Medieval Welsh

A Self-Instruction Course created by Heather Rose Jones

Copyright © 2003, 2004 all rights reserved. This page most recently revised on: May 31, 2004

Return to main course page


Return to main unit page

Unit: 3d

The Nasal Mutation and Mutation Review

 

The Nasal Mutation

This is the last mutation you will have to learn. (That is, the last type of mutation. There are still a lot of causes of mutation yet to be learned.)

This is also the rarest mutation. It occurs after the preposition yn(meaning "in"), after the first person singular possessive pronoun vy (meaning "my"), and after a couple of numbers (which we'll deal with in a separate section on numbers). That's it.

Note: the preposition yn is a different word than the predicative particle yn and causes a different mutation.

The nasal mutation affects six letters.

Radical Root word Gloss Mutation "My <word>" Gloss
p penn head mh vy mhenn my head
b brawd brother m vy mrawd my brother
t tad father nh vy nhad my father
d Duw God n vy Nuw my God
c cath cat ngh vy nghath my cat
g gwlad country ng vy ngwlad my country

Mutation Review

When you chart them out, the mutations make a useful pattern for remembering them. Three letters take the aspirate mutation. They are p, t, c -- what are called in phonetics "voiceless stops". These and their "voiced" counterparts (b, d, g) take the nasal mutation. And all the preceding plus m, ll (and in Modern Welsh, rh) take lenition (except that ll doesn't take _all_ the lenitions). The basic letter is called the "radical".

Radical
Lenited
Nasalized
Aspirated
p
b
mh
ph
t
d
nh
th
c
g
ngh
ch
b
v
m
d
dd
n
g
-
ng
m
v
ll
l

Exercise

Using your existing vocabulary, make phrases of the form "my X" with the proper mutations.

Key to the Exercise


Contact me -- or go to the entrance to my general web site.