Nouns
Like most other Indo-European languages, all nouns belong to a certain grammatical gender; the genders in Welsh are masculine and feminine. A noun's gender conforms to its referent's natural gender when it has one (e.g. mam "mother" is feminine), but otherwise there is no pattern, and gender must simply be learnt.
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number. Singular/plural nouns correspond to the singular/plural number system of English, although unlike English, Welsh noun plurals are unpredictable and formed in several ways. Some nouns form the plural with an ending (usually -au), e.g. tad and tadau. Others form the plural through vowel change, e.g. bachgen and bechgyn. Still others form their plurals through some combination of the two, e.g. chwaer and chwiorydd.
A few nouns also display a dual number, e.g. llaw, "hand", dwylo, "(two) hands".
The other system of number is the collective/unit system. The nouns in this system form the singular by adding the suffix -yn (for masculine nouns) or -en (for feminine nouns) to the plural. Most nouns which belong in this system are frequently found in groups, for example, plant "children" and plentyn "a child", or coed "forest" and coeden "a tree". In dictionaries, the plural is often given first.
Read more about this topic: Colloquial Welsh Morphology
Famous quotes containing the word nouns:
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)