Modern Welsh can be written, and spoken, in several levels of formality, for example colloquial or literary,[1][2] as well as different dialects.
The grammar described in this article is for Colloquial Welsh, which is used for speech and informal writing.
The mutation ts → j reflects a change heard in modern words borrowed from English.
Borrowed words like tsips (chips) can often be heard in Wales and the mutated form jips is also common.
This is represented by the addition of an h after the original initial consonant (c /k/, p /p/, t /t/ → ch /χ/, ph /f/, th /θ/), but the resultant forms are pronounced as single phonemes.
The only word that it always follows in everyday language is ei ("her") and it is also found in set phrases, e.g. mwy na thebyg ("more than likely").
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').
The definite article, which precedes the words it modifies and whose usage differs little from that of English, has the forms y, yr, and ’r.
Others form the plural through vowel change (a process known as affection in Celtic languages), e.g. bachgen / bechgyn 'boy / boys'.
Adjectives normally follow the noun they qualify, while a few, such as hen, pob, annwyl, and holl ("old", "every", "dear", "whole") precede it.
Adjectives with one or two syllables receive the endings -ach "-er" and -a(f) "-est", which change final b, d, g into p, t, c by provection, e. g. teg "fair", tecach "fairer", teca(f) "fairest".
The demonstrative adjectives are yma "this"' and yna "that" (this usage derives from their original function as adverbs meaning "here" and "there" respectively).
There is, consequently, no word corresponding to English "it", and the choice of e/o (south and north Welsh respectively) or hi 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 hi, thus producing sentences like: However, colloquially the pronoun is often omitted when it would be translated as "it" in English, leaving: Third-person masculine singular forms o and fo are heard in parts of mid- and north Wales, while e and fe are heard in parts of mid-, west and south Wales.
In the inflected future of the verbs mynd, gwneud, dod, and cael, first-person singular constructions like do fi may be heard.
Fi, fe, and fo are used after conjunctions and non-inflected prepositions, and also as the object of an inflected verb: Fe and fo exclusively are used as subjects with the inflected conditional: Both i, e, and o and fi, fe, and fo are heard with inflected prepositions, as objects of verbal nouns, and also as following pronouns with their respective possessive adjectives: The use of first-person singular mi is limited in the spoken language, appearing in i mi "to/for me" or as the subject with the verb ddaru, used in a preterite construction.
Conversely, ti can be said to be limited to the informal singular, such as when speaking with a family member, a friend, or a child.
In Colloquial Welsh, the majority of tenses and moods make use of an auxiliary verb, usually bod "to be" or gwneud "to do".
There are five periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of bod: 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 talu 'pay' (pluperfect conjugation is rarely found beyond the verb 'bod').
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.
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 four verb-nouns mynd "to go", gwneud "to do", cael "to get", and dod "to come" are all irregular in similar ways.
The forms caeth, caethon, caethoch often appear as cafodd, cawson, cawsoch 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.
While some have clear-cut and obvious translations (heb ‘without’), others correspond to different English prepositions depending on context (i, wrth, am).
This syllable changes for each preposition and results in an inflection pattern similar to that found in Welsh verbs.