wow there've been a lot of responses!!!
Richard W wrote:Roedd y plant yn chwarae yn y parc = 'The children played/were playing in the park'.
I've a feeling the English tenses etc. don't map cleanly into the Welsh ones. Somewhere in the system there should be something like Chwaraeodd y plant yn y parc = 'The children played in the park'; I'm not sure if it's colloquial Welsh, and I have little confidence I have inflected the verb correctly.
This is fine, though I would be more likely to say
naeth y plant chwarae - synthetic preterite is not used that much up north. I would write
chwaraeodd though.The Welsh tenses do actually line up pretty well with the English ones, except that maybe there's more of a tendency to use the continuous (as you also find in some Wenglish dialects), especially with e.g. verbs of opinion (
o'n i'n meddwl, gwyddwn i/o'n i'n gwbod, etc)
There is or was an inflected imperfect but this has merged with the past subjunctive in the modern language (same as in Scots Gaelic) and is used for habitual action in the past, in statements like, "When I was a kid we all used to play/would play in the street". Even here though the imperfect of 'bod' with 'yn' + verbal noun, feels more natural, "Pan oeddwn i'n blentyn, bydden ni i gyd yn chwarae yn y stryd", literally '... we would all be playing/ we all used to play'
There's no inflected imperfect anymore except for a couple of verbs (colloquially, that is; Literary Welsh is different). Those verbs that do have it tend to use it only for conditional constructions (
hoffwn i etc in some dialects). In some South Walian dialects, which are the most synthetic, most verbs can take these endings but they're only used for conditionals.
That's a bit odd. I'm used to a different kind of ambiguity, one where the future is used with habitual meaning. So Ydy Bethan yn siopa yn Llundain? would mean only "Is Bethan shopping in London?" whereas Fydd Bethan yn siopa yn Llundain? could mean either "Will Bethan be shopping in London?" or "Does Bethan shop in London?"
This depends entirely on context. The
bydd habitual is, I think, a solidly Northern dialect form, and is interchangeable (IME) with the forms with
ydy.
Something else which has bugged me about Welsh - when I was at primary school (so under 11 years old) we had to do certain things in Welsh, like ask for permission to visit the toilet, answer the attendance register, write the date (except in English lessons) etc. We were taught to ask the time by asking Faint o'gloch ydych chi? which appears to mean something like How much o'clock are you?. I have since learnt that most people say beth yw'r amser? which seems to make more sense. So is Faint o'gloch ydych chi? a more polite phrasing which doesn't translate properly into English?
This will be
faint o'r gloch ydy hi? ('how much o' clock is it?'), which we all had to learn in school - you can say that or
beth ydy'r amser. The latter is possibly more English-y, but both are used.
There are also a few adjectives with (optional?) plural forms too.
Almost all adjectives have optional literary plural forms formed with various endings (though mainly
-ion or
-on) or possibly with some vowel shift, although I can't think of any that work like that right now. Some Northwestern speakers have plural forms for colours and a couple of other adjectives (ironically I have heard
daon as a plural of
da even though that particular adjective is invariable even in Literary Welsh). Northern dialects love preserving relatively high degrees of synthesis in a small number of irregular members of a given class (certain irregular verbs also tend to have periphrastic futures and sometimes preterites in Northern dialects, for some reason, but the morphology is not productive with most verbs).
