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The morphology of the Welsh language has many characteristics likely to be unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, tense, and mood with affirmative, interrogative, and negative conjugations of some verbs. There is no case inflection in Modern Welsh. Modern Welsh can be written in two varieties — Colloquial Welsh or Literary Welsh.〔See e.g. King, Gareth. 2003. Modern Welsh: a comprehensive grammar. P.2.: "A distinction must first be made between the Colloquial (or Spoken) Welsh in this grammar and Literary Welsh. The difference between these two is much greater than between the virtually identical colloquial and literary forms of English - so great, in fact, that there are good grounds for regarding them as separate languages"〕〔For a complete treatment of literary Welsh, see ''A Grammar of Welsh'' (1980) by Stephen J. Williams〕 The grammar described on this page is for Colloquial Welsh, which is used for speech and informal writing. Literary Welsh is closer to the form of Welsh used in the 1588 translation of the Bible and can be seen in formal writing. ==Initial consonant mutation== Initial consonant mutation is a phenomenon common to all Insular Celtic languages, although there is no evidence of it in the ancient Continental Celtic languages of the early first millennium. The first consonant of a word in Welsh may change when preceded by certain words (e.g. , , and ), or because of some other grammatical context (such as when the grammatical object directly follows the grammatical subject). Welsh has three mutations: the soft mutation, the nasal mutation, and the aspirate mutation. These are also represented in writing: : * A blank cell indicates no change. For example, the word for "stone" is , but "the stone" is (soft mutation), "my stone" is (nasal mutation) and "her stone" is (aspirate mutation). These examples represent usage in the standard language; there is some regional and idiolectal variation in colloquial usage. In particular, the soft mutation is often used where nasal or aspirate mutation might be expected on the basis of these examples. Mutation is not triggered by the ''form'' of the preceding word; the meaning and grammatical function of the word are also relevant. For example, while meaning "in" triggers nasal mutation, homonyms of do not. For example: *In the sentence ("There is plastic in Siaco's nose") ''trwyn'' has undergone nasal mutation. *In the sentence ("Siaco's nose is plastic" ) ''plastig'' has undergone soft mutation, not nasal mutation. *In the sentence ("Siaco's nose contains plastic") ''cynnwys'' is not mutated. === Soft mutation === The soft mutation (Welsh: ) is by far the most common mutation in Welsh. When words undergo soft mutation, the general pattern is that unvoiced plosives become voiced plosives, and voiced plosives become fricatives or disappear; some fricatives also change, and the full list is shown in the above table. In some cases a limited soft mutation takes place. This differs from the full soft mutation in that words beginning with ''rh'' and ''ll'' do not mutate. Common situations where the limited soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive. * feminine singular nouns with the definite article or the number one () * nouns or adjectives used predicatively or adverbially after * adjectives following ("so"), ("too") or ("fairly, very") Common situations where the full soft mutation occurs are as follows – note that this list is by no means exhaustive: * adjectives (and nouns used genitively as adjectives) qualifying feminine singular nouns * words immediately following the prepositions ("for"), ("on"), ("to"), ("under"), ("over"), ("through"), ("without"), ("until"), ("by"), ("from"), ("to"), ("of") - note that this does not mean there is a one-to-one correspondence between Welsh and English prepositions! * nouns used with the number two () * nouns following adjectives (N.B. most adjectives follow the noun) * nouns after the possessives (informal ''your'') and (when it means ''his'') * an object immediately following the subject (typically after conjugated verbs) * the second element in many compound words * verb infinitives following an indirect object (e.g. - it is necessary to me to go) * inflected verbs in the interrogative and negative (also frequently, in the spoken language, the affirmative) The occurrence of the soft mutation often obscures the origin of placenames to non-Welsh-speaking visitors. For example, is the church of (Mary), and is the bridge on the Tawe. === Nasal mutation === The nasal mutation (Welsh: ) normally occurs: * after – generally pronounced as if spelt – ("my") e.g. ("a bed"), ("my bed"), pronounced * after the locative preposition ("in") e.g. ("Tywyn"), ("in Tywyn") * after the negating prefix ("un-") e.g. ("fair"), ("unfair"). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Colloquial Welsh morphology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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