Colloquial Welsh Morphology - Verbs

Verbs

In Colloquial Welsh, the majority of tenses make use of an auxiliary verb, usually bod "to be". Its conjugation is dealt with in Irregular Verbs below.

There are four periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of bod: present, imperfect, future, and conditional. The preterite, future, and conditional tenses have a number of periphrastic constructions, but Welsh also maintains inflected forms of these tenses, demonstrated here with talu 'pay'.

		Singular	Plural
Preterite	First Person	talais	talon
	Second Person	talaist	taloch
	Third Person	talodd	talon
Future	First Person	talaf	talwn
	Second Person	tali	talwch
	Third Person	talith	talan
Conditional	First Person	talwn	talen
	Second Person	talet	talech
	Third Person	talai	talen

• Notes on the preterite:
  • First and second singular forms may in less formal registers be written as tales and talest, though there is no difference in pronunciation since there is a basic rule of pronunciation that unstressed final syllables alter the pronunciation of the /aj/ diphthong.
  • Word-final -f is rarely heard in Welsh. Thus verbal forms in -af will be pronounced as if they ended in /a/ and they may be written thus in lower registers.
  • In some parts of Wales -s- may be inserted between the stem and plural forms.
  • In parts of South Wales forms like talws are heard for talodd.
• Notes on the future:
  • di is used instead of ti, thus tali di, not *tali ti.
  • Forms like taliff may appear instead of talith in some southern parts of Wales.
  • Note that the future was formerly also used as an inflected present. A small amount of frozen forms use the future forms as a present habitual: mi godaf i am ddeg o'r gloch bob bore - I get up at ten o' clock every morning
• Notes on the conditional:
  • -s- may be inserted between the stem and endings.

In the preterite, questions are formed with the soft mutation on the verb, though increasingly the soft mutation is being used in all situations. Negative forms are expressed with ddim after the pronoun and the mixed mutation, though here the soft mutation is taking over (dales i ddim for thales i ddim).