Морфология валлийского языка: особенности и структура

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The morphology of the Welsh language has many characteristics likely to be unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and mood, with affirmative, interrogative, and negative conjugations of some verbs. There is no case inflection in Modern Welsh. Modern Welsh can be written, and spoken, in several levels of formality, for example colloquial or literary, as well as different dialects. The grammar described in this article is for Colloquial Welsh, which is used for speech and informal writing. Literary Welsh is closer to the form of Welsh used in William Morgan's 1588 translation of the Bible and can be seen in formal writing. It does not reflect the spoken language presented here.

A mixed mutation occurs when negating conjugated verbs. Initial consonants undergo aspirate mutation if subject to it, and soft mutation if not. For example, clywais i ("I heard") and dwedais i ("I said") are negated as chlywais i ddim ("I heard nothing") and ddwedais i ddim ("I said nothing"). In practice, soft mutation is often used even when aspirate mutation would be possible (e. g. glywais i ddim); this reflects the fact that aspirate mutation is in general infrequent in the colloquial language (see above).

Under some circumstances an h is added to the beginning of words that begin with vowels, a process commonly called 'h prothesis' and usually called pre vocalic aspiration (PVA) by linguists. This occurs after the possessive pronouns ei ("her"), ein ("our") and eu ("their"), e. g. oedran ("age"), ei hoedran hi ("her age"). It also occurs with ugain ("twenty") after ar ("on") in the traditional vigesimal counting system, e. g. un ar hugain ("twenty one", literally "one on twenty"). Although aspirate mutation also involves the addition of h in spelling, the environments for aspirate mutation and initial h addition do not overlap except for ei ("her").

Welsh has no indefinite article. This means that indefiniteness is implied by the lack of definite article or determiner. The noun cath, therefore, means both 'cat' and 'a cat'. English has no plural indefinite article proper, but often uses the word 'some' in place of one: compare "I have an apple" and "I have some apples", where the word 'some' is being used as an article because the English language calls for something in this position, compare "I have apples" and "I have some apples", the former is rarely encountered in English. 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').

As in most other Indo European languages, all nouns belong to a certain grammatical gender; the genders in Welsh are masculine and feminine. A noun's gender usually conforms to its referent's natural gender when it has one (e. g. mam 'mother' is grammatically feminine), but otherwise there are no major patterns (except that, as in many languages, certain noun suffixes show a consistent gender, as sometimes do nouns referring to certain classes of thing, e. g. all months of the year in Welsh are masculine) and gender must simply be learnt. Welsh has two systems of grammatical number. Singular/plural nouns correspond to the singular/plural number system of English, although unlike English, Welsh noun plurals are unpredictable and formed in several ways, i. e. the plural form cannot be discerned simply by its singular form. Most nouns form the plural with a suffix (the most common, by far, is au), e. g. tad / tadau. Others form the plural through vowel change (a process known as affection in Celtic languages), e. g. bachgen / bechgyn 'boy / boys'. Still others form their plurals through some combination of the two, e. g. chwaer / chwiorydd 'sister / sisters'. A few nouns also display a dual number, e. g. llaw 'hand', dwylo '(two) hands', though llaw also has the general plural llawau. The dual dwylo comes from combining llaw with the feminine numeral dwy 'two'; dwylo is only used to refer to the hands of a single person, else llawau is used, e. g. dy ddwylo 'your hands', eich dwylo 'your hands', fy nwylo 'my hands', ein dwylo 'our hands', but mae llawau gyda phobol 'people have hands'. Deufis is used for 'a period of two months' and deuddydd is 'a period of two days', these using dau rather than dwy. Welsh also has a special 'plural' for 'a period of three days', tridiau which is commonly used across Wales. as an independent pronoun it occurs especially frequently after a vowel sound at the end of the phrase (e. g. efo chdi, i chdi, wela i chdi, dyna chdi).