Medieval Welsh

A Self-Instruction Course created by Heather Rose Jones

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Unit: 3g

Recognizing Derived Adjectives

In English is it possible to turn one type of word into another. A noun can become an adjective (book > bookish), an adjective can become a noun (red > redness) or a verb (red > redden), a verb can act as a noun (to go > going), and -- that bane of modern prose -- almost any noun can be turned into a verb (network > to network). In Welsh this is, if anything, an even more normal part of the language than in English. So rather than learning the derived words separately, it is easier to learn to recognize when a word might be derived from something else and so to be able to guess at its meaning.

There are a number of suffixes that are used to turn root words into adjectives, but here are the four commonest.

-(Y)AWG

• cyvoeth n.m. "realm"
• cyvoethawg adj. "wealthy" (i.e., "having vast realms" although it is used for all types of wealth)

-AWL

• brawd n.m. brother
• brawdawl adj brotherly

-EIDD

• llaw n.f. hand
• llaweidd adj handy

-US

• golwg n.? sight, gaze, appearance
• golygus adj handsome, good-looking

  Note: in the last example that we have the same sort of vowel affection that we had in some of the plurals. Don't be surprised to run into it. (For the curious: vowel affection is caused by having a "high" vowel in the next syllable. In the case of the plurals formed solely by vowel affection, this high vowel was in the old inflectional ending that has disappeared.)

Keep in mind that not every word ending in these suffixes will be an adjective. You already know one pair in which both the root and the derivative are nouns.

• march n.m. "horse"
• marchawg n.m. "rider, knight"

Exercises

In the vocabulary that you've already been given, there are some adjectives with derivational endings, and some nouns that have corresponding derived adjectives.

Exercise 1 - you know the adjective, figure out the noun

For the first set of words, figure out what the root word should be and guess what it might mean. Don't expect to get them all exactly right, but make an honest attempt before looking them up.

• grymus
• gweddus
• gwressawg
• beichawg

Exercise 2 - you know the noun, figure out the adjective

For the next set of words, I've given the root noun (which you should already know) and one or more adjectives derived from it. Try to guess what these might mean.

Key to the Exercise

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