In Welsh, the initial consonant sound of feminine singular nouns undergo
SM after the definite article y(r) ‘the’ and after the numeral un ‘one’:
cath /kɑθ/ ‘cat’ (feminine) vs. ci /ki/ ‘dog’ (masculine)
y gath /ə ɡɑθ/ ‘the cat’ y ci /ə ki/ ‘the dog’As in German, gender is marked only in the singular in Welsh. The initial
consonant sounds of adjectives (or nouns behaving adjectivally) also undergo
SM when modifying feminine singular nouns:
du /dɨ/ ‘black vs. du /dɨ/ ‘black’
cath ddu /kɑθ ðɨ/ ci du /ki dɨ/ ‘black dog’This applies to all adjectives that occur in a sequence:
mawr /maur/ ‘big’ vs. mawr /maur/ ‘big’
cath fawr ddu /kɑθ vaur ðɨ/ ci mawr du / ki maur dɨ / ‘big black dog’Adjective(s) modifying plural feminine nouns do not undergo mutation
in this context. Although a noun’s form provides no indication of its gender
(although it is reported that there are some regularities in the endings of some
abstract nouns, see Surridge, 1989, and nouns ending in –wr/-yn/-ydd tend to
be masculine and those ending in –wraig/-en tend to be feminine) there are
small sets of quantifiers and adjectives that have marked feminine forms that
do agree with the gender of the co-occurring noun. However, the use of these
feminine forms is minimal, even in literary Welsh (Watkins, 1993).
Gender is also shown in distant reference to the noun in the choice of pro-
nouns and possessives. These distant elements must agree with the gender of
the antecedent noun. For example, the feminine gender of the (homonymic)
possessive adjective ei ‘his, her, its’ is marked by A M on the modified word, and
the masculine gender of the same form is marked by SM on the modified word:
pen /pεn/ ‘head’ vs. pen /pεn/ ‘head’
mae’r ddafad wedi disgyn ar ei mae’r mochyn wedi disgyn ar ei ben/
phen /fεn/ bεn/
is-the-sheep-has-fall(non finite)- is-the-pig-has-fall(non finite)-
on-its-head on-its-head
‘the sheep has fallen on its ‘the pig has fallen on its
(feminine) head’ (masculine) head’
Note that SM is used here to mark masculine gender, whereas after the
definite article and on modifying adjectives, SM is used to denote feminine
gender. (In comparison, German uses gender-specific possessive forms.)
44 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development