Is this the trickiest Welsh mutation? The case of the missing ‘g’…

Advice often given to Welsh learners regarding mutations is simply not to worry about them. The idea is that by learning the language and thus continually interacting with it, you’ll naturally pick them up over time.

This is probably true in the long-term. To begin with, though, it is really helpful to have a brief understanding at least of what the different mutations look like. That way you’re not confused when you come across a word in a mutated form, even if you aren’t yet confident with using them mutation yourself.

Possibly one of the most confusing mutations patterns in Welsh is the dropped g. This is exactly what it says on the tin; it means that when there is a g at the start of the word, and the conditions for a soft mutation are satisfied, that g will simply disappear.

In my experience many people find this harder to track and notice than other kinds of mutation where the letter at the beginning of the word changes. It’s also important to learn since the soft mutation is so incredibly common – practically every sentence spoken in Welsh contains at least one soft mutation, and they are even more common in colloquial spoken Welsh, where they often appear where there should technically be a nasal or aspirate.

So what makes the case of the missing g quite so troublesome? More importantly… how do we solve it? Let’s dive in.

It’s skipped more often than other soft mutations

There are nine kinds of soft mutation in Welsh. These are p ->b, t -> d, c -> g, b ->f, d -> dd, g -> nothing, m -> f, ll -> l, and rh -> r.

You can see right away that g is the only one of its kind, already putting it at a disadvantage compared to the others when it comes to easy recognisability. I was talking to a friend learning Welsh recently, and she mentioned that she had for a long time assumed that g didn’t take soft mutation at all.

This came from her once misreading a soft mutation table which showed a blank space under g… it’s easy to see how that could be confusing.

It’s perhaps because of its uniqueness that it behaves slightly differently to other mutations in how it’s applied. Like the ll -> l and rh -> r mutations, the dropped g mutation sometimes doesn’t apply where you might expect it to (you can read more about them here).

But unlike ll -> l and rh -> r, these exceptions aren’t based on grammatical circumstances, but on the word itself.

In general, unless they are incredibly recent borrowings, loan words in Welsh obey normal Welsh rules and thus take mutation. But there’s often an exception for words beginning with g which are more resistant to the soft mutation, though not the nasal.

Some examples of recent Welsh loan words which evade the dropped g mutation include:

• grêt = great
• gôl = a goal
• graff = a graph
• gêm = a game
• golff = golf

A good example of this grammatical curiosity is the two phrases mae’n grêt and mae’n wych, both meaning it’s great and using the words grêt and gwych respectively. Normally, yn used as it is here (to link to an adjective) causes a soft mutation. But to say mae’n rêt would sound very strange even though that’s exactly what happened to gwych. The only difference is that grêt is a loan word.

But why do the g-words escape while other loan words don’t? There are a couple of theories. One is that it’s because with short words in particular, taking away the whole first letter makes the word hard to recognise.

It’s also worth noting that three of the above examples would begin with a long vowel if we took away the first letter. This doesn’t happen often in Welsh – ôl (back) is a notable exception, which indeed would be easy to confuse with gôl if the latter did take soft mutation.

As a general rule, if you’re using a Welsh word starting with g and it sounds very similar to an English word, it’s fairly safe to assume it won’t mutate. The online dictionary Gweiadur also has a useful list of many of the most common g-words that don’t soft mutate for one reason or another.

The g may have already been dropped

One particularly confusing reason that sometimes prevents g-words from mutating is that sometimes, the g isn’t even there in the first place. Why on earth would that be?

Usually, it’s because it was hard to pronounce so it was left out! It’s easy as a learner to assume that finding Welsh words difficult to pronounce is just your personal problem, but some words are even tricky for native speakers. This is common across languages – for example, plenty of people are naturally unable to roll their rs, making speaking languages with a rolled r like Spanish (or Welsh for that matter) a challenge.

Of course, being used to speaking a language as a native speaker makes things much easier, but it’s still sometimes easier to dramatically shorten a word or phrase. Think of the phrase gonna in English. Going to isn’t necessarily difficult to pronounce, but gonna is certainly easier and so it’s a common way to say these two words together, even if you wouldn’t write it down like that.

Welsh has a lot of tricky consonant clusters and in some cases, one or two of the consonants are omitted in colloquial speech. This makes things faster and easier and is a valid form of dialect. For example, in the South, it is common to say ‘ware instead of chwarae and ‘werthin instead of chwerthin.

A similar thing happens with words starting with gw– sometimes, famously and importantly in the word gwneud, which is very, very often shortened to ‘neud.

Its conjugations, too, receive the same treatment. Gwnes i (I did) is normally ‘nes i. The question gwnewch chi? (Will you?) quickly becomes ‘newch chi? – and what you might notice here is that by doing this, we have completely avoided using the soft mutation.

Where this can become difficult for learners is that you might assume that losing the gw is another version of the soft mutation. If you hear the neud form out of context you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a mutated form of gwneud rather than just an abbreviated form.

This easily leads to confusion. So if you do end up coming across neud in the wild and wondering why gwneud has mutated there, don’t panic – it’s not a mutation at all, just a colloquial abbreviation of the word for ease of speech, and it can occur to gwneud in both the radical and the mutated form.

It can be hard to tell what the original word was

At some point in your learning you’ll be able to easily recognise what the most common causes for mutation in everyday language are. So, if you encounter a new word in its mutated form, you will normally be able to work out what the original version of the word would be, even without a dictionary to hand.

Let’s take the phrase mae gen i for example. Mae gen i means I have and it causes a soft mutation. If you had never heard the word dafad (sheep) before, but you had a good grasp on soft mutation rules, and you read the phrase mae gen i ddafad (I have a sheep) in a book, you would understand that sheep is dafad not ddafad.

What if you read the phrase mae gen i afr (I have a goat)? You might guess that the original form is gafr, but equally you might not. If there were a word afr, it wouldn’t mutate after mae gen i since it starts with a vowel, so it would look the same in this context. And such a word seems perfectly plausible; it’s not far off afu (liver) for one thing.

Good general guidance is that words beginning with the vowels a, e, i, u, and y are overall slightly more likely to be root words whereas those beginning with o or w are more likely to be mutated forms of words beginning with g. You’ll notice though that this doesn’t apply in our gafr example so it’s by no means a perfect rule!

This isn’t the only problem that occurs as a result of the dropped g mutation changing words to start with a vowel.

W in Welsh is sometimes pronounced as a consonant and sometimes as a vowel. Usually it should be is obvious, but there is disagreement when it comes to the diphthong wy. Many – perhaps most – wy words in particular are pronounced in different ways by different speakers, with Northerners favouring w as a consonant and Southerners favouring it as a vowel. For example, gwylan is generally gwill-an in the North but goi-lan in the South.

This means there is a lot of disagreement about whether to use y or yr in front of some words, since y precedes consonants and yr precedes vowels. Many words start with gw in Welsh and so they then become w after the soft mutation… and then, for a feminine noun which will take this soft mutation after y or yr, you’re left with the problem of figuring out which one to use.

Some relevant examples:

• gwylan (seagull)-> yr wylan / y wylan, with the former formally preferred
• gŵyl (festival or holiday) -> yr ŵyl / y ŵyl, with the former formally preferred
• gwybodaeth (information) -> written yr wybodaeth, but often said y wybodaeth, especially in the North
• gwyddfa (honoured place or grave) -> written Yr Wyddfa in the name of the mountain, but often said, Y Wyddfa especially in the North
• gwraig (wife) -> y wraig, even though w is a vowel here
• gwlad (country) -> yr wlad, even though w is a vowel here

Going back to the issue of identifying words, a similar problem appears with words that begin with the letter rh. Rh becomes r under soft mutation, and the dropped g mutation can also sometimes produce a word beginning with r, such as with words like gramadeg (grammar) or grug (heather).

Then we see it again with ll -> l and the dropped g in words beginning gl, although this is less common since there aren’t that many native Welsh words that start that way.

And of course words that appear beginning with g are quite often mutations themselves of words originally beginning with c, of which Welsh has a very large number. If you’re pretty confident with when mutations appear and when they don’t you’ll usually be able to spot these, but it’s not always obvious. Even the simple gyda (with) is actually a mutated version of the phrase cyd â, which is why it never mutates.

This issue isn’t exclusive to the dropped g, since the fact that both b and m mutate to f can present an issue; think of the phrase mae gen i fuwch (I have a cow). This could be buwch or muwch in its radical form if you didn’t already know the word buwch (cow). But it is more common and wide-ranging with our mischievous missing g.

It results in new words being created

You might think that this kind of confusion would only really affect learners. But in actuality, even native speakers have been bamboozled by the case of the missing g, resulting in all sorts of linguistic mayhem.

Imagine you had never heard the word ŵyr (grandson) before. You’re reading a book in Welsh, and you come across the term ei ŵyr. It’s clear from context that it means his grandson. You know that ei, when it means his, causes a soft mutation in Welsh, and that words starting with w can either have always started with w, or have once had a g in front of them and be a result of soft mutation.

If you used my guidance above to figure out what the root form of the word was, you would actually come to the wrong conclusion – sorry! You would end up with gŵyr, but in this case the word really is just ŵyr.

As it happens, native speakers have frequently made this mistake too; not to the best of my knowledge with ŵyr but with many other words. For example, do you say gallt or allt for hillside? Either is heard, but the original and the standard form is allt. The variant gallt is what is called a back-formation.

Since many Welsh words beginning with vowels are actually mutated versions of g-words, sub-consciously, speakers have assumed that this word is too, and created a variant, which is the norm in some dialects and not even considered particularly incorrect.

Other words which have undergone back-formation include:

• gonest = honest <- onest
• garddwrn = wrist <- arddwrn
• gwyneb = face <- wyneb
• giâr = chicken <- iâr
• gaddo = promise <- addo
• Afon Gwy = the Wye River, from –wy which appears as a suffix in some river names

Gonest and gwyneb in particular are heard all the time… sometimes you’ll even get ‘corrected’ for trying to use the original form of the word!

This phenomenon results in strange and unexpected mutated forms: if you heard fy ngiâr (my face) when you had before only known of chicken as iâr, you would be quite surprised since iâr obviously doesn’t take a nasal mutation at all.

My advice is simply to stick to whatever is most common in the dialect you are learning, rather than agonising over which is ‘more correct’. There’s no such thing. The forms without g are older, but the forms with the g are natural, indigenous evolutions of the language, even if they technically started out as errors.

Thanks for sticking with me all the way through! The case of the missing g can be a mysterious one, with all its linguistic twists and turns. If you have any questions, or you’d like to read a blog post about another grammatical feature in Welsh, let us know!