Tanja Säily
Essay, BIr146
Department of English
University of Helsinki
Spring 1999
Welsh is often said to be a peculiar language and thus hard to learn. In this essay, I shall examine some features of Welsh that I find similar to or different from the other languages I know. My language skills include Finnish, which is my native language, English, Swedish and some German. I shall concentrate on English and Finnish in my comparison, as they are the ones I am the most familiar with.
Welsh is a VSO language, which means that its 'normal' word order is Verb-Subject-Object. English and Finnish, on the other hand, are both primarily SVO languages. A literal translation of the Welsh sentence Gwelodd y bachgen y ci would be 'Saw the boy the dog' - a sentence quite unacceptable in English. In Finnish, 'Näki poika koiran' could be grammatical if you needed to emphasise the verb näki, e.g. when trying to convince somebody that the boy really saw the dog. Such usage is rare, though.
There is no such verb as to have in Welsh. The sentence I have a car would be in Welsh Mae car gyda fi, literally 'There is a car with me'. Although this sounds very odd in English, Finns would find it rather natural, as the verb to have does not exist in Finnish, either. We would say, Minulla on auto ('There is a car on me').
In Welsh, adjectives postmodify nouns, while English and Finnish usually have adjectives as premodifiers. Thus, bachgen bychan 'a boy small' or 'poika pieni' would be ungrammatical both in English and Finnish. Actually, you can have something like that in Finnish, but then the construction is a compound, e.g. poikaraukka 'poor boy'. English has adjectives as postnominal modifiers only in some institutionalised expressions like times past.
Initial consonant mutations are an interesting feature of the Celtic languages, including Welsh. Not even Finnish with all of its irregular inflections has anything comparable to that, to say nothing about English. There are three kinds of mutation in Welsh: nasal, soft and aspirate. The mutation is triggered by the syntactic environment rather than the phonological context of the word in question. For an example of the soft mutation, the feminine noun cath 'cat' becomes gath when preceded by the definite article y (Davies: 110).
In Welsh, unlike English, nouns followed by a cardinal number keep their singular form, e.g. Tair filltir 'three mile(s)'. The situation is similar in Finnish: Kolme mailia. However, Faint o filltiroedd 'How many miles?' does have a plural ending, whereas the Finnish question Montako mailia still has the noun in the singular form.
Being a Finnish speaker, I would probably find Welsh a relatively easy language to learn. As we have seen, Finnish and Welsh share many features; to add one, both languages are to a great extent phonetic, i.e. the words are pronounced as they are written. However, I would like to point out that even though English might appear to be much farther away from Welsh than Finnish is, English and Welsh are in fact linguistically related to each other and unrelated to Finnish. They are both Indo-European languages, while Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language.
Davies, Janet. 1993. The Welsh Language. Bath: University of Wales Press.