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 is no case inflection
in Modern Welsh.
Modern Welsh can be written in two varieties — Colloquial Welsh or Literary Welsh
. The grammar described on this page is for Colloquial Welsh, which is used for speech and informal writing. Literary Welsh is closer to the form of Welsh used in the 1588 translation of the Bible and can be seen in formal writing.
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
), or when preceded by certain words, e. g. , , and . Welsh has three mutations: the soft mutation, the nasal mutation, and the aspirate mutation. These are also represented in writing:
* The soft mutation for g is the simple deletion of the initial sound. For example, "garden" becomes "the garden".
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 examples show usage in the standard language
; in practice there is some regional and idiolect
al variation in colloquial usage. In particular, the soft mutation is often used where nasal or aspirate mutation might be expected on the basis of these examples.
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.
Common situations where the limited soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive.
Common situations where the full soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive:
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 aspirate mutation also causes an h to be added before words beginning with a vowel (e.g. = age, = her age), although and before a vowel change to and and the word beginning with a vowel is itself unaffected.
. 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:
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), but otherwise there is no pattern, and gender simply must be learnt.
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 .
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.
Adjective comparison in Welsh is fairly similar to the English system. Adjectives with one or two syllables receive the endings "-er" and "-est", which change final b, d, g into p, t, c by provection
, e. g. "fair", "fairer", "fairest". Adjectives with two or more syllables use the words "more" and "most", e. g. "sensitive", "more sensitive", "most sensitive". Adjectives with two syllables can go either way.
These are the possessive adjectives:
The possessive adjectives precede the noun they qualify, which is often followed by the corresponding form of the personal pronoun, e.g. "my bread", "your bread", "his bread", etc.
The demonstrative adjectives are 'ma "this"' and 'na "that" (this usage derives from their original function as adverbs meaning "here" and "there" respectively). They follow the noun they qualify, which also takes the article. For example, "the book", "this book", "that book".
The Welsh masculine-feminine gender distinction is reflected in the pronouns. There is, consequently, no word corresponding to English "it", and the choice of (south and north Welsh respectively) 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:
and Russian
. 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. A third form, used almost exclusively in the language's northern varieties, is , which has a value close to ; as an independent pronoun it occurs especially frequently after a vowel sound at the end of the phrase (e.g. .
Note that there is no gender distinction in the third person singular.
s like "me too".
The term 'emphatic pronoun' is in fact misleading since they do not necessarily indicate emphasis. They are perhaps more correctly 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)
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".
There are four periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of : present, imperfect, future, and conditional. The preterite, future, and conditional tenses have a number of periphrastic constructions, but Welsh also maintains inflected forms of these tenses, demonstrated here with 'pay'.
In the preterite, questions are formed with the soft mutation on the verb, though increasingly the soft mutation is being used in all situations. Negative forms are expressed with ddim after the pronoun and the mixed mutation, though here the soft mutation is taking over ( for ).
The present tense in particular shows a split between the North and the South. Though the situation is undoubtedly more complicated, King (2003) notes the following variations in the present tense as spoken (not as written according to the standard orthography):
also has a conditional, for which there are two stems:
("not") is added after the subject for negative forms of
A few verbs which have in the verbnoun display certain irregular characteristics of itself. is the most irregular of these. It has preterite and conditional forms, which are often used with present and imperfect meaning, respectively. The present is conjugated irregularly:
The common phrase "I don't know" uses a special negative form of the first person present.
The forms often appear as in writing, and in places in Wales these are also heard in speech.
In the conditional, there is considerable variation between the North and South forms of these four irregular verbs. That is partly because the North form corresponds to the Middle Welsh (and Literary Welsh) imperfect indicative, while the South form corresponds to the Middle Welsh (and Literary Welsh) imperfect subjunctive.
There is some dialectal variation, particularly in the first and second person singular forms. In some places one may hear or
The majority of prepositions trigger the soft 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 is no case inflection
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 Modern Welsh.
Modern Welsh can be written in two varieties — Colloquial Welsh or Literary Welsh
Literary Welsh morphology
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...
. The grammar described on this page is for Colloquial Welsh, which is used for speech and informal writing. Literary Welsh is closer to the form of Welsh used in the 1588 translation of the Bible and can be seen in formal writing.
Initial consonant mutation
Initial consonant mutationConsonant 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...
), or when preceded by certain words, e. g. , , and . 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). The examples show usage in the standard language
Standard language
A standard language is a language variety used by a group of people in their public discourse. Alternatively, varieties become standard by undergoing a process of standardization, during which it is organized for description in grammars and dictionaries and encoded in such reference works...
; in practice there is some regional and idiolect
Idiolect
In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection , grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual. Every individual's language production is in some sense unique...
al variation in colloquial usage. In particular, the soft mutation is often used where nasal or aspirate mutation might be expected on the basis of these examples.
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.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.
Common situations where the limited soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive.
- feminine singular nouns with the definite article or the number one
- nouns or adjectives used predicatively or adverbially after
- adjectives following ("so"), ("too") or ("fairly, very")
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"), ("on"), ("to"), ("under"), ("over"), ("through"), ("without"), ("until"), ("by"), ("from"), ("to"), ("of")
- nouns used with the number two
- nouns following adjectives (N.B. most adjectives follow the noun)
- nouns after the possessives (informal your) and (when it means his)
- an object immediately following the subject (typically after conjugated verbs)
- the second element in many compound words
- verb infinitives following an indirect object (e.g. - it is necessary to me to go)
- inflected verbs in the interrogative and negative (also frequently, in the spoken language, the affirmative)
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 – generally pronounced – ( "my") e.g. ("a bed"), ("my bed"), pronounced
- after the locative preposition ("in") e.g. ("TywynTywynTywyn is a town and seaside resort on the Cardigan Bay coast of southern Gwynedd , in north Wales. The name derives from the Welsh tywyn and the town is sometimes referred to as Tywyn Meirionnydd...
"), ("in Tywyn") - after the negating prefix ("un-") 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")
- after ("with")
- for masculine nouns after the number three
- after the number six
The aspirate mutation also causes an h to be added before words beginning with a vowel (e.g. = age, = her age), although and before a vowel change to and and the word beginning with a vowel is itself unaffected.
Mixed mutation
A mixed mutation occurs when negating conjugated 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") and ("I said") are negated as ("I heard nothing") and ("I said nothing").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.
- When the word begins with a vowel, is used, e.g. ("the garden").
- In all other places, is used, e.g. ("the boy").
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), but otherwise there is no pattern, and gender simply must be learnt.
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 .
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, while some, such as and precede it. For the most part, adjectives are uninflected, though there are a few which maintain distinct masculine/feminine or singular/plural distinctions. After feminine singular nouns, adjectives receive the soft mutation.Adjective comparison in Welsh is fairly similar to the English system. Adjectives with one or two syllables receive the endings "-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", "fairer", "fairest". Adjectives with two or more syllables use the words "more" and "most", e. g. "sensitive", "more sensitive", "most sensitive". Adjectives with two syllables can go either way.
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 often followed by the corresponding form of the personal pronoun, e.g. "my bread", "your bread", "his bread", etc.
The demonstrative adjectives are 'ma "this"' and 'na "that" (this usage derives from their original function as adverbs meaning "here" and "there" respectively). They follow the noun they qualify, which also takes the article. For example, "the book", "this book", "that book".
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 (south and north Welsh respectively) 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, as is in FrenchFrench 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...
and Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
. 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. A third form, used almost exclusively in the language's northern varieties, is , which has a value close to ; as an independent pronoun it occurs especially frequently after a vowel sound at the end of the phrase (e.g. .
Reflexive pronouns
The reflexive pronouns are formed with the possessive adjective followed by "self". There is variation between North and South forms. The first person singular possessive pronoun fy is often heard as if it were spelt yn.| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| North | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| South | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
Note that there is no gender distinction in the third person singular.
Emphatic pronouns
Welsh has special emphatic forms of the personal pronouns. They are perhaps not extremely common in lower registers of the language, though they are nevertheless alive, especially in set phraseSet phrase
A set phrase or fixed phrase is a phrase whose parts are fixed, even if the phrase could be changed without harming the literal meaning. This is because a set phrase is a culturally accepted phrase. A set phrase does not necessarily have any literal meaning in and of itself. Set phrases may...
s like "me too".
The term 'emphatic pronoun' is in fact misleading since they do not necessarily indicate emphasis. They are perhaps more correctly 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 Colloquial Welsh, the majority of tenses make use of an auxiliary verb, usually "to be". Its conjugation is dealt with in Irregular Verbs below.There are four periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of : present, imperfect, future, and conditional. The preterite, future, and conditional tenses have a number of periphrastic constructions, but Welsh also maintains inflected forms of these tenses, demonstrated here with 'pay'.
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Preterite | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Future | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
| Conditional | First Person | ||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | |||
- Notes on the preterite:
- First and second singular forms may in less formal registers be written as and , though there is no difference in pronunciation since there is a basic rule of pronunciation that unstressed final syllables alter the pronunciation of the /aj/ diphthong.
- Word-final -f is rarely heard in Welsh. Thus verbal forms in -af will be pronounced as if they ended in /a/ and they may be written thus in lower registers.
- In some parts of Wales -s- may be inserted between the stem and plural forms.
- In parts of South Wales forms like are heard for .
- Notes on the future:
- is used instead of , thus , not .
- Forms like may appear instead of in some southern parts of Wales.
- Note that the future was formerly also used as an inflected present. A small amount of frozen forms use the future forms as a present habitual: mi godaf i am ddeg o'r gloch bob bore - I get up at ten o' clock every morning
- Notes on the conditional:
- -s- may be inserted between the stem and endings.
In the preterite, questions are formed with the soft mutation on the verb, though increasingly the soft mutation is being used in all situations. Negative forms are expressed with ddim after the pronoun and the mixed mutation, though here the soft mutation is taking over ( for ).
and compounds
Bod 'to be' is highly irregular. In addition to having inflected forms of the preterite, future, and conditional, it also maintains inflected present and imperfect forms which are used frequently as auxiliaries with other verbs. Bod also distinguishes between affirmative, interrogative, and negative statements for each tense.The present tense in particular shows a split between the North and the South. Though the situation is undoubtedly more complicated, King (2003) notes the following variations in the present tense as spoken (not as written according to the standard orthography):
| Affirmative (I am) | Interrogative (Am I?) | Negative (I am not) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | ||
| North | First Person | ||||||
| Second Person | —, | ||||||
| Third Person | |||||||
| South | First Person | , — | |||||
| Second Person | —, | — | |||||
| Third Person | |||||||
| Affirmative (I am) | Interrogative (Am I?) | Negative (I am not) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | ||
| Preterite | First Person | ||||||
| Second Person | |||||||
| Third Person | |||||||
| Imperfect | First Person | ||||||
| Second Person | |||||||
| Third Person | |||||||
| Future | First Person | ||||||
| Second Person | |||||||
| Third Person | |||||||
also has a conditional, for which there are two stems:
| Affirmative | Interrogative | Negative | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | ||
| First Person | |||||||
| Second Person | |||||||
| Third Person | |||||||
| First Person | |||||||
| Second Person | |||||||
| Third Person | |||||||
("not") is added after the subject for negative forms of
- There are many dialectal variations of this verb.
- Colloquially the imperfect tense forms are and . These are used for the declarative, interrogative and negative.
- In speech the future and conditional forms often receive the soft mutation in all situations.
- Welsh and other Celtic languages are unusual among the European languages in having no fixed words for "yes" and "no". If a question has a verb at its head, the relevant part of that verb is used in the answer e.g.: (Are you liking coffee? = Do you like coffee?) then either (I am = I do = Yes) or (I am not = I do not = No)
A few verbs which have in the verbnoun display certain irregular characteristics of itself. is the most irregular of these. It has preterite and conditional forms, which are often used with present and imperfect meaning, respectively. The present is conjugated irregularly:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| First Person | ||
| Second Person | ||
| Third Person |
The common phrase "I don't know" uses a special negative form of the first person present.
and
The four verbs "to go", "to do", "to get", and "to come" are all irregular in similar ways.| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preterite | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| Future | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
The forms often appear as in writing, and in places in Wales these are also heard in speech.
In the conditional, there is considerable variation between the North and South forms of these four irregular verbs. That is partly because the North form corresponds to the Middle Welsh (and Literary Welsh) imperfect indicative, while the South form corresponds to the Middle Welsh (and Literary Welsh) imperfect subjunctive.
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| North | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
| South | First Person | ||||||||
| Second Person | |||||||||
| Third Person | |||||||||
Prepositions
In Welsh, prepositions frequently change their form when followed by a pronoun. These are known as inflected prepositions. Most of them, such as , follow the same basic pattern:| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | |||
| Second Person | |||
| Third Person | Masculine | ||
| Feminine | |||
There is some dialectal variation, particularly in the first and second person singular forms. In some places one may hear or
The majority of prepositions trigger the soft mutation.