Among the six thousand or so languages of the world the Welsh language is of an unusual but not rare type. Almost ninety percent of the languages of the world have sentence structures that are either Subject-Verb-Object like English or Subject-Object-Verb like Japanese. Welsh is one of the about nine percent which have the structure Verb-Subject-Object. With that sentence structure and the modification of the beginning rather than the end of a word to indicate some grammatical features Welsh appears to be a very strange language indeed to English speakers.

The vocabulary of Welsh however is not so exotic. Many of the words, particularly for of modern things, have been borrowed from English. The spelling may nevertheless make a familiar word seem exotic.

Here are the letters of Welsh and their nearest English equivalents.

The LL sound in Welsh is roughly equivalent to the sound produced by putting the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth and articulating a heavily aspirated H.

Grammar

Personal Pronouns

The Present Tense Conjugation of bod (to be)

The words yr and y in the above table are particles with no literal meaning.

The Present Participle of Verbs

The present participle of a verb in Welsh is formed by preceding it with the word yn. For example, the work for to play is chwarae so playing is yn chwarae. The present tense in Welsh can be formed by adding the present particple of the verb to the appropriate form of bod (to be). For examples consider:

• she is working: y mae hi yn gweithio
• he is playing: y mae ef yn chwarae

Articles

There is no indefinite article (a and an in English) in Welsh. The definite articles (corresponding to the in English) are y, yr and 'r. The rules for their use are:

• y is used before consonants
• yr is used before vowels and h
• 'r is used after vowels

When the definite articles (y, yr, 'r) before a singular feminine noun the initial sound in the noun is changed in a systematic way called mutation. This is described below. Mutation does not occur for masculine nouns or for plural feminine nouns. All nouns are either masculine or feminine.

The Formation of Plurals

In Welsh nouns and some adjectives may have plural forms. The plural form may be generated by several different different methods, but the most common is the first one listed below:

• Addition of Endings

  _au

  _iau

  _ion

  _ydd

  _i

  _od

  The most common endings for plural nouns are _au and _iau. For plural adjectives the most common ending for those that have such endings is _ion.

• Change of vowel with no addition of an ending
• Change of vowel with an addition of an ending

Formation of Negatives

Welsh forms a negative by bracketing the affirmative with two special markers in the same way as does French with ne....pas. The negative markers in Welsh are nid.....ddim. The negation of the forms of bod (to be) are:

The Formation of a Question

In spoken Welsch the rising inflection of the voice signals that a question is being asked. In written Welch a particle A is used to indicate a question. The conjugation of bod (to be) in question form is as follows:

Welsh does not have a word equivalent to yes so a question must be answered by a statement, preferably by an emphatic statement. In the above table, when a second version of a statement is given that second version is more emphatic than the first version.

(To be continued.)