But WHY does Welsh have mutations? (History & Info)

Maybe you already know that the Welsh language has mutations, and maybe you even know how they work, but WHAT are they really? Why do they exist? Where do they com from?
If you already speak Welsh but don't know exactly why you ended up with mutations or if you have only a vague notion that some languages have a thing called "mutations", this video will show how they came about. This is a short history of mutations in Welsh. Go from memorising grammar rules to actually understanding why grammar is the way it is!

[@Murphyalex]

You've unlocked what only used to belong to the linguists and grammar buffs and made the language make a ton of sense to the regular learner and layperson. If that doesn't deserve a like, I don't know what does! 👍

[@lizhurley7377]

Diolch Diolch Diolch. I've been sooooooo frustrated that no Welsh person can explain why mutations exist. This has helped me so much!

[@Knappa22]

It’s basically vocal and palatal laziness. It’s easier to pronounce soft consonants than harder ones and they flow better between vowels It’s evident in other languages too. Spanish is full of lenition e.g look at the sentence “Mi padre trabajo todos los días” (My father works every day) In reality the sentence is pronounced approximately “Mi pathre travacho tothos los dias.” (‘th’ in this case as in English *that* ) All the consonants have been softened or aspirated. It’s just in Welsh these lenitions have developed a grammatical significance.

[@torrawel]

As a Breton speaker, I approve this message :) Great channel you have!

[@hariowen3840]

Has any other fluent first language Welsh speakers, who haven't at all studied the Welsh language academically - noticed that without thinking about it, we somehow know when and where to use all these mutations automatically. (It's always puzzled me how that is?)

[@aledmorgan4889]

Agree as a first language Welsh speaker I mainly mutate by ear as some phrases just sound right.

[@EdwardCullen667]

Yes, totally. I remember being in school and “learning” these but I always used to blanc out as I’d knew them all anyway by hearing which sounded more “correct” to say. It’s the way it flows. Fascinating!!

[@fonkedonke]

As someone who doesn't plan to learn Welsh or any celtic language soon (maybe Irish as I'm from NI), this video really opened up to me how badly language is taught in schools. I was only taught French, and the way they did so was give us a bunch of words, put them in a certain order, add some conjugations, change adjectives depending on gender, here's a few more rules and voilà, you speak French. But this doesn't give us a true grasp of the language, we know these rules exist but not why. They just seem nonsensical, just like consonant mutations were to me. But if we teach these things are the same to a degree in English such as conjugations and irregulars. Teach some common differences between words etymologically (for example turn é at the start of some words into an s (école-> Scole = school)) and some other things, we may get language stuck in our head better. How can we expect students to grasp a foreign language if they can't even grasp their own?

[@Kenbreg]

"y" was probably not from "sindos" and "sinda" but rather from Latin "ille" and "illa". ille > ill > ydd > yr > y

[@Caz-Cymru]

As a Welsh learner I found this very interesting. Diolch yn fawr!

[@delwinaherd8621]

Wonderful! It makes you wonder how the changes in how Welsh is used today will cause mutations to "mutate" in the future. Diolch i chi.

[@penashe17]

Always wondered why. This was a clear explanation. Llawer o ddiolch! Gobeithio y byddwch yn gwneud mwy o videos cyn hir!

[@diarmaiddillon1568]

This channel is simply fantastic

[@TerriEynon]

This is a brilliant explanation. Thank you so much! I knew mutations had to make sense somehow but this is the first sensible explanation I have come across. Diolch yn fawr!

[@richardwade2696]

Thank you so much for this! It can be demotivating as a learner to not understand why these seemingly random changes are happening, so to have a video explaining it concisely and understandably is everything I could have hoped for. you've earned a like ;)

[@maxgruntgens9000]

Awesome videos! Keep it up!

[@baruchpinnick811]

An excellent video. Thank you very much.

[@danfowles8290]

Amazing, thank you so much for this!

[@MarcioSilva-ssiillvvaa]

Unbelievably good! Thanks!

[@polyphant]

Wow thank you so much, so good with history built in to make me feel like I can get on top of it! More please you are a great teacher :)

[@MegaJohnny]

Amazing video, I always wondered what the history of mutations were and this was a perfect explanation!

[@kiwicymraeg]

An excellent and very interesting explanation. I find the history of how languages develop totally fascinating and I look forward to more of your videos. Diolch yn fawr iawn!

[@TheFigure71]

This was brilliantly made and very informative! Keep it up!

[@paulatthetimmy]

Excellent and interesting explanation

[@Matt-od4bs]

Diolch! Great clarity, in form and content 😊

[@shannonsolomon7480]

This makes so much more sense than anything else I've heard. Thank you

[@hunterluxton5976]

Outstanding.❤

[@larrydykes7643]

Best explanation I have ever seen! Diolch yn fawr am esbonio!

[@qing7902]

I did my primary school education in Welsh so kind of grew to have a feel for them but I never really had an iron tight understanding of them and their history so this video is really interesting.

[@mariannehancock8282]

Are we going to have more videos from Rodolfo soon? He appears to have gone quiet.

[@kernowforester811]

Cornish has four mutations! Also Westcountry English, especially Devon and Cornwall, also has lenition of middle 't', I suspect from where American English gets it, e.g. butter is budder, get on is geddon, water is wadder etc.

[@johnboden8430]

Wow! That was cool.

[@richardsteele79]

So clear and interesting! Diolch yn fawr iawn!

[@neilroberts755]

Eglurhad ardderchog. Diolch am greu hyn!

[@he2722]

I’m not sure how to get in touch since there doesn’t seem to be a “contact us” or anything on the page, but there seems to be an issue with the Gairglo game. Ô and Ŷ aren’t options and there’s already been a case of the daily word having a ŷ in it, and today’s word has an ô in it. It’s quite literally impossible to get the word right. Is there any way you can add an ô and a ŷ to the keyboard please? 😅

[@garethryan4126]

Love these videos. The explain so much. I don’t think it makes learning or knowing Welsh any easier, but I enjoyed it. Also, Welsh seems to be been pronounced quite differently in the past. I am sure I read somewhere that a Modern Welsh speaker can understnad Welsh from much earlier than a Modern English speaker can understand English from a long time ago. But this makes that seem unlikely. Thoughts?

[@ftumschk]

I'm guessing that a lot of these words (esjas, sinda etc) go back to some sort of "proto Welsh". They certainly seem very different and more "primitive" than the Old Welsh I encounter when reading Taliesin, Aneirin and other mediæval Welsh texts, which I can do reasonably well, without having studied Welsh at an academic level.

[@garethryan4126]

@@ftumschk thanks. That’s what I thought! Modern formal Welsh is closer to Welsh from over a thousand years ago than modern English is to English from 500 years ago. Which is great! I’m nearly a year into learning Welsh and can’t even understand kids stories yet 😂

[@ftumschk]

@@garethryan4126 Thanks for the thanks! If I were to draw a tentative parallel, reading Old Welsh (Aneirin etc) for me is a bit like reading Chaucer, as opposed to, say, Beowulf.

[@garethryan4126]

@@ftumschk very impressive. I tried Beowulf the other week. Barely sounds like English. Chaucer’s swear words still mean the same thing today! 😂 he was bawdy as heck.

[@hiriaith]

@@ftumschk Yes, these are very old words, probably over 2000 years old. These are the words that were "available" to the speakers who had the phonetic processes that with time became the mutations, and mutations probably appeared in the Common Brittonic period, before the different Celtic languages of Great Britain split.

[@TerencePetersenAjbro]

Excellent explanation! As a language aficionado myself I really enjoyed this video. I get the impression that older Welsh shared quite a few similarities with Latin. Pity that feminine nouns have lost their "a" ending, it would be easier to identify them as in modern Italian or Spanish. The examples of older forms of the definite article you shared, was that from Middle Welsh or even earlier? I have been teaching myself Welsh for about a year now and would say that it is easier than German, but harder than Spanish or Swedish. I often recognise Latin cognates via Spanish (canu = cantar, ladron = lladron, credu = crear, etc).

[@hiriaith]

This is much earlier than Middle Welsh. Some of the old word forms are from Proto-Celtic and were the words Common Brittonic had at its disposal when it started to mutate everything. But for our purposes it doesn't matter much if they were from Proto-Celtic (i.e., the parent language of all Celtic languages) or Common Brittonic (the parent language of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton).

[@alyanahzoe]

​@@hiriaith breton? what's that?

[@hiriaith]

@@alyanahzoe a language spoken in northwestern France

[@xotan]

Mutations are not particular to Welsh. Gaeilge (Ireland), Gaelic (Scotland}, Gaelg. Isle of Man) also use mutatons In Gaeilge, which with I m most familiar: An Cat An Chait - of the cat An ngCat - to /for the the cat Na cait - the cats Na ngat- of the cats A cat - his cat A chat - her cat A/bhur/Ár gcat. Their/our Cat. How simple Welsh seems.

[@margaretandedferriman9168]

I loved this. So very interesting. Thank you. It would be good to know more about Welsh as it used to be. The development of language is fascinating. I would love you to do an explanation of the word 'yn' as it seems to pop up in many different contexts (in this video it seems to have come from 'fyn' for 'my'. But before adjectives and adverbs (and nouns - dw'i'n athro) as well as meaning 'in' and the present continuous 'doing'. Are all the 'yn's from the same root?

[@amaurysilva580]

Parabéns, 2.500 visualizações

[@DAILARNER]

Diolch, esboniad swych 👌

[@kebi7792]

Diolch! I finally understand..

[@nicholasjones7312]

An example of a mutation in English occurs in the first word of this sentence, so shouldn’t be an alien concept. Shouldn’t it ?(there’s another one!)

[@ilikethiskindatube]

Diolch yn fawr

[@IndianaJones664]

Diolch yn fawr am y fideo hwn. Mae’r treigladau’n rhan ddiddorol yr iaith Gymraeg (ac yr ieithoedd Celtaidd eraill hefyd), ac mae’n neis i ddysgu pam y maen yn digwydd.

[@nicholasjones7312]

But there are mutations in English too, so it isn’t that unusual eg an Apple.

[@willhughes5336]

Diddorol iawn

[@rosamundbradford9878]

p͓̽r͓̽o͓̽m͓̽o͓̽s͓̽m͓̽

[@jenniferh3827]

So, is there any truth in the notion that mutations were either created or maintained deliberately to improve the sound of poetry? That's what I've been telling everyone 😂

[@hiriaith]

No, there isn't.

[@clivebradley2633]

mae'n ddiddorol iawn, diolch yn fawr

[@mattiegriffiths]

diddorol iawn! diolch gan dysgwr

[@philldavies7940]

Great explanation. but I'll still call them mutilations.

[@hwnna]

Ardderchog! Yr esboniad gorau i mi glywed erioed o darddiad y treigladau. Bydda i'n cyfeirio fy nysgwyr sy'n holi i gyd at eich fideo. Diolch o galon.

[@garmit61]

Diolch yn fawr iawn. Joies i’r fideo ‘ma. Dw i newydd danysgrifio i eich sianel. Dw i’n edrych ymlaen at weld mwy o flog fel hwn!

[@phylbrake3719]

Diolch o galon am y fideo hon. Yn fy marn i, mae'n addysgiadol ac yn ddifyr, a dylai fod o ddiddordeb i ddysgwyr a siaradwyr iaith gyntaf fel ei gilydd. OND, yn Ngeiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, ceir * o flaen ffurfiau 3 pers. un. y rhagenw meddiannol a ddangosir yn y fideo, sef *esi̯o (g.) ac *esi̯ās (b.). Fy nghwestiwn i felly yw sut y gellir bod y ffyddiog taw dyna'r ffurfiau mewn gwirionedd?

[@hiriaith]

These are recontructions of Proto-Celtic and Brittonic. Not many people know what the asterisk means so I didn't want to include them in my video. The process of linguistic reconstruction by comparison is well established and can be corroborated by hard data. For example, we have written records of how Latin words were written and spoken and we can see how they became in Welsh. And - voila - these changes corroborate the theorised sound changes behind the reconstructions. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method

[@phylbrake3719]

@@hiriaith Dyna'r pwynt rwy'n ceisio'i wneud. Dw innau'n gwybod ystyr y seren yma, a chymerais eich bod hi'n gwybod hefyd. Dw i ddim yn gwbl argyhoeddedig gyda'r "ailgreadau" hyn - heb dystiolaeth ysgrifenedig, ond mae rhai pobl wedi treulio eu bywydau'n astudio sut mae ieithoedd yn newid. Felly, pwy ydw i i'w cwestiynu?

[@lothariobazaroff3333]

Helô! Dw i'n hoffi dy fideos diddorol. Cyfarchion o Wlad Pwyl.

[@sellis1016]

Diolch yn fawr