Colloquial Welsh morphology


The morphology of the Welsh language has many characteristics likely to be 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, number, 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, and spoken, in several levels of formality, for example colloquial or literary, as well as different dialects. 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 William Morgan's 1588 translation of the Bible and can be seen in formal writing. It does not reflect the spoken language presented here.

Initial consonant mutation

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 first millennium AD; nor was there any evidence of this in the Insular Celtic Languages around the 500s.
The first consonant of a word in Welsh may change when preceded by certain words, or because of some other grammatical context can often be heard in Wales and the mutated form jips is also common. Dw i'n mynd i gael tsips ; Mae gen i jips. Despite this the 'ts' → 'j' mutation is not usually included the classic list of Welsh mutations and is rarely taught in formal classes. Nevertheless, it is a part of the colloquial language and is used by native, first-language speakers.
The word for "stone" is carreg, but "the stone" is y garreg, "my stone" is fy ngharreg and "her stone" is ei charreg. These examples represent usage in the standard language; there is some regional and idiolectal 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.
Mutation is not triggered by the form of the preceding word; the meaning and grammatical function of the word are also relevant. For example, while yn meaning "in" triggers nasal mutation, homonyms of yn do not. For example:
The soft mutation 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 include -
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, Llanfair is the church of Mair, and Pontardawe is the bridge on the Tawe.

Nasal mutation

The nasal mutation normally occurs:
Under aspirate mutation, unvoiced stops become fricatives. This is represented by the addition of an h after the original initial consonant, but the resultant forms are pronounced as single phonemes.
The aspirate mutation occurs:
Aspirate mutation is the least-used mutation in colloquial Welsh. The only word that it always follows in everyday language is ei and it is also found in set phrases, e.g. mwy na thebyg . Its occurrence is unusual in the colloquial Southern phrase dyna pham as dyna causes the soft mutation, not aspirate mutation.

Mixed mutation

A mixed mutation occurs when negating conjugated verbs. Initial consonants undergo aspirate mutation if subject to it, and soft mutation if not. For example, clywais i and dwedais i are negated as chlywais i ddim and ddwedais i ddim. In practice, soft mutation is often used even when aspirate mutation would be possible ; this reflects the fact that aspirate mutation is in general infrequent in the colloquial language.

''h''-Prothesis

Under some circumstances an h is added to the beginning of words that begin with vowels, a process called 'h-prothesis'. This occurs after the possessive pronouns ei, ein and eu, e.g. oedran, ei hoedran hi. It also occurs with ugain after ar in the traditional counting system, e.g. un ar hugain.
Although aspirate mutation also involves the addition of h in spelling, the environments for aspirate mutation and initial h addition do not overlap except for ei.

The article

Indefinite article

Welsh has no indefinite article. This means that indefiniteness is implied by the lack of definite article or determiner. The noun cath, therefore, means both 'cat' and 'a cat'.
English has no plural indefinite article proper, but often uses the word 'some' in place of one: compare "I have an apple" and "I have some apples", where the word 'some' is being used as an article because the English language calls for something in this position, compare "I have apples" and "I have some apples", the former is rarely encountered in English. In these types of English sentences, the word 'some' is therefore left untranslated due to there being no concept on an indefinite article in Welsh: mae gen i afalau.

Definite article

The definite article, which precedes the words it modifies and whose usage differs little from that of English, has the forms y, yr, and ’r. The rules governing their usage are:
The article triggers the soft mutation when it is used with feminine singular nouns, e.g. tywysoges " princess" but y dywysoges.
The definite article is used in Welsh where it would not be used in English in the following ways:
As in most other Indo-European languages, all nouns belong to a certain grammatical gender; the genders in Welsh are masculine and feminine. A noun's gender usually conforms to its referent's natural gender when it has one, but otherwise there are no major patterns and gender must simply 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. Most nouns form the plural with an ending, e.g. tad and tadau. Others form the plural through vowel change, e.g. bachgen and bechgyn. Still others form their plurals through some combination of the two, e.g. chwaer and chwiorydd.
A few nouns also display a dual number, e.g. llaw, "hand", dwylo, " hands".
The other system of number is the singulative. The nouns in this system form the singular by adding the suffix -yn or -en to the plural. Most nouns which belong in this system are frequently found in groups, for example, plant "children" and plentyn "a child", or coed "trees" and coeden "a tree". In dictionaries, the plural is often given first.

Adjectives

Adjectives normally follow the noun they qualify, while a few, such as hen, pob, annwyl, and holl precede it. For the most part, adjectives are uninflected, though there are a few with distinct masculine/feminine or singular/plural forms. 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 -ach "-er" and -a "-est", which change final b, d, g into p, t, c by provection, e. g. teg "fair", tecach "fairer", teca "fairest". Adjectives with two or more syllables use the words mwy "more" and mwya "most", e. g. teimladwy "sensitive", mwy teimladwy "more sensitive", mwya teimladwy "most sensitive". Adjectives with two syllables can go either way.
There is an additional degree of comparison, the equative, meaning "as... as...".
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. fy mara i "my bread", dy fara di "your bread", ei fara fe "his bread", etc. The corresponding pronoun is often dropped in the spoken language, fy mara, dy fara, ei fara and ei bara.
The possessive adjective fy is most often heard as 'yn or 'y followed by the mutated noun. For example, bara would likely be heard as 'y mara.
The demonstrative adjectives are yma "this"' and yna "that". When used in this context they are almost always shortened to 'ma and 'na. They follow the noun they qualify, which also takes the article. For example, y llyfr "the book", y llyfr 'ma "this book", y llyfr 'na "that book"; literally the book here and the book there.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns

The Welsh personal pronouns are:
The Welsh masculine-feminine gender distinction is reflected in the pronouns. There is, consequently, no word corresponding to English "it", and the choice of e/o or hi 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, Indo-Aryan or Slavic languages. Unlike other masculine-feminine languages, which often default to the masculine pronoun in the construction, Welsh uses the feminine singular hi, thus producing sentences like:

vs.

Chi, in addition to serving as the second-person plural pronoun, is also used as a singular in formal situations, as is in French and Russian. Conversely, ti 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. An alternative form of ti, used almost exclusively in some north-western dialects, is chdi, ti; as an independent pronoun it occurs especially frequently after a vowel sound at the end of the phrase.

Reflexive pronouns

The reflexive pronouns are formed with the possessive adjective followed by hun "self". There is variation between North and South forms. The first person singular possessive pronoun fy is usually pronounced as if spelt y.
Note that there is no gender distinction in the third person singular.

Emphatic pronouns

Welsh has special emphatic forms of the personal pronouns.
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.
Literary standard forms are given in brackets.
The emphatic pronouns can be used with possessive adjectives in the same way as the simple pronouns are used.

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.
In certain expressions, hyn may represent "now" and hynny may represent "then".

Verbs

In Colloquial Welsh, the majority of tenses make use of an auxiliary verb, usually bod "to be" or gwneud. The conjugation of bod is dealt with in Irregular Verbs below.
There are four periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of bod: 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 talu '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.

Irregular verbs

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 notes the following variations in the present tense as spoken :
Bod also has a conditional, for which there are two stems:
A few verbs which have bod in the verbnoun display certain irregular characteristics of bod itself. Gwybod 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 dwn i ddim "I don't know" uses a special negative form of the first person present. The initial d- in this form originates in the negative particle nid: nid wn i > nid wn i ddim > dwn i ddim. Such a development is restricted to a very small set of verb forms, principally this form of gwybod and various forms of bod."

and

The four verb-nouns mynd "to go", gwneud "to do", cael "to get", and dod "to come" are all irregular in similar ways.
The forms caeth, caethon, caethoch often appear as cafodd, cawson, cawsoch 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 imperfect indicative, while the South form corresponds to the Middle Welsh imperfect subjunctive.

Prepositions

Prepositions are words like on, at, to, from, by and for in English. They often describe a relationship, spatial or temporal, between persons and objects. For example, 'the book is on the table'; 'the table is by the window'.
There are approximately two-dozen or so simple prepositions in modern colloquial Welsh. While some have clear-cut and obvious translations, others correspond to different English prepositions depending on context. As with all areas of modern Welsh, some words are preferred in the North and others in the South.
The main prepositions used in modern colloquial Welsh are:
Most of these share the following characteristics:
  1. they cause mutation of the following word
  2. they inflect for person and number, similar to verbs
  3. they can be used with a following verbal noun
Inflected prepositions
When used with a personal pronoun, most prepositions insert a linking syllable before the pronoun. This syllable changes for each preposition and results in an inflection pattern similar to that found in Welsh verbs. Broadly speaking, the endings for inflected prepositions are as follows: