"Dw i eisiau ffrog wen."
Translation:I want a white dress.
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120
Gwyn is the masculine form and Gwen is the feminine form. You will almost never see gwen instead of wen because adjective mutate softly after feminine nouns. So Cath wen= (A) white cat, Ci gwyn=(A) white dog. There are other feminine adjectives like ber= feminine form of byr meaning short. And again you will rarely see ber because it becomes fer after the noun ( Merch Fer=(A) short girl.)
To follow up:
The few adjectives with a separate feminine form often revert to the masculine when separated from the noun, particularly yn:
- Stori fer (’a short story’, from byr ’short’)
- Roedd y stori’n fyr/fer iawn. (’the story was very short’, either is accepted here)
Is frock a loanword in English from ffrog, or is it the other way round? Or is it in both languages a loan word from a third language?
- 897
There are hardly any Welsh loanwords in English*, so pretty much any time there's a cognate you know it's either a relatively modern English loanword or it's older word that both English and Welsh took from Latin or French.
Some examples: coombe (meaning 'valley') is from cwm; crag ('rock') is from carreg / craig; dad ('father') may be from tad; penguin might come from pen gwyn (white head), as an old word for the now-extinct great auk, who were northern cousins of the penguin; some English place names such as Avon (from afon - river) and Dover (from Dŵr - water, via Portus Dubris in Latin). All interesting, but these few examples pale in comparison to the number of English words that Welsh has borrowed in the modern era.
I have also believed wrongly for a long time that daffodil came from Welsh, for obvious reasons, but it turns out it entered Middle English from the Latin asphodelus, of ultimately Greek origin.
- 1134
Thanks, I wondered too, thinking the English was newer, but helps me remember the Welsh
I understand the soft mutation after i and o. but how do we know when a noun is feminine?
Is it like French where the words have a particular way of operating (e.g. Words ending with 'au' being masculine and words ending 'elle' being feminine).
If so, what is the rule to help me identify them?
how do we know when a noun is feminine?
You look it up in a dictionary and memorise the result.
Is it like French where the words have a particular way of operating (e.g. Words ending with 'au' being masculine and words ending 'elle' being feminine).
Not in general, unfortunately.
And there are even words where the Welsh disagree about the gender (e.g. munud "minute", with some people saying un munud [masculine] and some un funud [feminine] for "one minute").
It's more like German or Danish (where you have to look up gender) than like French or Spanish (where you can usually guess it).
