Achosi is a Welsh verb which means to cause or to bring about. It’s used in a very similar way to its English equivalent, and is a great way to make formal language flow better and sound simpler and more natural.
achosi
to cause
You have probably already heard of achosi’s parent word, which is achos. It’s ultimately derived from a Latin borrowing, occasio, and is used most often to mean because. As well as a conjunction, it also works as a noun, meaning a cause or sometimes a case.
In order to turn it into a verb, the ending –i is added; most (though by no means all!) Welsh verbs end in a vowel in their basic forms. In some older texts the form achosio is recorded but this is not used today.
You don’t need to worry about mutations with achosi since it starts with a vowel. However, you do need to consider h-prosthesis. If you haven’t come across this phenomenon before, don’t panic! It works in quite a similar way to mutation.
H-prosthesis means adding an h to the start of a word. In Welsh it happens to words that begin with vowels, and it happens after eu (their), ein (our), and ei (her). It doesn’t happen after ei (his). It also occurs in some limited special contexts.
H-prosthesis can happen to achosi. For example, say you were talking about a sequence of events, and you wanted to say that something caused them to happen. This would result in the construction eu hachosi (literally, their causing). Although neglecting h-prosthesis doesn’t matter much in casual speech and native speakers do it a lot, it’s good to try and get it right when speaking formally or writing.
The use of achosi in sentences is constructed very similarly to its English equivalent. To translate to cause a disaster, for example, you would simply say achosi trychineb. Here, achosi means to cause and trychineb means a disaster, so it’s exactly the same.
Rydym wedi penderfynu mai ei gweithredoedd hi a achosodd y tân.
We have decided that it was her actions that caused the fire.
When it comes to causing someone or something to do something, the translation is again close to literal. Say you want to say it causes someone to laugh. (Obviously this isn’t a very natural sentence, but it works well for our purposes of demonstrating how achosi is used grammatically, so bear with me!)
The Welsh translation of this is mae’n achosi i rywun chwerthin.
Mae’n is a contraction of mae e’n, itself a contraction of mae e yn. You probably are used to this term; it means he is or it is, with mae meaning is, e meaning he or it, and yn being a grammatically necessary ‘linking word’ with no direct English translation. You may also have seen the pronoun o instead of e. This makes no difference to meaning – o is Northern and e is Southern.
Achosi means cause, as we know, and i means to. Then we have rywun, which is just rhywun (someone), but soft-mutated because of the preposition i. If rywun were replaced with a pronoun like hi (she) or nhw (them), i would have to be inflected to agree with the pronoun, but luckily in this situation we’ve avoided that. Chwerthin means to laugh.
So putting it all together this literally translates as is it causing to someone laugh, rather than it is causing someone to laugh. Most learners will be familiar with the is it rather than it is order at the start of the sentence, but it’s a common mistake to write achosi rhywun i rather than achosi i rywun, and something to be aware of so you can avoid it.
Gall yfed gormod o alcohol achosi i’r afu fethu.
Drinking too much alcohol can cause the liver to fail.
But that’s not the only way to construct that phrase! A verb which means something quite like achosi is peri. Also often translated as to cause, peri tends to be used to refer to changes in someone’s emotional state. So, it works well to discuss chwerthin (laughter) – in fact, to make someone laugh would usually be translated as peri i rywun chwerthin. Interestingly, peri is also the root of the word peiriant (machine).
Other words that can mean to cause in some contexts are cychwyn (to start) and hala (a colloquial Southern form of hela, meaning to chase or to hunt). There’s also the word dwyn (in modern spoken Welsh usually to steal), which is used in a similar way in specific circumstances, for example dwyn dagrau i lygaid rhywun (to bring tears to someone’s eyes, literally to steal tears to eyes someone).
