Re: Middle Welsh (was Cein)

On Wed, 30 May 2001, Sally Caves <scaves@...> a oruc yskrifennu :

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

-------------------

>>> 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 [of] the golden shield;
I'd say "taking by A. of the shield"

I have to disagree with you here. On another thread, Ray has said that
in Romance langs phrases with "de" or some other preposition took the
place of the old genitive case. This didn't happen in Celtic langs, the
noun ceased to marked for genitive, but the _genitive construction_ (i.e.
marking by word order) continues. e.g.

Take these two phrases in proto-celtic :

/weros sindi tegesos/ "the man of the house (host, landlord)" and
/tegos sindi weri/ "the house of the man, the man's house"

In Scots Gaelic these are now :
<fear an taighe> and <taigh an fhir> with the cases still marked.

In Welsh (and Cornish and Breton) case is no longer marked, but the
construction still works :

<gw^r y ty^> and <ty^'r gw^r>

Essentially the same construction is used in Arabic (Dar es Salaam) and
Hebrew (Rosh ha-Shannah) also with the original case endings now lost.

The pronoun that can be translated "of" or "from" in the various langs
is used for what in Finnish is called the partitive case. e.g. in Welsh :

<Gwydryn o gwrw> "A glass of beer" (partitive)
<Gwydryn cwrw> "A beer glass" (genitive)

The first will get you a drink, the second only the empty glass :-)

-------------------

> 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."
This really is a separate issue from the use of verbal nouns. There are
examples in Old Welsh of the fronted phrase as the complement of the copula
"ys" e.g. (in modern spelling)
Unmarked VSO order :

"Y gwelodd y dyn y ty^ ar y bryn" (saw the man the house on the hill)

Where "y" is a preverbal particle indicating a positive statement.
"Y" is still used when the adverbial phrase is brought forward for emphasis :

"Ar y bryn y gwelodd y dyn y ty^" (on the hill [pos.stat] saw the man the house)

With the subject or object first the sentences would have been :

"[Ys] y dyn a welodd y ty^ ar y bryn" (['Tis] the man who saw ...)
"[Ys] y ty^ a welodd y dyn ar y bryn" (['Tis] the house which saw the man ...)

You get this today in Gaelic still with relative force :
'Se an duine a chunnaic an taigh air a' chnoc
'Se an taigh a chunnaic an duine ...

However even in the Middle W. period the "ys" was usually omitted, and the
relative force of the pronoun "a" forgotten. It was seen as another preverbal
particle marking subject or object before verb. What seems to have happened
is that Middle Welsh, (and Cornish and Modern Breton) developed a "verb
second" rule. That is the "Y gwelodd y dyn ..." type of sentence was
avoided and if there was no other emphases the subject was fronted so that
"Y dyn a welodd ..." became unmarked. (I've just checked a Modern Breton
grammar, and this construction is dealt with under "use of verbal particles"
and isn't identified with the rel. pron. which is discussed separately).
Why the verb first pattern came back into fashion in modern literary Welsh
is a bit of a puzzle. Possibly the result of proscriptive grammars or maybe
an over-literal translation of the OT (Biblical Hebrew is strongly VSO).

The use of the verbal noun with "to do" in place of the finite verb can
occur with verb first, subject first or complement first :

(Cornish for a change) :
Y hwrug an den gwelez an chi war'n vre. [Usually avoided in the literature]
                         (Did the man seeing of the house on the hill)
An den a wrug gwelez an chi war'n vre. (The man did seeing of the house ...)
Gwelez a wrug an den an chi ... (Seeing did the man of the house ...)
And indeed --
War'n vre y hwrug gwelez an den an chi.
                             (Upon the hill did seeing the man of the house)

So "fronting" and use of the verbal noun are independent processes.

> It's a very gerundial prose style which has earned it all sorts
> of mixed praise for its "quaintness" and "stasis,"
I find it a very vivid idiom for describing a sequence of actions that
flow one into the next -- not in the least quaint, and certainly the very
opposite of static.

> Sally
> "The gods have retractible claws."
Very, very true, my household gods send their greetings to you, "mew!"

Reply