Gareth King - Modern Welsh : A Comprehensive Grammar

Modern Welsh A Comprehensive GrammarModern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar is the ideal reference source for all speakers and learners of Welsh. Focusing on contemporary spoken Welsh, it presents the complexities of the language in a concise and readable form. Common grammatical patterns and parts of speech are discussed in detail and without jargon and extensive cross references make the book comprehensive and easy to use. Now in its third edition, the Grammar has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout. Changes include an increased number of illustrative examples, additional appendices for easy reference, inclusion of IPA phonetic symbols and expanded sections on further reading. Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar is the most thorough, detailed and user-friendly Welsh grammar available in English today. Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar is the most thorough, detailed and user-friendly Welsh grammar available in English today.

It is suitable for use in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes at all levels and will, as its predecessors, prove an invaluable aid for Welsh language learning and teaching. Gareth King is an experienced teacher of Welsh and the author of ModernWelsh: A Comprehensive Grammar (1993, 2003, 2015), Basic Welsh: AGrammar and Workbook (1995, 2014), The Routledge Intermediate WelshReader (2013), Colloquial Welsh: The Complete Course for Beginners (2009) and Intermediate Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook (1996). All are published by Routledge. Routledge Comprehensive Grammars Comprehensive Grammars are available for the following languages: Bengali Cantonese Catalan Chinese Danish Dutch Greek Indonesian Japanese Modern Welsh Modern Written Arabic Polish Slovene Swedish Turkish Ukrainian Titles of related interestColloquial Welsh: A Complete Course for Beginners By Gareth King Basic Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook By Gareth King Intermediate Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook By Gareth King Routledge Intermediate Welsh Reader By Gareth King Business Welsh: A Users Manual By Robert Dery Modern Welsh A Comprehensive Grammar Third edition Gareth King First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 1996, 2003, 2016 Gareth King The right of Gareth King to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-82629-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-82630-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73941-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Contents v Contents vi Contents vii Contents viii The indulgence with which readers and critics have favoured the first and second editions of this grammar of the modern Welsh language, and the heartening response it has drawn from those it has always been primarily intended for, have encouraged me to risk a third. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-82629-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-82630-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73941-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Contents v Contents vi Contents vii Contents viii The indulgence with which readers and critics have favoured the first and second editions of this grammar of the modern Welsh language, and the heartening response it has drawn from those it has always been primarily intended for, have encouraged me to risk a third.

Once again I have taken the opportunity for expansion and improvement. I have significantly added to the illustrative examples throughout, and have adopted a more generalised approach to dialect indication. Four appendices have been added, dealing with the verb system, mutation system, and Welsh linguistic and grammatical terminology. Naturally I have updated and slightly expanded the Further Reading section to include works that have appeared since the previous editions, and I have also this time added links for some reliable and useful internet resources. My debt to those already acknowledged in the previous editions of course remains. G.K. G.K.

Cambridge December 2014 ix With this new edition of Modern Welsh I have taken the opportunity to make some changes and improvements. Chief among these are: the extension of typographic marking of initial consonant mutations to cover the entire text of the new edition I hope that this provision will enhance the user-friendliness of the grammar by making more transparent the distribution and syntactic patterns of this difficult aspect of the language; and the addition of an entire new section dealing with the practical aspects of function and situation, by which I have aimed to set the language even more firmly in a context that reflects its status as a living and flourishing medium of modern everyday communication. The order and numbering of the grammar sections remains unchanged from the original edition, except that the concluding sections 514530 of the original have now been incorporated in the new Function part of the book, and have been accordingly redesignated. References for original and new material have been conflated into a revised and somewhat expanded Index. I have also taken the opportunity to correct a small number of typographical errors that slipped through in previous reprints. The text of the grammar section of the book remains otherwise essentially the same.

The bibliography has been slightly amended to record the happy fact that Fynes-Clintons work referred to in the acknowledgements of the original edition has indeed now achieved its reprinting. I am glad that this grammar has found so many friends among those for whom it was written, and I hope that in its new and expanded incarnation it will win many more. G.K. East Sussex February 2002 x First and foremost I should like to thank the many native speakers of Welsh from all over Wales from whose speech a large proportion of the illustrative material in this grammar has been drawn. Their anonymity here belies the importance of their contribution. I am especially indebted to those Welsh-speaking friends and acquaintances who, in the later stages of writing, were interested and patient enough both to answer all manner of questions and to gently correct me when I went wrong.

Thanks must also go to my students, mainly in Llanafan, Llanilar and Aberystwyth, for not being afraid to ask awkward questions, and thereby bringing to my attention many gaps and areas for improvement in the explanations. Special thanks are due to James Fife, not only for innumerable discussions over the years on questions of Welsh grammar and semantics, but also for his meticulous and conscientious reports on the grammar in its earlier stages which saved me from not a few slips and oversights, those remaining being entirely my own responsibility. He also discharged his responsibilities in periodically reminding me, when my resolve showed signs of faltering, of our shared conviction that, for the serious student of any language, grammar is a key to understanding and not an obstacle. The writer of any descriptive work of this kind owes an immeasurable debt to his predecessors in the field. I have listed the main works that have been of help to me (see References) but I would like to single out for particular mention the study by O.H. Fynes-Clinton, published eighty years ago and a model of objective fieldwork untarnished by any disesteem of the language of ordinary people.