Language is full of surprises. I love when I find something in English that catches my attention in a new way—like when I realized phonemes are real. Part of what makes learning a new language fun is that those discoveries happen so often.
Welsh is not known as a particularly easy language to learn, but for some reason, I picked that as a project. After a few false starts, I’ve now got a 3+ year streak going on Duolingo and have finished all the official lessons there. And I’ve been using SaySomething in Welsh, which is a fantastic program (and now offers other languages in the same method). This adds up to quite a lot of exposure to Welsh that has been more absorbed than understood.
Recently, I’ve been using AI as a practice aid. It’s fantastic—customized lessons and contextual explanations. So suddenly, the rules are becoming a little bit clearer.
A little bit. There are some… complications in Welsh when it comes to rules. Let me see if I can explain without getting too far into this.
Like most languages, Welsh has grammar rules that change the way words are pronounced or spelled. There are the requisite vowel changes and plural forms and verb conjugations to learn. But Welsh offers the unsuspecting student something special: initial consonant mutations. The beginning of a word changes based on its grammatical surroundings, which is notoriously hard to get one’s head around. (This is a Celtic-language trick—Breton does it, too.)
In the textbooks, they make it sound like it’s very orderly, if complex: three families of mutation (soft, nasal, and aspirate) apply to different consonants in certain situations. However, there are layers and layers of grammar effects hiding in that. Nouns are gendered in Welsh, which affects whether and how certain words mutate. Certain other grammatical constructions require mutations, too, which I’m still learning.
In my lesson tonight, I came across this: “Oes problem gyda char Celyn heddiw?” (Is there a problem with Celyn’s car today?) Investigating the sudden appearance of char, which I’d never seen, brought up a mutation rule I’d never heard: gyda causes the aspirate mutation. That mutation changes c → ch, p → ph, and t → th. Which is all well and good, except I was Quite Sure that I’d seen “gyda pannas” many times—meaning “with parsnips.” (Duolingo teaches Welsh with frequent references to parsnips, leeks, and dragons. Obviously.)
Turns out car, which sometimes appears as gar, and in the plural is ceir (or, under the right circumstances, geir*, because well, why not), technically takes the aspirate mutation after gyda. Which means that, technically, it ought to be “gyda phannas.” Yet it never, ever, ever seems to be.
Well, the official answer is: yeah, that’s the rule, but a lot of native speakers don’t consistently use it.
So in addition to the fact that mutations flex according to an extensive set of conditions that a) I haven’t yet fully mastered and b) rely on rote knowledge of important things like books are masculine and libraries are feminine, it turns out there’s one more major issue: sometimes speakers don’t bother.
If there’s a consolation for me, it’s that when I stumbled on car turning into char, I had parsnips as a ready counterexample—proof that I had actually picked up the pattern. It wasn’t, as it happens, technically correct, but it’s a valuable lesson in two ways. First, a reminder that people adjust the rules of their native language all the time. And second, apparently, parsnips cannot mutate.
* and, bonus, the plural of the word “word” is geiriau, which kind of looks like it ought to be the plural of the plural of “car.”
(Image by Bernadette Wurzinger from Pixabay)
