Re: Middle Welsh (was Cein)

Ah!  So you've discovered the joys of Middle Welsh!

kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET wrote:
>
> On Tue, 29 May 200,1 daniel andreasson <daniel.andreasson@...> wrote
:
>
> > I'm just reading an article on Middle Welsh which has
> > some *very* interesting features, especially for marking the
> > A of transitive and intransitive verbal nominal clauses. It's
> > actually an active language! (At least partly.) Who would've
> > known? :)
Hmmm.  I don't see this immediately.

> I never quite thought of it like that, but it's certainly worth looking
into.
>
> > Anyway. The A is marked with the preposition _o_ which has
> > the meaning 'from, of'. Example:
>
> > kymryt o    Arthur y   daryan eureit
> > take   from Arthur the shield golden
"Of."  O = poss. "of," not "from."  "Taking of Arthur the golden
shield."
I.e., Arthur's taking the golden shield;

> > 'Arthur took the golden shield.'
>
> "kymryt" is a verbal noun lit. "taking". If you wanted to say "A. took it"
> it would be "ygymryt o Arthur" lit. "its taking by A."
>
> The "o" construction seems to be a middle Welsh speciality. What seems to
> have happened is first, probably for variety or to emphasise the action,
> the verb "to do" was used as a auxillary in narrative passages. So instead
> of "he went" you got "he did go" but in Welsh this is expressed as
> "going he did" "mynet a oruc" where <mynet> [m@ned] (Mod. W. mynd) is a
> verbal noun. (This construction isn't much used in Modern W. but is very
> common in Cornish and Breton, also it's equivalent in Manx).
It's what scholars call an "abnormal" sentence (as opposed to the
"mixed"
sentence which actually does indicate a relative clause).  Welsh is
normally
a verb initial language.  For some reason, it was considered elegant in
late medieval prose to initialize the subject but one had to indicate
this
by borrowing the relative particle "a" and putting it before the
displaced
verb.  (Verbs were normally preceded by preverbal particles.)  So you
get
a construction like "Gwyr a aeth Catraeth" which looks like "[it is] Men
[who] went to Catraeth" (early medieval poetry, actually!), but was used
to mean "men went to Catraeth."  By analogy, one took the verbal noun
and
fronted it also:  Kyfodi a oruc--"arising [that] he did"--meaning "he
arose."
Here, kyfodi is the object of oruc, and not the agent, unlike "gwyr" in
"gwyr a aeth Catraeth." Or: Pwyll Pendeuic Dyfet a oed yn arglywydd:
"Pwyll
Prince of Dyfet [a] was lord."

As you describe below, fronted verbal nouns were often used
independently
of their agents, and to express agency you needed the "o" construction:
"Edrych ohonaw ef ar liw yr erchwys," "and seeing of him the color of
the
pack of dogs." (from _Pwyll_)  I.e., "he saw the color of the pack of
dogs."

It's a very gerundial prose style which has earned it all sorts
of mixed praise for its "quaintness" and "stasis," although all Celtic
languages do this in varying degrees as you say.  I'm not exactly sure,
though, how it is an "active" language.  Can Daniel be more specific?  I
may
need some reminding about active languages, but I thought it was one
rather
like Teonaht, where some verbs take either agents or participants as
their
subjects regardless of whether they are transitive or intransitive to
express
some kind of grammatical distinction.  So:  The man listens. (man is
agent,
because he is actively listening, even though the verb is
intransitive).  The
man hears the noise (man is patient because he is passively hearing,
even though
the verb is transitive).  Where do you see the Welsh making a
distinction between
agent and patient in these constructions?  Maybe I'm blind.  Maybe I
don't
know the rules for active languages.  Maybe I'm missing part of Daniel's
first
posting.

Sally
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