The Article
Welsh has no indefinite article. The definite article, which precedes the words it modifies and whose usage differs little from that of English, has the forms y, yr, and ’r. The rules governing their usage are:
- When the previous word ends in a vowel, regardless of the quality of the word following, ’r is used, e.g. mae'r gath tu allan ("the cat is outside"). This rule takes precedence over the other two.
- When the word begins with a vowel, yr is used, e.g. yr ardd ("the garden").
- In all other places, y is used, e.g. y bachgen ("the boy").
The article triggers the soft mutation when it is used with feminine singular nouns, e.g. tywysoges "(a) princess" but y dywysoges ("the princess").
Read more about this topic: Colloquial Welsh Morphology
Famous quotes containing the word article:
“Be assured that it gives much more pain to the mind to be in debt, than to do without any article whatever which we may seem to want.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)