The Dysgwr's Diary, Part Two: Attack of the Mutants

David here. Well, since I last wrote in my Dysgwr's Diary a couple of weeks ago, I've made a little progress on my Welsh. I've got a handle on the Welsh alphabet, that is, Yr Wyddor Gymraeg, all the consonants and vowels and diphthongs, and I even have a pretty good idea of how to pronounce words I've never seen before. But you see that word "Gymraeg" up there? That brings up an interesting point, a point that's been hanging me up for the last week or so.

You see, here I am going along just fine in my lessons, learning a few words here and there and how to pronounce them right and all, learning a language I thought was called (in Welsh) Cymraeg. See that? It clearly starts with a C. But look up there in that phrase meaning "the Welsh alphabet:" It's a G! No mistake about it, the word changed from Cymraeg to Gymraeg after yr wyddor. And then in my first real units of study on the BBC Catchphrase website and this other new site I found called E-Wlpan, I kept seeing it everywhere, without any rhyme or reason I could see! I'd be going along learning greetings, for example, bore da (good morning) and all that, figuring it out just fine, and then I'd come to a phrase like noswaith dda (good afternoon). Now, see that? Da, without warning, just becomes dda, with the hard "th" sound. I asked myself, why in the world is that happening? There must be a pattern; the teachers didn't make it up just to torture me (a rationale I often used back in grade school!).

Well, I went back to my good old standby, the Pocket Modern Welsh Dictionary by Gareth King, and lucky for me there was a whole section of the preface devoted to just this topic-something called mutations, which seems fitting considering how out-of-this-world they seem to me just now. The dictionary explained just what mutations were: changes to the beginning of Welsh words in certain situations. Then it explained what those situations were, and what mutations they caused: soft, nasal, and aspirate. It really blew my mind and I knew there was no way I was going to remember all the rules, like feminine singular article y causing soft mutation but masculine possessive pronoun ei also causing soft mutation, and on and on. I figured I'd better just concentrate on what the mutations are, and then worry about when they happen. Luckily, I got a great tip from this mailing list I joined on Clwb Malu Cachu. When I posted a message saying "I just don't get these dang mutations," someone wrote me this nice note saying that we have mutations in English, too; they just aren't that common. Take the words wife and knife and dwarf, for example; pluralize them and you get wives, knives, and dwarves. That changing of f to v in just that one situation, the plural-that's a mutation! So it didn't actually come from outer space. I was joking about that anyway. But that explanation really helped me grasp the concept of mutation and be a little less intimidated by it. After all, if I was able to learn it in English, surely I could figure it out in Welsh, right?

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