Questions about Welsh

[Yng]

golff gwirion means 'silly golf' and is not a collocation I've ever seen. I don't know what the normal collocation for 'crazy golf' is - I would just say it in English - but golff gwyllt seems like a more obvious calque.

[Jonlang]

golff gwirion means 'silly golf' and is not a collocation I've ever seen. I don't know what the normal collocation for 'crazy golf' is - I would just say it in English - but golff gwyllt seems like a more obvious calque.

Fair enough, "golff gwirion" was suggested by someone on Facebook, so I just accepted it.

Why is it "ar gopa" and not "ar y gopa"?

[Yng]

copa Pen y Gogarth means 'the top of the Great Orme'. y copa o Ben y Gogarth is a calque on English.

[Jonlang]

copa Pen y Gogarth means 'the top of the Great Orme'. y copa o Ben y Gogarth is a calque on English.

Thanks!

[Jonlang]

So last night I learnt that dim is actually a positive word and not negative!

[Yng]

I mean not really. Maybe etymologically, but not in modern Welsh.

[Jonlang]

I mean not really. Maybe etymologically, but not in modern Welsh.

True. It came about via a Facebook group when I asked how the phrase "dim byd" came to mean "nothing" when it looks as if it should mean "no world"... and someone posted this photo of a page from a book called A Guide to Correct Welsh:

[Travis B.]

When something insists on something as being correct usage, it is a good sign that it really isn't used that way in everyday speech, as if it were, there would be no need to insist that such-and-such is correct.

[Jonlang]

When something insists on something as being correct usage, it is a good sign that it really isn't used that way in everyday speech, as if it were, there would be no need to insist that such-and-such is correct.

But it helps with understanding. The entry on dim for instance kind of explains how i'r ddim means "perfect" when "dim" is seen as negative.

[Yng]

Yeah, the wording is unfortunate but there are definitely a few expressions which are mystifying if you don't know dim originally had a positive meaning. But nobody would say ni welais ddim to mean 'I didn't see anything' - dim has been totally bleached, and this isn't just prescriptive usage, it's plain wrong.

[Jonlang]

Yeah, the wording is unfortunate but there are definitely a few expressions which are mystifying if you don't know dim originally had a positive meaning. But nobody would say ni welais ddim to mean 'I didn't see anything' - dim has been totally bleached, and this isn't just prescriptive usage, it's plain wrong.

Gwelais i ddim byd?

[Yng]

The literary-ish form would be ni welais ddim byd, less literary forms include welais i ddim byd, weles i ddim byd etc

[Znex]

Would weles i'm byd work too?

[Jonlang]

Would weles i'm byd work too?

Yeah I think so, I'm sure I've seen ddim shortened to 'm

[Yng]

Yes!

[Jonlang]

I've been thinking about the Welsh irregular verbs, there's something rather pleasing about their construction - like how mynd, gwneud, cael and dod all follow similar patterns like es i, nes i, ces i and des i. But what I'm wondering is how did they become this way? Were they just shortened due to the frequency of their use? Obviously "es i" is quicker and easier than "myndais i" which I'm guessing mynd would be if it were not irregular.

[Znex]

It might help if we have a look at the Literary Welsh forms as well.

Literary Welsh has:
euthum aethost aeth...
gwneuthum gwnaethost gwnaeth...
cefais cefaist cafodd/cafas...
deuthum daethost daeth...
bod: bûm buost bu...

Modern/Colloquial Welsh has:
es est aeth...
nes nest naeth...
ces cest caeth/cafodd...
des dest daeth... (alt: dois doist dôth...)
bod: bues buest buodd/bu

[Yng]

I'm not entirely sure about the etymology. mynd and es, aeth etc are probably suppletive, i.e. originally from different words (like 'go' and 'went'). There may have been at one point more irregular verbs than there currently are, but they became regular by analogy. The irregular verbs themselves seem to be conceptualised as a separate conjugation class, as in colloquial Welsh their conjugations often line up almost exactly, having been reformed by analogy with one another.

As Znex points out, in older Welsh the forms were actually very different from the modern forms and much more differentiated from another. All but cael preserved a different 1sg suffix (-um), for example, whilst their 3sg was formed with the bare past stem (gwnaeth- for example). Cael itself seems to have actually been basically regular, albeit with a stem (caf-) that was not predictable from its verbnoun - but that's hardly unusual. The -as, incidentally, is just a very archaic form of -odd you occasionally see in very old literary texts.

What seems to have happened is that the -aeth form we see (which might represent some kind of past formant historically, I don't know) gets reanalysed as a past suffix and then the past tense forms are restructured and regularised around that - so the stem becomes d- or for mynd is a zero morpheme. Cael also got adopted into this group of verbs and formed in the same way.

This process has parallels in the nonpast, where the literary 3sg suffix is actually -a and lots of verbs have forms which have no suffix and stem modification (that is, the literary 3sg is the same as the 2sg imperative). So we have for example gwyr 'he knows', câr 'he loves', daw 'he comes', â 'he goes' etc. In colloquial Welsh this was restructured to have either -ith or -iff as the suffix (depending on the dialect), based - it seems - on cael's form caiff 'he gets' whose -iff was reanalysed as a suffix.

[Jonlang]

Crap. That's much more complicated than I hoped it would be... Thankfully it's more to do with selecting which verbs to make irregular for my conlang (and deciding how and why they are) than helping with Welsh. I don't really need to know why irregular verbs are irregular to learn the language, after all I don't know why English irregular verbs are irregular.

[Znex]

If anything, it tends to be the case that the most used words are the most irregular; or rather, the words that preserve the more features. Hence why pronouns usually preserve cases in languages like English, and why verbs like {be} and {go} have many and varied forms. Less used words on the other hand tend to conform more to the more used words and adopt one pattern or the other.

Most used is not necessarily the same as the most basic though, and it may be the case that one language has and uses more irregular forms than other languages around it (eg. Classical Greek).

[Jonlang]

If anything, it tends to be the case that the most used words are the most irregular; or rather, the words that preserve the more features. Hence why pronouns usually preserve cases in languages like English, and why verbs like {be} and {go} have many and varied forms. Less used words on the other hand tend to conform more to the more used words and adopt one pattern or the other.

Most used is not necessarily the same as the most basic though, and it may be the case that one language has and uses more irregular forms than other languages around it (eg. Classical Greek).

My thoughts were that it had something to do with frequency of use, because Welsh's are [to be], [to go], [to do/make], [to get] and [to come] which are all things people say a great deal in every day speech. I mean bod, mynd and gwneud are all introduced in the first SSiW lesson. But I was surprised to see that other Celtic languages don't all have the same irregular verbs, I thought there'd be a good deal of crossover, though if I remember rightly there is more crossover between Welsh and Breton than there is with Welsh and Cornish.

[Jonlang]

How do you know when to use soft mutation for the object of a sentence?

Nes i weld tair cath or;
Nes i weld dair cath or;
Nes i weld dair gath or;
Nes i weld tair gath?

[Yng]

It's only the object of a conjugated verb that comes directly after either the verb or the subject pronoun. None of your sentences would have the mutation, or rather, all of them already do - on gweld (which is the object of naeth):

gwelodd e gi
pwy a welodd gi?
fe a welodd gi

But:

gwelodd e'r ci
pwy a welodd y ci?
welodd o ddim ci
welodd o mo'r ci

[Jonlang]

It's only the object of a conjugated verb that comes directly after either the verb or the subject pronoun. None of your sentences would have the mutation, or rather, all of them already do - on gweld (which is the object of naeth):

gwelodd e gi
pwy a welodd gi?
fe a welodd gi

But:

gwelodd e'r ci
pwy a welodd y ci?
welodd o ddim ci
welodd o mo'r ci

Ah okay. So what ever verb-noun comes after "nes i" (or it's other forms) is mutated. I'm going to try to concentrate on Northern from now on as that's what I'm learning, as I live in Denbighshire, trying to get to grips with two dialects may be too much for now.

[Yng]

Yes.

naeth o weld...
naeth o ddim gweld
hoffwn i weld