Welsh

Bwriad y papur hwn yw ymchwilio i natur y gwallau a wneir gan oedolion sydd yn dysgu Cymraeg ar Lefelau 4, 5 a 6 Cyd-bwyllgor Addysg Cymru a gobeithio, erbyn ei ddiwedd e, na fyddwch chi ddim yn teimlo’ch bod chithau wedi gwneud camgymeriad eich hunain! Felly, ceisiwyd dadansoddi a dosbarthu'r gwallau hyn er mwyn deall yr anawsterau penodol sydd yn wynebu dysgwyr yr iaith. Gobeithir y bydd canlyniadau'r ymchwil hon o ddiddordeb arbennig i diwtoriaid iaith  ac i'r rhai sydd yn paratoi deunyddiau dysgu.

(Duplicate entry) Based on the paper which opened the international conference 'The Military Orders: Politics and Power' at Cardiff University in September 2009, this surveys the history, properties and role of the Hospitallers and Templars in Wales and the Welsh March during the Middle Ages, and discusses why patrons chose to support these institutions, or not.

Edrychir ar y defnydd a wneir o'r Gymraeg gan bobl ifanc 16-18 oed yn nwyrain Sir Gâr, a Gorllewin Morgannwg (Abertawe, Cwm Tawe, Cwm Nedd, Port Talbot). Nodir pa ffactorau sy'n hyrwyddo'r defnydd o'r Gymraeg a pha rai sy'n milwrio yn ei herbyn.  Cynigir argymhellion ar sail yr astudiaeth.

Through the auto-ethnographic lens of a learner of the Welsh language living in Gwynedd, a largely Welsh-speaking region of North West Wales, Fiona Bowie explores the phenomenon of Welsh identity, its fluidity and variety, and the contested and political nature of identification with Wales, its language and culture. The simple essentialism sometimes implied by terminology (to be or not to be 'Welsh' or a 'Welsh-speaker' for example) takes on particular nuances as one moves from the micro level of ethnographic observation to the wider national stage and political arena. The value of combining these perspectives becomes clear not just for Wales, but when examining any form of identity politics.

Evan Roberts is a key historic figure, deeply involved with the remarkable Welsh revival of 1904.  This paper analyzes how 10% of the Welsh population became involved in the revival within two years.  It also looks at the social impact on Welsh culture, particularly in terms of crime, alcohol abuse, and the court system.

Mac, mac, mac, mab, mab, mab- all mean ‘son’, inis, innis, hinjey, enez, ynys, enys - all mean ‘island.’ Anyone can see the similarities within these two cognate sets from orthographic similarity alone. This is because Irish, Scottish, Manx, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish are related. As the six remaining Celtic languages, they unsurprisingly share similarities in their phonetics, phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax. However, the exact relationship between these languages and their predecessors has long been disputed in Celtic linguistics. Even today, the battle continues between two firmly-entrenched camps of scholars- those who favor the traditional P-Celtic and Q-Celtic divisions of the Celtic family tree, and those who support the unification of the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of the tree under Insular Celtic, with this latter idea being the Insular Celtic hypothesis. While much reconstructive work has been done, and much evidence has been brought forth, both for and against the existence of Insular Celtic, no one scholar has attempted a phonetic reconstruction of this hypothesized proto-language from its six modern descendents. In the pages that follow, I will introduce you to the Celtic languages; explore the controversy surrounding the structure of the Celtic family tree; and present a partial phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic through the application of the comparative method as outlined by Lyle Campbell (2006) to self-collected data from the summers of 2009 and 2010 in my efforts to offer you a novel perspective on an on-going debate in the field of historical Celtic linguistics.

Welsh syntactic mutation and Arabic indefinite accusative: Case or configuration?
Welsh marks indefinite direct objects with lenition: Gwelodd Mair dŷ [Sawº Mair house (tŷ)] ‘Mair saw a house’. Welsh also applies “syntactic mutation” in a number of other circumstances: gwelwyd tŷ ar y bryn [was.seenº house on the hill], but with the prepositional phrase interposed: gwelwyd ar y bryn dŷ [was.seenº on the hill house] ‘a house was seen on the hill’.
Formal Arabic marks indefinite direct objects with -an (indefinite accusative): ra’at miryam bait.an [sawºF Miryam house.INDEF.ACC] ‘Miryam saw a house’. “Faulty indefinite accusative” is applied frequently by proficient users of Formal Arabic where there should be indefinite nominative: ru’iya ‘alà t-tall bait.(un) [was.seenºM on the-hill house.(INDEF.NOM)] ‒> ru’iya ‘alà t-tall bait.an [was.seenºM on the-hill house(INDEF.ACC)] ‘a house was seen on the hill’. Every time “faulty indefinite accusative” is found in Arabic, the Welsh equivalent would have “syntactic mutation”. In both cases, the phenomenon seems to be the result of an identical HEAD-TRIGGER-DEPENDENT rule marking the dependent. This rule would account for all cases of syntactic mutation in Welsh, and for both correct and faulty indefinite accusative in Arabic.
Historical evidence suggests that the rule governing indefinite accusative in Arabic has evolved from a semantic, case-based rule to a syntactic one based on simple configuration. If such a case > configuration evolution was possible for Arabic, it could provide a clue to the genesis and evolution of “syntactic mutation” in Welsh, which may also have originally been case-based, but has most likely evolved into a configurational rule. A widely studied rule of Welsh thus helps to explain a persistent, but little studied “faulty” pattern in Formal Arabic, and the likely genesis of that “faulty” rule in Arabic, in turn, may shed light, in this typological exercise, on the origin and development of the Welsh rule.

When discussing aspectuality, a distinction is normally made between grammatical and lexical aspect. Both are linked, to varying degrees, to the category of tense. The existence of grammatical aspect in a language is normally accepted if it is fully expressed in a grammatical category, preferably a verbal one, as seems to be prototypically encoded in some Slavic languages. Questions concerning aspect have been posed for Welsh, since perfectivity could be expressed by the verbal particle ro-in its older stages. However, Modern Welsh differentiates synthetically between six tenses for the verb bod 'to be' and four for all of the others (save defective verbs) in the Indicative, the category looked at here. It is little surprising, therefore, that the aspect dichotomy of perfectivity vs. imperfectivity is not expressed morphologically. However, based on field work, it has been established that issues of aspectuality in Welsh are typically expressed by employing its periphrastic VSO structure, i.e. verb-noun constructions with linking elements of varying synsemantica between the finite VS-and the "O-phrase" (complement).

This draft makes clear that the system of Welsh pronouns is very different from that of the SAE-languages and strongly linked to VSO-syntax, i.e. major pronoun categories in Welsh are determined by their syntactic use and should not be termed on the basis of Latin-orientated grammar terminology.

My discussion aims not so much to provide an answer to the thorny question of whether Dafydd ap Gwilym was a Europhile - this has been attempted by many a critic - as to examine the way in which this question has become the accepted framework within which to study Dafydd’s work.  In my introductory section I discuss the ways in which criticism has investigated Dafydd’s possible debt to Continental traditions, with special reference to love poetry (these being the poems which have most frequently been juxtaposed to French models); this is followed by a reading of Morfudd fel yr Haul.  Then I outline the case for Dafydd’s possible debt to a sub-literary tradition, before concentrating, in my concluding section, on his so-called ‘fabliau’ poems.  In my discussion of Trafferth Mewn Tafarn and Cyfeddach, I explore the implications of using imported frameworks for reading Dafydd’s poetry, and question the appropriateness of the classification of certain of his poems as ‘fabliau type’.  I suggest that the investigation of the European dimension, with its necessary bias towards ‘influence’ and ‘source’ studies, is not the only respectable scholarly activity, and is a tendency that has sometimes eclipsed the sophistication of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s individual texts.  I conclude with another debt to Europe, that owed by Dafydd ap Gwilym studies today to critics Chotzen and Stern, not only for their painstaking detective work, but for treating him as the equal of his more famous Continental counterparts.

"‘Thy people shall be my people’: these were the words of Ruth, the Moabitess, of the Old Testament, the ‘model émigré’ who pledged fidelity to another nation. These, too, were the words used by J.Gwyn Griffiths to describe the experience of his Jewish-German wife, Kate Bosse-Griffiths, who was exiled to Britain from Germany in 1936 and through marriage to a Welsh man, dedicated herself to a new life in Welsh-speaking Wales. In a short space of time, she established herself as a recognised
Welsh language author who challenged the society in which she lived. There is much more to this woman than the exchange of one culture or identity for another. This study of her life and published works will attempt to unravel the multiple threads that interweave the identity of a Welsh-German woman. Analysis of her unpublished poems may reveal an unprecedented insight into a seemingly complex and yet fascinating woman, whose role as a member of an ethnic minority in Wales deserves closer attention."

Most languages of Europe, either within the Standard Average European Sprachbund or not, have a T-V distinction (Brown and Gilman 1960; Helmbrecht 2013). This means that when addressing an allocutor, the speaker has to choose between a ‘familiar’ T-form (2sg.fam; cf. Fr. ‘tu’) or a ‘polite’ or ‘formal’ V-form (2sg.hon, commonly homonymic with 2pl; cf. Fr. ‘vous’). Welsh (Indo-European, Celtic) has such a distinction (‘ti’ being a T-form; ‘chi’ a V-form), while English (Indo-European, Germanic) ‘you’ has not. Thus, when translating from English into Welsh, translators are obliged to make politeness distinctions according to their understanding of the text in order to produce an idiomatic output.

The present study uses the Welsh translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling 2003) as a corpus and describes aspects of the Welsh T-V system, as reflected by the ways the translator conveyed sociopragmatic information using the Welsh second person.

In total, there are 1393 occurrences of ‘you’, ‘your’, ‘yourself’ etc. in the original text. By tagging them with ‘speaker’, ‘addressee’ and ‘ti:chi’ information (i.e. who speaks to whom how), an intricate map of sociopragmatic relationships emerges. Imperatives in the translation, which do distinguish ‘ti:chi’ but do not correspond to occurrences of ‘you’, have been taken into account as well. Using this map three topics are addressed, with attestation by examples from the text:

* Change in address form.
Transitioning from one address form to the other as a linguistic signal for a change in the relationship between characters.

* Unidentified or non-specific addressee.
The ‘ti:chi’ opposition is grounded in the concrete pragmatic situation. When the addressee is unidentified (e.g. addressing someone knocking on the door) or non-specific (e.g. addressing non-specific readers), ‘chi’ is used exclusively, ‘ti’ being too loaded.

* Age and status.
Belonging to the boarding school story genre, the corpus offers us an opportunity to examine the linguistic expression of social relationships in which age plays a major role. Three sub-topics: the ways students and teachers address each other, intra-familial relationships, and the use of ‘chi’ by grown-ups in establishing the child protagonist as a famous, admired personality.

This study is a part of a comparative typological project using translations of the first Harry Potter book, which was translated into 74 languages, as means to explore the sociopragmatics of second person in languages with a T-V system (see Haspelmath 2010; Stolz 2007).

The traditional view of the language of the sixteenth-century Welsh Bible translations as unnatural and conservative in having predominantly subject-verb, in contrast to the verb-initial word order of Modern Welsh, is essentially incorrect. This article shows that poetic books of the sixteenth-century Bible translations (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous Welsh prose texts to use frequent verb-initial order in affirmative main clauses and may have contributed to the development of a new literary prose style, characterized by frequent verb-initial word order. The translators may have adopted verb-initial word order from poetry, where it was common, to recreate a poetic quality in a prose translation of the original Hebrew poetry, reflecting a simultaneously domesticating and foreignizing strategy, in that it exploits a native linguistic feature in a novel way to reproduce exotic stylistic effects of the source text.

Until the promulgation of this paper it has been the universal understanding that "Schiehallion" means "the fairy hill of the Caledonians". Here I refute this suggestion entirely, explaining how the misunderstanding came to be. An extension of this new analysis allows us also an understanding of the development - probably over some hundreds of years BC-of the Caledonian tribe from minor mountain dwellers to pre-eminent enemy of the Romans in the time of Agricola.

Despite the fact that the Udmurt language is, besides Russian, an official language of the Udmurt Republic in Russia and one of the bigger languages of the Uralic language family, the language is "definitely endangered" according to UNESCO. The reasons for this are manifold: urbanisation, influence of mass media, increased mobility, weak institutional support, low prestige, etc. In recent years, predominantly urban language activists have been using social media to promote the use of Udmurt and to create an Udmurt identity in a modern environment. The colloquial tone in Udmurt groups on social network sites (SNS) like Vkontakte fosters the use of mixed language forms ("суро пожо"), otherwise frowned upon by adherents to language purism. The role of SNS in maintaining and revitalising languages is often believed to be of considerable importance, but is still poorly investigated. Research has been carried out on, e.g. the Welsh language. Compared with the apparently normalised and widespread presence of Welsh on the internet, Udmurt on social media is still very much characterised by language activism. One possible explanation for this might be an earlier adoption of SNS by

When the Red Book of Endangered Languages was compiled between 1993 and 1999, Sardinian and Welsh were both deemed "endangered languages". 20 years later, their situations is drastically different: whilst Sardinian's status changed from "endangered" to "definitely endangered", the situation of Welsh took a turn for the better and is now considered as a "vulnerable" language.
The aim of this paper is to explore the reasons that led these two minority languages to have such a drastically different result.

Dr. Britta Schulze-Thulin legt in ihrem Beitrag "Zum Bergnamen Y Das in Wales" dar, dass wal. das mit einiger Wahrscheinlichkeit ein Lehnwort aus dem Irischen (mir. daiss) ist, das vermutlich seinerseits auch Geber für anord. des und die anderen westskandinavischen Wörter war. Das schwankende Geschlecht und die Pluralvarianten von wal. das sind einerseits durch den Lehnwortcharakter, andererseits durch Analogie zu erklären. Hyperkorrektes tas (aus das) kann ins Englische entlehnt worden sein, vielleicht gehören die englischen Tas-Ortsnamen dazu.

In 1588 William Morgan published his monumental Welsh translation of the Bible. This work is notable, among other aspects, in that it has the Old Testament translated directly from the original Hebrew. This fact invites comparative study of the Welsh and Hebrew texts, which may shed light on the Welsh text and language, the translation process, and (the translator’s reading of) the original text.

In this paper I will attempt a close examination of the lexical means by which Morgan translated Hebrew phrases concerning the senses (chiefly verbs of perception). The Hebrew and the Welsh lexicon and grammar are structured differently; that obliges the translator to make constant meaning-bearing choices, interpreting the text according to their reading thereof. Structural description of Morgan’s lexical choices will be at the heart of the paper.

I hope the proposed description, which is based on formal linguistic grounds and aims at understanding (Bible) translations through the lens of structural linguistic analysis, will contribute to our understanding of the 1588 Bible and its language.

(This paper broadens the scope of a paper delivered at ICCS14, in which the semantic field of ‘hearing’ was in focus. Attendance at the previous paper is not required nor assumed.)

This paper seeks to reassess two often repeated views concerning the language of the sixteenth century Welsh Bible translations, in particular the 1588 Bible: first, that it was modelled on that of cywydd metre poetry (as argued by R. Geraint Gruffydd, Thomas Parry, J. Lloyd-Jones and Isaac Thomas) and second, that it was conservative in maintaining predominantly subject-verb order (e.g., R. Geraint Gruffydd; Robert A. Fowkes; David W.E. Willis), compared to the characteristic verb-initial order of Modern Welsh. Despite being of key interest to understanding the development of the modern standard language, these assumptions have not generally been systematically investigated.

We will show that, contrary to the traditional view, the Welsh sixteenth-century Bible translations were innovative in comparison with contemporary prose texts. Some of these, in particular Old Testament books translated from Hebrew poetry (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous prose texts in Welsh to show frequent verb-initial order in positive declarative main clauses. This innovative use of verb-initial order, as well as being an indicator of language change in progress, may reflect poetic influence. Verb-initial order was common in contemporary and earlier poetry but rare in prose and could thus have been perceived as a poetic linguistic feature and in turn exploited by the Bible translators to give a poetic quality to a prose translation of Hebrew poetry. We will also examine briefly William Morgan’s linguistic changes when revising the 1567 New Testament and Psalms to shed light on whether he may have selected higher register variants using poetry as a model.

The history of Welsh word order has long been an issue of controversy. While some scholars have argued that Welsh underwent as many as two major word order changes between the Old and Modern periods — from verb-initial to verb-medial and back to verb-initial again — others have maintained that Welsh has always been essentially verb-initial, disregarding the apparent non-verb-initial phase in the Middle and Early Modern Welsh periods as an artificial literary aberration. At the same time, there has until recently been little empirical study of Early Modern Welsh word order. This thesis provides a systematic empirical investigation of Early Modern Welsh word order from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries, based on an original corpus of over 100 texts of diverse genres, registers and discourse types, including Slander case records, personal letters, drama, the Bible translations, sermons, religious treatises, catechisms and pseudo-historical works. The investigation focuses on the diachronic development of one particular verb-initial construction Absolute-initial verb (AIV) order, where a finite verb comes in absolute initial position in a positive declarative main clause (PDMC). In Middle Welsh (c.1200–c.1500), AIV order was rare in prose, which had a predominantly verb-second or medial word order in positive declarative main clauses, but common in poetry. The corpus analysis shows that AIV order starts to be used more frequently in prose texts from the second half of the sixteenth century and that the first innovative texts to show a frequent use of AIV are the 1567 and 1588 Bible translations, in particular poetic books of the Old Testament such as Psalms, Isaiah, Song of Songs, contradicting the traditional view in Welsh s​c​h​o​l​a​r​hip that the Bible translations were a conservative bastion of non-verb-initial word order. There is evidence of a continued increase in the use of AIV order in seventeenth and eighteenth century corpus texts, however at the same time we find extreme patterns of variation in the use of AIV order throughout the two century corpus period with some prose authors showing dominant AIV order in over 50% of PDMCs, other contemporary authors almost avoiding the construction altogether, as well as various intermediate patterns of usage.

We contrast the Principles and Parameters (P&P) account of this change in Welsh word order by Willis (1998), which seeks to explain the rise of AIV order in terms of a discrete and abrupt change in the grammaticality of the construction but which does not in itself seek to account for the variation in the use of the construction, with an alternative Construction Grammar (CxG) approach, where we posit a gradual mechanism of syntactic change and seek to propose an integrated syntactic and sociohistorical account of the change and variation in use of AIV order. In the Principles and Parameters approach, Middle Welsh is analysed as a V2 language, where unmarked VSO is ungrammatical in positive main clauses, and the emergence of grammatical unmarked VSO in Early Modern Welsh is attributed to the resetting of the V2 parameter, resulting in an abrupt change from a V2 grammar with ungrammatical unmarked VSO to a non-V2 grammar with grammatical unmarked VSO. In the Construction Grammar approach, AIV order is analysed as being a grammatical, but weakly motivated construction in Middle Welsh prose and the gradual increase as well as the variation in its use is analysed in terms of changing and competing motivations (both structural/syntactic and sociolinguistic/stylistic) for its use over time. We will argue that the Construction Grammar concept of motivation can be used as tool in the explanation of syntactic variation and change. In a Construction Grammar framework, it can be argued that AIV order was a well-formed construction in MW prose but a weakly-motivated one, as a system of pre-verbal fronting had come to be generalised: Subject/direct object + preverbal particle a + verb, and Adverbial phrase + preverbal particle y(d) + verb. Where, less frequently, there were finite-verb-initial constructions, the verb was usually preceded by the preverbal particle y(d), rather than occurring in absolute-initial position. In MW poetry the more frequent use of AIV order may have been motivated by specific cultural and stylistic factors (e.g. poetic tradition, metre). The increase in use of AIV order in EMnW seems at least in part to have been motivated by the gradual loss of the preverbal particle y(d): we find correlations between the frequency of use of AIV order and Adverb+Verb order – the use of Adverb+Verb order (i.e. without the particle y) appears to motivate AIV order and vice versa. The patterns of variation further suggest that AIV order appears to have been perceived as interchangeable with two other constructions: Pronominal Subject+Verb and Dummy subject+Verb, and came to be used in all the contexts where these other two constructions were used. The perceived interchangeability of AIV and these constructions seems to have provided Early Modern Welsh writers with a stylistic resource which they exploited in different ways, some choosing to generalise the construction, others to avoid it. A perceived association of AIV order with poetry may have been a motivating factor for its use for some authors, particularly in the 16th century prose translations of the Psalms, where the AIV order may have been used to evoke a poetic style in a prose text and perhaps also render more closely the verb-initial patterns in the original Hebrew poetry.

The paper was written together with Siôn R. Williams and published in: Asmus, Sabine and Barbara Braid (2014) "Unity in Diversity. Cultural and Linguistic Markers of the Concept", Cambridge: Scholars Publishing. After an overview over major developments in the social history of Welsh, structural weakness in Welsh institutions as well as an overdiversification of registers (whilst the standard is weak) and subsequent language forms are identified as major problems in its maintenance.