Talk:Colloquial Welsh morphology

message: A whole bucketload of references and further reading that can be added to this article can be found here. Uncle G 19:05, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  References and further reading 

message: I've added some information about the limited version of the soft mutation, which does not mutate "rh" or "ll", and have given instances where it occurs accordingly. However, by doing this I have had to divide the list of contexts in which the soft mutation occurs into a list for the limited version and a list for the full version. As a result, I put all the contexts of the limited soft mutation that I know of into that list, but put the remainder in the list for the full soft mutation: this means that some of the entries for the full list may in fact belong to the limited list, because I'm not sure that all the entries on the full list belong there for certain. Can anyone help? Pobbie Rarr 21:51, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: According to Gramedeg Cymraeg Cyfoes, adjectives following 'rhy' should be in the list for the full version.  All adjectives following 'yn' should be in the limited list (however used). (And it has a bunch more cases, of course!) --Dienw (talk) 00:37, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

text: I think Dienw is right - so therefore 'adjectives used adverbally after yn' should be moved to limited. Consider 'yn rhugl' as in 'siarad cymraeg yn rhugl'(speaking welsh fluently) , 'yn llawn'-fully(talu'r pris yn llawn) , 'yn lleol' locally(prynu'r peth yn lleol), 'yn rhad'(ces i'r peth yn rhad). This adverbal use is given at the site -  http://users.aber.ac.uk/bmj/Tr/Cym/tr_rhag.html . 
Don't people who say 'yn lawn' and 'yn leol' also say it after the predicatively used yn -e.g. "mae e'n lawn'? 
It seems that 'yn iawn' is being miss-transcribed as 'yn lawn' in electronic texts. 
I'll move the text tomorrow if there are no objections. 119.12.185.102 (talk) 03:41, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, could you be more specific about what you mean? What text do you intend to move? garik (talk) 15:15, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: One of the elements in the list for full soft mutation is "adjectives used adverbially(after yn)".- it should be in the limited soft mutation list(as it is in the literary Welsh morphology page - where it's included in 'nouns or adjectives used predicatively or adverbially after yn'). I suppose in spoken Welsh any degree of diversity could occur but complying with the literary Welsh is fine here so why add more complexity? I'm looking for some authoritative source to prove me wrong.119.12.185.102 (talk) 13:32, 30 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're quite right. In fact I've gone ahead and made the change. I've also added a note about variation in the spoken language and altered the bit about the spread of soft mutation in spoken Welsh and added a source. In particular I removed the "jin a thonic" joke (basically OR) and the claim that the change is due to the mechanisms no longer being understood. Given the spread of literacy and education over the last few centuries, the proportion of Welsh speakers who have some metalinguistic grasp of how mutation works has almost certainly gone up, not down. garik (talk) 15:39, 30 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Limited soft mutation

message: The article says that nasal mutation is really only used in two circumstances in spoken Welsh, but it doesn't say which two (of the three?) situations are being referred to. Can someone add this information? Thanks. --SameerKhan 07:38, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the two situations referred to are the two where it crosses a word boundary (after fy and after yn); people tend to forget about it occurring after the an- prefix since once a word like annheg has been learned, nasal mutation doesn't have to be actively applied to it anymore. I don't think NM is losing ground after the prefix an-; only in word-initial position after fy and yn. —Angr 07:53, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm not in a position to comment much about the spoken colloquial language, but my understanding is that if Nasal Mutation is not used after fy and yn, then Soft Mutation is. Likewise with the Aspirate Mutation; as I understand it, when it's avoided in the spoken language, it's replaced by Soft Mutation, not by the absence of any mutation. —Angr 11:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The aspirate mutation, if unused in the spoken language, is not replaced with the soft mutation - no mutation occurs, so Te a choffi (tea and coffee) can be said as te a coffi. 'c' after 'a' (meaning 'and') is the most common spoken usage of the aspirate mutation, but even that's sporadically applied. Theoretically, coffi a te should be coffi a the but it rarely is. :) YngNghymru (talk) 23:52, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: This is generally true -- though I've certainly heard "te a goffi". garik (talk) 09:12, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Really? I've never seen that. Although since mutations, like certain vocabulary and verb forms, have a tendency to vary depending on location, preference, formality and all sorts of other factors, that's certainly plausible. YngNghymru (talk) 17:31, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nasal mutation 

message: As a newcomer to Welsh language learning, I wonder about the appropriateness of the term "aspirate mutation". Maybe the spelling is tricking me into something, but isn't <ph> /f/ and therefore a simple voiceless labio-dental fricative, rather than an "aspirated fricative" as the article suggests? The same goes for /k/ → /x/ and /t/ → /θ/. Note that the latter isn't even the fricative counterpart of the plosive /t/, which should be /s/. If I get this correctly, are we in the presence of a term ("Aspirate Mutation") that bears little relation to the real phonology involved? I'm looking forward to the comments of anyone who knows better. JREL (talk) 19:56, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, you're right. The term Aspirate Mutation has a venerable history behind it, but is phonologically inaccurate, as the mutation involves spirantization (fricativization), not aspiration. —Angr 20:25, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aspirate mutation 

message: The claim that there is an officially identified "Colloquial Welsh" and "Literary Welsh" is dubious. As Literary Welsh morphology is a substantial duplicate of this article, I intend to merge it here. Neelix (talk) 21:11, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: After merging "literary" and "colloquial" articles, it all became rather messy. Here are some problems that I have spotted: 1)the literary pronouns "ef", "chwi" and "hwy" are not given. At the same time "hwythau" appears in the emphatic forms section. 2) in 3rd person plural only the form "talen" is given, while in literary Welsh it should be "talent" (which is not followed by a pronoun, unlike talen - this should also be mentioned) 3) literary forms (like euthum, aethost) are ommited in the irregular verbs section 4) literary negations with "ni(d)" (which actually causes the mutation in negation) are not mentioned. Could someone please mend it! I myself cannot, as English is not my first language. However artificial or "dubious" the literary-colloquial distinction may seem, it nevertheless exists and you cannot just get rid of literary forms.       
83.21.51.164 (talk) 18:07, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know what you mean by "officially identified", but it is certainly not dubious that Colloquial Welsh and Literary Welsh are distinct, and that part of their distinction includes differences in morphology much more significant than the differences between colloquial and literary registers in many other languages like English. If Literary Welsh morphology is indeed a substantial duplicate of this article, that just means more work has to be done on highlighting the differences rather than that two articles need merging. —Angr (talk) 12:13, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

text: I can't believe this! Neelix, pardon me, but are you drunk? Do you know the first thing about the topic? "Literary Welsh morphology" wasn't a duplicate of "Colloquial Welsh morphology", the endings and morphemes differ in many, many ways, as mentioned by others, especially in the verbal and pronominal paradigms, and a more than cursory look at the articles would have shown that, but you apparently never looked at them for more than two seconds and probably just noticed that the "Mutations" sections look the same (because the mutations really are the same, unlike many other features). The claim that the two varieties are different, which you consider "dubious", is found in all the literature cited in the article: Gareth King, in Modern Welsh, writes, on p.2, "A distinction must first be made between the Colloquial (or Spoken) Welsh in this grammar and Literary Welsh. The difference between these two is much greater than between the virtually identical colloquial and literary forms of English - so great, in fact, that there are good grounds for regarding them as separate languages" - and so on, throughout the book. As the other two users say the same thing, I'm going to revert your misguided changes.--Anonymous44 (talk) 14:43, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I don't think the articles should be merged, but there are great difference between colloquial and standard grammar in other languages as well. In German for example, the difference is huge. General features of colloquial German are: almost complete avoidance of the genitive case; loss of weak singular noun inflection; avoidance of the simple past and the past subjunctive (except for some frequent verbs); complete loss of the present subjunctive and more. Nevertheless, there are no "Grammars of Colloquial German". There are just grammars, and some of them have notes on colloquial usage. I suppose that would work with Welsh too. But let's leave it as it is.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.40.72.19 (talk) 19:49, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious 

message: "Clic Clic Cymraeg (a Welsh course)" is broken on october 23rd 2011.--DarkFlemy (talk) 03:57, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Broken link 

message: I have been learning Welsh for over three years, and although I am familiar with the Emphatic Pronouns listed here, and have no problem understanding their use by a Welsh speaker, I have absolutely no understanding as to when I should use them myself (beyond a couple of stock phrases such as "Finnau chwaith" or "Finnau hefyd").  Is there anyone out there that could expand upon the section here?  Even if a couple of examples need to be given, this would surely be better than what is given here (which doesn't explain anything).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.30.136.202 (talk) 18:18, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emphatic Pronouns 

message: I'm not a Welsh-speaker nor a linguist, but the article states that feminine adjectives are "usually not inflected" before saying that they receive an initial mutation. To my understanding, that is inflection. We're used to describing endings or vowel changes as inflection, but why shouldn't initial mutations be inflections? Especially if using them or not using them marks the difference between two genders.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.40.72.19 (talk) 19:31, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a separate set of inflections involving vowel affection (gwyn/gwen; tlws/tlos); that's what's being referred to. There were many of these historically, but most of them are archaic, even in Literary Welsh. These adjectives are subject to soft mutation in the appropriate environment, like everything else. But, there are other things than gender agreement that can trigger soft mutation. GeckoFeet (talk) 22:31, 22 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adjectives uninflected 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The article states that 'rhy' is one of the words which causes limited soft mutation, i.e. 'll' and 'rh' are excepted. Whilst a lot of people go along with this (as Googling examples shows), all the rule books (Bruce, Thorne, Lewis) don't say this, and give examples like 'rhy rad', 'rhy laes', etc.  What do we reckon?  Hogyn Lleol (talk) 16:43, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: There's no categorical right or wrong answer. Technically, the rule is limited soft mutation if you go with a prescriptivist outlook at Welsh grammar - in the same way that prescriptivists would say an English sentence cannot end with a preposition (i.e. 'of whom do you speak?' vs. 'who do you speak of?'). Questions like these will receive a different answer depending on the type of linguist you ask. – Dyolf87 (talk) 12:15, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  rhy