This Week in Welsh: Half Term Day 1
Welsh has what are called "mutations" and what could best be described as institutionalized phonological changes. As a speaker of any language, I'm sure you will have had occasion to notice when things have changed slightly in speech, particularly when things are sped up. For example, if you are an American English speaker, you may have noticed that you don't say the "t" in "bottle". (There is a good chance that if you speak a variety of British English that you don't say that "t" either.) Well, Welsh has taken that and run with it by making the sounds that you would probably make anyway mandatory.
There are three kinds of mutations, a nasal mutation, an aspirate mutation and a soft mutation. Of these mutations, it would seem that the soft is the most important. At the very least, it seems to be the one that I have used the most often in the past month or so.
The nasal mutation (called treiglad trwynol)goes like this:
g- ng
c- ngh
d- n
t- nh
b- m
p- mh
So, when you say, "I live in Cardiff" in Welsh you would need to mutate Cardiff Dwi i'n byw yn Nghaerdydd. This is not such a problem. There are further uses of this mutation, as I will discuss tomorrow.
The soft mutation (called treiglad meddal) goes like this:
c- g
g- { }
d- dd
t- d
m- f
b- f
p- b
This mutation is used, as I mentioned above quite frequently. Feminine things tend to mutate; and three of the first four numbers take a soft mutation in reference to feminine things. What I like about this one is that one of the teachers taught us a device to remember them. However, I can never remember the whole device. This defeats the purpose of it.
The aspirate mutation (called treiglad llaes) is the easiest to learn thus far, but only because so few things mutate. Here it is:
c- ch
p- ph
t- th
So far it has only been applied to certain cases in the past tense.
This has been today's Welsh update. Hywl!
