18 Comments
Does buwch specifically refer to female cows and not male bulls? Or does it mean the non-gendered cattle?
Does buwch specifically refer to female cows and not male bulls?
Yes.
buwch = cow
tarw = bull
gwartheg = cattle as SaraGalesa has pointed out.
Buwch comes from Proto-Celtic *bowkkā, from *bōws ("ox"), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷṓws ("cattle"), also the source of Welsh bugail ("shepherd, pastor"), Irish buchaill ("boy"), English cow, Latin bōs ("cow, bull or ox", whence Spanish buey ["ox"] and English bovine and beef), Ancient Greek βουκόλος (boukólos, “cowherd”, whence bucolic), Latvian govs ("cattle; cow"), Russian говя́дина (govjádina, "beef"), Armenian կով (kov, “cow”), Persian گاو (gāv, "cow") and Sanskrit गो (go, "cow", whence गोविन्द [govinda, "cowherd; epithet of Krishna"] and Hindustani गाय/گائے [gāy, "cow"]).
Does buwch literally mean cow and is there a separate word for 'cattle' ?
1453
I'm Welsh, and I learnt a little Welsh at school, but I'm not a native speaker. As far as I know cows is buchod, and cattle is gwartheg.
i is "to" (as in mynd i'r ysgol "go to (the) school")
It can also mean "I", as in dw i "I am".
ac is "and".
Perhaps you mean a?
Basically, ac is used before vowels, a before consonants (e.g. buwch a dafad "a cow and a sheep"), but there are a handful of words that start with a consonant but still take ac before them, in at least some cases because there used to be a word beginning or particle that started with a vowel which is nowadays no longer used but which still allows the -c to stay on - e.g. ...ac mae... "and ... is".
Oh, man that's it, I've been doing Polish.
Side note, I see you on so many of these courses, how many languages do you speak?
Hard to say and depends on the criteria for "speak" :) Basic conversations in maybe ten languages, reasonably fluently, four or so (en de eo fr). And I could probably get my Greek pretty fluent again if I spent a couple of weeks there - I spoke that all day every day for two years, but it was a long time ago.
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Why is "&" not acceptable in the English sentence? I'm working hard to prevent the loss of the ampersand from written English ;o) I love its form in this font - you can see its origin: et
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In Welsh the singular form of the word is used after numbers, so your literal translation is correct, however, when you convert that to correct English, the plural forms are needed! And in English, as others have pointed out, sheep is both singular and plural (as are deer and fish in common usage)
For 'seven cows', yes. But y buchod for 'the cows'.
See the course notes (look for the sticky discussion on hints and tips at https://www.duolingo.com/topic/924/hot) which explain that Welsh uses a singular noun when it directly follows a number.
