Colloquial Welsh morphology

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 of an indefinite article in Welsh: mae gen i afalau ('I have [some] apples'). Definite article 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 following word (usually a noun) begins with a vowel or h, is used, e.g. ("the garden"), ("the sun"). "w" counts as a vowel in words such as ("the face"), ("the week"); similarly "i" in ("the language"). (But sometimes is heard before and .) • In all other places, is used, e.g. ("the boy"). "w" counts as a consonant in words such as ("the country"), ("the web"). The article triggers the soft mutation when it is used with feminine singular nouns, e.g. "(a) princess" but ("the princess"). The definite article is used in Welsh where it would not be used in English in the following ways: • To prevent a noun from being indefinite. In an English sentence like ''I'm going to school, the noun school has no article, but the listener is expected to know which school is being talked about. In Welsh this noun (ysgol) would take the definite article: dw i'n mynd i'r ysgol'' ('I'm going to school'). • With demonstratives like this and that, which in Welsh are phrases equivalent to English the... here (this) and the... there (that), e.g. ''y bore 'ma (this morning); y gadair 'na'' (that chair). • In certain places where English uses an indefinite article. English phrases like one pound per kilogram / one pound a kilogram replace the indefinite article with the definite article, e.g. un bunt y cilogram. • In genitive constructions. English can again get away with no article in these phrases, e.g. Town Hall, City Centre. In Welsh these call for use of the definite article, e.g. Neuadd y Dref (Town Hall, lit. "hall of the town"); Canol y Ddinas (City Centre, lit. "centre of the city"). ==Nouns==

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 (e.g. 'mother' is grammatically feminine), but otherwise there are no major patterns (except that, as in many languages, certain noun suffixes show a consistent gender, as sometimes do nouns referring to certain classes of thing, e.g. all months of the year in Welsh are masculine) 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 noun plurals are unpredictable and formed in several ways, since the plural form cannot be discerned simply by its singular form. Most nouns form the plural with a suffix (the most common, by far, is ), e.g. . Others form the plural through vowel change (a process known as affection in Celtic languages), e.g. 'boy / boys'. Still others form their plurals through some combination of the two, e.g. 'sister / sisters'. A few nouns also display a dual number, e.g. 'hand', '(two) hands', though also has the general plural . The dual comes from combining with the feminine numeral 'two'; is only used to refer to the hands of a single person, else is used, e.g. 'your hands', 'your hands', 'my hands', 'our hands', but 'people have hands'. is used for 'a period of two months' and is 'a period of two days', these using rather than . Welsh also has a special 'plural' for 'a period of three days', which is commonly used across Wales. The other system of grammatical number is the collective/singulative. The nouns in this system form the singulative by adding the suffix (for masculine nouns) or (for feminine nouns) to the collective noun. Most nouns which belong in this system are frequently found in groups, for example, "children" and "a child", or "trees" and "a tree". In dictionaries, the collective form, being the root form, is given first. ==Adjectives==

Adjectives normally follow the noun they qualify, while a few, such as hen, pob, annwyl, and holl ("old", "every", "dear", "whole") 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 "-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. There is an additional degree of comparison, the equative, meaning "as ... as ...", e. g. "as big as a tree", where is the equative form of "big, great, much". Possessive adjectives The usual method of showing possession in Welsh is to place the nouns or noun phrases in apposition. The possessed noun is placed before the possessor of the noun. For example, ‘Dewi’s ship’ or ’town centre’, literally ‘centre the town’. For this reason those which English describes as possessive pronouns Welsh describes as possessive adjectives. These possessive adjectives are placed before the noun and the corresponding pronoun follows it, effectively “sandwiching” the noun between the possessive adjective and the pronoun: ‘my car’, literally ‘my car me’. As can be seen from this example, singular possessive adjectives are triggers of consonant mutation. These are the possessive adjectives: The corresponding pronoun is often dropped in the spoken language, 'my bread', 'your bread’, etc. Some speakers will even keep the pronoun and drop the adjective: ‘my bread’, , etc., though this is non-standard. The possessive adjective is most often heard as or followed by the mutated noun. For example, ('bread') would likely be heard as ('my bread'). The demonstrative adjectives are yma "this"' and yna "that" (this usage derives from their original function as adverbs meaning "here" and "there" respectively). When used in this context they are almost always shortened to and . They follow the noun they qualify, which also takes the article. For example, "the book", "this book", "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 (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, 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 , thus producing sentences like: : : It's raining. : : It was cold last night. However, colloquially the pronoun is often omitted when it would be translated as "it" in English, leaving: : : It's raining. : : It was cold last night. Notes on the forms Third-person masculine singular forms and are heard in parts of mid- and north Wales, while and are heard in parts of mid-, west and south Wales. The pronoun forms , and are used as subjects after a verb. In the inflected future of the verbs , and , first-person singular constructions like may be heard. , and are also used as objects with compound prepositions, for example 'in front of him'. , and are used after conjunctions and non-inflected prepositions, and also as the object of an inflected verb: : : Did you see him over the weekend? and exclusively are used as subjects with the inflected conditional: : : He ought to buy you a new one. Both , and and , and are heard with inflected prepositions, as objects of verbal nouns, and also as following pronouns with their respective possessive adjectives: : : Have you seen him today? : : I can't find my keys. The use of first-person singular is limited in the spoken language, appearing in "to/for me" or as the subject with the verb , used in a preterite construction. is found most often as the second-person singular pronoun, however is used as the subject of inflected future forms, as a reinforcement in the imperative, and as following pronoun to the possessive adjective "your ..." vs. , 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, 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 , used almost exclusively in some north-western dialects, is ; 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 usually pronounced as if spelt . : 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 misleading since they do not always indicate emphasis. They are perhaps more correctly termed 'conjunctive, connective or distinctive pronouns' since they are used to indicate a connection between or distinction from another nominal element. For example, 'minnau' may on occasion be best translated 'I/me, for my part'; 'I/me, on the other hand', 'I/me, however', or even simply 'I/me'. Full contextual information is necessary to interpret their function in any given sentence. : 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 While the singular demonstrative pronouns this and that have separate forms for masculine and feminine, there is only a single plural form in each case (these, those). This is consistent with a general principle in Welsh that gender is not marked in the plural. The latter forms are also often used for intangible, figurative, or general ideas (though cf. also the use of 'hi' discussed above). : In certain expressions, may represent "now" and may represent "then". ==Verbs==

In Colloquial Welsh, the majority of tenses and moods make use of an auxiliary verb, usually "to be" or gwneud "to do". The conjugation of bod is dealt with in Irregular Verbs below. There are five periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of : present, imperfect, future, and (less often) pluperfect; these are used variously in the indicative, conditional and (rarely) subjunctive. 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' (pluperfect conjugation is rarely found beyond the verb 'bod'). : • 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 /ai/ 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 some dialects, 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. • 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- or, -as, may be inserted between the stem and endings in the preterite and conditional (thus overlapping with the pluperfect in the latter case). Questions are formed by effecting soft mutation on the verb (the effect of the interrogative particle 'a', often elided in speech and informal writing), 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 in informal registers ( for ). Irregular verbs and compounds Bod 'to be' is 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 has separate conjugations for (a) affirmative and (b) interrogative and negative forms of the present indicative (there are also further variations in the third person singular, in the context of dependent clauses). The apparent high irregularity of this tense can be simplified and rationalised by tracing back the divergences to the standard formal written forms: e.g. 'dyw e ddim' and 'dydy e ddim' or 'dydi o ddim' (he is not) can all be seen as informal variants of 'nid ydyw ef (ddim)'. The present tense in particular shows divergence between north and southern dialects. 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 • 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" (although many speakers do use 'ie' and 'na' in ways that mimic English usage). 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: : The common phrase "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 : > > . Such a development is restricted to a very small set of verb forms, principally this form of and various forms of (e.g. , from and respectively)." and The four verb-nouns "to go", "to do", "to get", and "to come" are all irregular in similar ways. : 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. : ==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 (heb ‘without’), others correspond to different English prepositions depending on context (i, wrth, am). 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: • â • am • ar • at • cyn • [o] dan (tan) • dros (tros) • efo (hefo) • gan • ger • gyda • heb • hyd • i • mewn • o • oddiar (oddi ar) • oddiwrth (oddi wrth) • rhag • rhwng • tan • trwy (drwy) • tua • wrth • yn Most of these (but not all) share the following characteristics: • they cause mutation of the following word • they inflect for person and number, similar to verbs • 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: : == Notes ==