Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales

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Feminine singular nouns after the definite article ( y / yr / 'r), e.g. y rhyfel 'the war', not * y ryfel; y llwyfan 'the windpipe', not * y lwyfan. corgi, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, June 2018; “ corgi, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. Person 2: Felly rwyf am ddewis dau ddwr, os gwelwch yn dda. (So I want to choose two waters, please.)

Soft mutation causes initial /ɡ/ to be deleted. For example, gardd "garden" becomes yr ardd "the garden"; or gwaith "work" becomes ei waith "his work". The reflexive pronouns are formed with the possessive adjective followed by hun "self". There is variation between North and South forms. The first person singular possessive pronoun fy is usually pronounced as if spelt y(n). I bought this book while on a short holiday in Aberystwyth after reading one of the volumes in Malcolm Pryce's sublime Aberystwyth Noir series.Knowing Our Place: Cynefin, the Curriculum and Me by Charlotte Davies - a very thoughtful and engaging piece about how we construct ideas of local identity, and how we should be viewing BAME people and history as part of a cohesive whole of Welshness, not an addendum or a diverse offshoot. The preposition yn becomes ym if the following noun (mutated or not) begins with m, and becomes yng if the following noun begins with ng. E.g. Bangor ("Bangor"), ym Mangor ("in Bangor"); Caerdydd ("Cardiff"), yng Nghaerdydd ("in Cardiff"). sometimes words borrowed from other languages will use plural forms similar to the English forms at the end of words, eg:

My first harp teacher’s house is a museum that also happens to be a home. It is exactly where you want to go to receive a thorough education in the history of Welsh folk music. You are surrounded by artefacts, manuscripts and instruments that are kept warm and loved, and which in other less careful hands may have found themselves gathering dust. My first harp teacher is a gatherer, a protector, a collector. She takes this job seriously. It is her lifeblood, her passion, but the responsibility weighs heavily on her shoulders. Over her term, Issa aims to introduce more people to the ancient Welsh poetic form of cynghanedd, as well as encourage “more people to engage with and appreciate poetry”. She also wants to “add to conversations around identity and belonging, particularly when talking about nature spaces”. There are five periphrastic tenses in Colloquial Welsh which make use of bod: present, imperfect, future, and (less often) pluperfect; these are used variously in the indicative, conditional and (rarely) subjunctive. 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' (pluperfect conjugation is rarely found beyond the verb 'bod'). There are some very good and thought provoking essays in this collection, exploring ideas of Welshness and looking at what a future Welsh nation might look like.

With demonstratives like this and that, which in Welsh are phrases equivalent to English the... here (this) and the... there (that), e.g. y bore 'ma (this morning); y gadair 'na (that chair). Issa’s collection My Body Can House Two Hearts was published in 2019. She also contributed to Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales and The Mab, a retelling of the Mabinogi stories for children, both published this year. Hiraeth, saudade, duende. These words; these concepts. They embody an idea that is all about calmness but has no place for comfort, and if I could explain what they mean to a person who’s never felt their pulse then I would. A mixed mutation occurs when negating conjugated verbs. Initial consonants undergo aspirate mutation if subject to it, and soft mutation if not. For example, clywais i ("I heard") and dwedais i ("I said") are negated as chlywais i ddim ("I heard nothing") and ddwedais i ddim ("I said nothing"). In practice, soft mutation is often used even when aspirate mutation would be possible (e.g. glywais i ddim); this reflects the fact that aspirate mutation is in general infrequent in the colloquial language (see above).

I absolutely loved this. I usually devour essay anthologies in one sitting, but I deliberately paced this one over a week so I had time to sit with each piece. She co-founded the Cardiff open-mic night Where I’m Coming From, worked in the writers’ room for Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts and was a member of the first cohort of writers who took part in Literature Wales’s Representing Wales programme in 2021. The English dummy or expletive "it" construction in phrases like "it's raining" or "it was cold last night" also exists in Welsh and other Indo-European languages like French, German, and Dutch, but not in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Indo-Aryan or Slavic languages. Unlike other masculine-feminine languages, which often default to the masculine pronoun in the construction, Welsh uses the feminine singular hi, thus producing sentences like:Well, we’ll see about that (with fingers crossed). As I write, the Senedd, the Scottish Parliament and Stormont have all rejected the Withdrawal Agreement Bill; that is, the directly elected legislatures of the UK that are not England have rejected this vast constitutional change, but it is being imposed by the House of Commons, a body which is ethnically 82% English, and which rises to an anthem that, uniquely, is not about land but about a person — the sound of a subject people begging to be dominated. But what of the other stories that point us toward a Welsh future? In this anthology of essays, authors offer imaginative, radical perspectives on the future of Wales as they take us beyond the cliches and binaries that so often shape thinking about Wales and Welshness. Includes essays from Charlotte Williams (A Tolerant Nation?), Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, The Adulterants), Niall Griffiths (Sheepshagger, Broken Ghost), Rabab Ghazoul (Gentle / Radical Turner Prize Nominee), Mike Parker (On the Red Hill), Martin Johnes (Wales Since 1939, Wales: England’s Colony?), Kandace Siobhan Walker (2019 Guardian 4th Estate Prize Winner), Gary Raymond (Golden Orphans, Wales Arts Review, BBC Wales), Darren Chetty (The Good Immigrant), Andy Welch (The Guardian), Marvin Thompson (Winner 2021 UK Poetry Prize), Durre Shahwar (Where I’m Coming From), Hanan Issa (My Body Can House Two Hearts), Dan Evans (Desolation Radio), Shaheen Sutton, Morgan Owen, Iestyn Tyne, Grug Muse and Cerys Hafana. s There is no such thing as a true history,” historian, Martin Johnes, writes here. “It will always be rewritten and reinterpreted.” That is the starting point of this vibrant collection of essays on the future of Wales. A shared but static sense of history can be a comfort to a people. But it can also be cruelly exclusive. For instance, the concept of Wales as a Celtic nation is widely accepted. Yet as Johnes points out, this marginalises the non-Celtic migrants who have settled in the country over centuries. Thus are new interpretations of history always needed. In these essays, the writers were charged with “reimagining the Wales we live and see”. They do so with undeniable success.