Middle Welsh
Middle Welsh is the label attached to the Welsh language of the 12th to 15th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This form of Welsh developed directly from Old Welsh.
Literature and history
Middle Welsh is the language of nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion, although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of most of the manuscripts of mediaeval Welsh law. Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day Welsh speaker.Phonology
The phonology of Middle Welsh is quite similar to that of modern Welsh, with only a few differences. The letter u, which today represents in North Western Welsh dialects and in South Welsh and North East Welsh dialects, represented the close central rounded vowel in Middle Welsh. The diphthong aw is found in unstressed final syllables in Middle Welsh, while in Modern Welsh it has become o. Similarly, the Middle Welsh diphthongs ei and eu have become ai and au in final syllables, e. g. Middle Welsh seith = modern saith "seven", Middle Welsh heul = modern "sun".The vowels are as follows:
Vowel length is predictable: vowels are long in monosyllables unless followed by a geminate or one of the consonants,,,,. The vowels could combine into the following falling diphthongs:
1. ending in :,,, ~
2. ending in :,,
3. others:,
The diphthongs and, whose first component gradually changed into, were originally allophones of and, respectively, and no distinction between the two was expressed in Middle Welsh spelling, so their presence during most of Middle Welsh is not immediately observable. However, the fact that the modern pronunciations beginning with an occur in all word-final syllables, regardless of stress, makes it plausible that their distinctness from and was a legacy from the time before the stress shifted from final to penultimate syllables in Old Welsh. The full opening to and may have been completed at some point in later Middle Welsh, possibly the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.
The consonants are as follows:
Consonants may be geminate. is mostly found in loanwords such as siacet 'jacket'.
Stress was placed on the penultimate syllable with some exceptions such as the causative verbs in -háu, e.g. sicrháu. In terms of intonation, the tonal peak must have been aligned with the post-stress syllable, reflecting the earlier final stress of the late Brythonic period, since this persists even in Modern Welsh.
Orthography
Differences from modern Welsh
The orthography of Middle Welsh was not standardised, and there is great variation between manuscripts in how certain sounds are spelled. Some generalisations of differences between Middle Welsh spelling and Modern Welsh spelling can be made. For example, the possessive adjectives ei "his, her", eu "their" and the preposition i "to" are very commonly spelled in Middle Welsh, and are thus spelled the same as the definite article and the indirect relative particle. A phrase such as is therefore ambiguous in Middle Welsh between the meaning "the cat", the meaning "his cat", and the meaning "to a cat". The voiced stop consonants are represented by the letters t c at the end of a word, e.g. "protection", "running". The sound is very often spelled k before the vowels e i y. The sound is usually spelled with a u or v, except at the end of a word, where it is spelled with an f. The sound is usually spelled with a d. The sound is spelled r and is thus not distinguished from . The epenthetic vowel is usually written, in contrast to Modern Welsh: e.g. mwnwgyl rather than mwnwgl "neck".Letter-sound correspondences
In general, the spelling is both variable and historical and does not reflect some sound changes that had taken place by the Middle Welsh period, most notably the lenition. Some of the less predictable letter-sound correspondences are the following:| grapheme | phoneme |
| | |
| | |
| possibly | |
| , | possibly |
| , | |
| or | |
| or | |
Grammar
Morphology
Notable differences from modern Welsh
Middle Welsh is closer to the other medieval Celtic languages, e.g. Old Irish, in its morphology. For example, the endings -wŷs, -ws, -es and -as are used for 3rd person singular of the preterite in Middle Welsh as well as the form -odd. In the same person and tense exists the old reduplicated preterite kigleu 'he heard' of the verb klywet 'to hear', which corresponds to the Old Irish ·cúalae 'he heard' from the verb ro·cluinethar 'he hears'.Middle Welsh also retains more plural forms of adjectives that do not appear in modern Welsh, e.g. cochion, plural of coch 'red'.
The nominal plural ending -awr is very common in Middle Welsh, but has been replaced in modern Welsh by -au.
Morphonology
Like modern Welsh, Middle Welsh exhibits in its morphology numerous vowel alternations as well as the typical Insular Celtic initial consonant mutations.Vowels
There is a productive alternation between final syllables and non-final syllables known as mutation or centring, which is by necessity triggered by the addition of any suffix and operates as follows:| final | non-final | example |
| w | y | bwrd 'board' – pl. byrdeu dwg 's/he leads' – dygaf 'I lead' |
| y | y | cledyf 'sword' – pl. cledyfeu |
| aw | o | brawt 'brother' – pl. broder hawl 's/he claims' – holaf 'I claim' marchawg 'horseman' – marchoges 'horsewoman' |
The centring mutation is due to a process of vowel reduction that operated earlier, in late Brythonic, when the stress was placed on the last syllable.
Further, there are two types of alternations that are caused by following vowels and are no longer entirely productive, but nonetheless very frequent in the morphology. The first type is ultimate affection, which occurs in the last syllable of a word and is caused by a vowel that used to be located in the next syllable. The originally triggering vowel is either i or a, hence the alternations are referred to as i-affection and a-affection. The more common type is i-affection, which occurs in plurals with a zero ending and in the present singular of many verbs. In addition, in some cases, the singular has an affected vowel, but the plural does not. The alternation operates as follows:
| non-mutated | mutated | example |
| a, ae | ei | bard 'bard' – pl. beird maen 'stone' – pl. mein safaf 'I stand' – seif 's/he stands' dragon 'dracons' – dreic 'dracon' Saeson 'Saxons' – Seis 'Saxon' |
| e, o, w | y | gwelaf 'I see' – gwyl 's/he sees' corn 'horn' – pl. cyrn gwr 'man' – pl. gwyr |
| oe | wy | oen 'lamb' – pl. wyn |
Ultimate a-affection is found, most notably, in the feminine forms of adjectives that do have gender declension, and it changes the stem vowels as follows:
| non-mutated | mutated | example |
| y | e | gwynn – gwenn 'white' |
| w | o | crwm – crom 'bent' |
The second type of affection is triggered by extant close vowels or semivowels in the following syllables, and is hence known as penultimate affection. The effect varies somewhat depending on the triggering vowel, hence one may speak more specifically, for instance, of y-affection. Penultimate y-affection is a regular feature of verb forms with an ending containing y. Both it and other types of penultimate affection may also occur due to the addition of suffixes containing the respective vowels, e.g. in the plural of nouns.
| non-mutated | trigger | mutated | example |
| a | y, i | e | caraf 'I love' – kery 'thou lovest' dar 'oak' – pl. deri cawr 'giant' – kewri |
| a, e | i | ei | mab 'son' – pl. meibyon |
| ae | i | ei | maer 'steward' – pl. meiri |
| ae | y | ey | caer 'fort' – pl. keyryd |
Penultimate and ultimate affection may occur in one and the same form, e.g. castell 'castle' – pl. kestyll, manach 'monk' – meneich 'monks', or, with reversion, elein 'fawn' – pl. alaned.