecting "small" and inflecting "dirty" with the masculine noun and the feminine noun , both meaning "table":
| Masculine | Feminine | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | ||
| Plural |
| Masculine | Feminine | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | ||
| Plural |
Adjective comparison in Welsh is fairly similar to the English system except that there is an additional degree, the equative (Welsh y radd gyfartal). Adjectives with one or two syllables usually receive the endings "as/so", "-er" and "-est", which change final b, d, g into p, t, c by provection
Fortition
Fortition is a consonantal change from a 'weak' sound to a 'strong' one, the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a plosive...
, e.g. "fair", "as/so fair", "fairer", "fairest". Generally, adjectives with two or more syllables use the words "as/so", "more" and "most", e.g. "sensitive", "as/so sensitive, "more sensitive", "most sensitive". There are a number of irregular adjectives, e.g. "good", "as/so good", "better", "best". The literary language tends to prefer the use of endings if possible.
These are the possessive adjectives:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | (n) | ||
| Second Person | (s) | ||
| Third Person | Masculine | (s) | |
| Feminine | (a) | ||
The possessive adjectives precede the noun they qualify, which is sometimes followed by the corresponding form of the personal pronoun, especially to emphasize the possessor, e.g. "my bread", "your bread", "his bread" etc.
, and feminine add an h
H
H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....
a following word beginning with a vowel, e.g. "name", "her name".
The demonstrative adjectives are inflected for gender and number:
| Masculine | Feminine | Plural | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proximal | |||
| Distal |
These follow the noun they qualify, which also takes the article. For example, the masculine word "book" becomes "this book", "that book", "these books" and "those books".
Personal pronouns
The Welsh personal pronouns are:| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
The Welsh masculine-feminine gender distinction is reflected in the pronouns. There is, consequently, no word corresponding to English "it", and the choice of or depends on the grammatical gender of the antecedent.
The English dummy
Dummy pronoun
A dummy pronoun is a type of pronoun used in non-pro-drop languages, such as English....
or expletive
Syntactic expletive
Syntactic expletives are words that perform a syntactic role but contribute nothing to meaning. Expletive subjects are part of the grammar of many non-pro-drop languages such as English, whose clauses normally require overt provision of subject even when the subject can be pragmatically inferred...
"it" construction in phrases like "it's raining" or "it was cold last night" also exists in Welsh and other Indo-European languages like French, German, and Dutch, but not in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or the Slavic languages. Unlike other masculine-feminine languages, which often default to the masculine pronoun in the construction, Welsh uses the feminine singular , thus producing sentences like:
- It's raining.
- It was cold last night.
vs.
, in addition to serving as the second-person plural pronoun, is also used as a singular in formal situations. Conversely, can be said to be limited to the informal singular, such as when speaking with a family member, a friend, or a child. This usage corresponds closely to the practice in other European languages. The third colloquial form, , is not found in literary Welsh.Reflexive pronouns
The reflexive pronouns are formed with the possessive adjective followed by (plural ) "self".| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| First Person | ||
| Second Person | ||
| Third Person |
Note that there is no gender distinction in the third person singular.
Reduplicated pronouns
Literary Welsh has reduplicated pronouns that are used for emphasis, usually as the subject of a focussed sentence. For example:"(It was) Thou that createdst us."
"Did I not choose you?"
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
Conjunctive pronouns
Welsh has special conjunctive forms of the personal pronouns. They are perhaps more descriptively termed 'connective or distinctive pronouns' since they are used to indicate a connection between or distinction from another nominal element. Full contextual information is necessary to interpret their function in any given sentence.Less formal variants are given in brackets. Mutation may also, naturally, affect the forms of these pronouns (e.g. minnau may be mutated to finnau)
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
The emphatic pronouns can be used with possessive adjectives in the same way as the simple pronouns are used (with the added function of distinction or connection).
Demonstrative pronouns
In addition to having masculine and feminine forms of this and that, Welsh also has separate set of this and that for intangible, figurative, or general ideas.| Masculine | Feminine | Intangible | |
|---|---|---|---|
| this | |||
| that | |||
| these | |||
| those | |||
In certain expressions, may represent "now" and may represent "then".
Verbs
In literary Welsh, far less use is made of auxiliary verbs than in its colloquial counterpart. Instead conjugated forms of verbs are common. Most distinctively, the non-past tense is used for the present as well as the future.The preterite, non-past (present-future), and imperfect (conditional) tenses have forms that are somewhat similar to colloquial Welsh, demonstrated here with 'pay'.
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Preterite | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Non-Past | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperfect | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
To these, the literary language adds pluperfect, subjunctive, and imperative tenses:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pluperfect | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Subjunctive | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperative | First Person | (does not exist) | |
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
and compounds
Bod 'to be' is highly irregular. Compared with the inflected tenses above, it has separate present and future tenses, separate present and imperfect subjunctive tenses, separate imperfect and conditional tenses, and uses the pluperfect as a consuetudinal imperfect (amherffaith arferiadol) tense. The third person of the present tense has separate existential and descriptive forms, except in the situations where the positive or relative forms are used in their place.| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Preterite | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Future | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Present | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Imperfect | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Conditional | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Consuetudinal Imperfect | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Present Subjunctive | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperfect Subjunctive | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperative | First Person | (does not exist) | |
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
In less formal styles, the affirmative/indirect relative , interrogative/direct relative , and negative particles have a particularly strong tendency to become infixed on the front of forms of , for instance and for and . Although the literary language tends toward keeping the particles in full, affirmative is optional before .
Reduplicating the negation of the verb with (which in the literary language strictly means "any" rather than "not") is generally avoided.
Certain other verbs with in the verb-noun are also to some extent irregular. By far the most irregular are ("to know (a fact)") and ("to recognize/know (a person)"); but there also exists a group of verbs that alternate (in the preterite and pluperfect) and (in all other tenses) stems, namely ("to perceive"), ("to acknowledge"), ("to meet"), ("to perish"), ("to discover"), ("to be obliged"), and ("to descend/issue from").
Therefore presented below are and in the tenses where they do not simply add or to forms of . Note that they both, like , separate the present and future tenses.
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Present | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperfect | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Present Subjunctive | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperfect Subjunctive | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperative | First Person | (does not exist) | |
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Present | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperfect | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Subjunctive | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
| Imperative | First Person | (does not exist) | |
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Impersonal | |||
and
The four verbs "to go", "to do", "to get", and "to come" are all irregular. These share many similarities, but there are also far more points of difference in their literary forms than in their spoken ones. In particular, is significantly different from the others in the preterite and non-past tenses.| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preterite | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Impersonal | |||||||||
| Non-past | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Impersonal | |||||||||
| Imperfect | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Impersonal | |||||||||
| Pluperfect | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Impersonal | |||||||||
| (Present) Subjunctive | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Impersonal | |||||||||
| Imperfect Subjunctive | First Person | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) | ||||
| Second Person | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) | |||||
| Third Person | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) | |||||
| Impersonal | (none) | (none) | |||||||
| Imperative | First Person | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) | |||
| Second Person | (none) | (none) | |||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Impersonal | |||||||||
Prepositions
In Welsh, prepositions frequently change their form when followed by a pronoun. These are known as inflected prepositions. They fall into three main conjugations.Firstly those in -a- (at, am (stem: amdan-), ar, tan/dan):
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
Secondly those in -o- (er, heb, rhag, rhwng (stem: rhyng-), tros/dros, trwy/drwy (stem: trw-/drw-), o (stem: ohon-), yn). All apart from "o" add a linking element in the third person (usually -dd-, but -ydd- in the case of trwy/drwy, and -t- in the case of tros/dros):
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
Thirdly, those in -y- (gan and wrth). Gan includes both vowel changes and a linking element, whilst wrth has neither:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
Finally, the preposition "i" is highly irregular:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
All inflected prepositions may optionally be followed by the appropriate personal pronouns, apart from "i", where this is only possible in the third person, thanks to its proper endings in the other persons sounding the same as the pronouns. In slightly less formal Welsh, the endings are split off the first and second persons of "i" to be interpreted as pronouns instead, although this creates the anomalous pronoun "mi".
The majority of prepositions (am, ar, at, gan, heb, hyd, i, o, tan/dan, tros/dros, trwy/drwy, wrth) trigger the soft mutation. The exceptions are â, gyda, and tua, which cause the aspirate mutation; yn, which causes the nasal mutation; and cyn, ger, mewn, rhag, and rhwng, which do not cause any mutation.