Sorry. At some level, I knew that, if one sees a brown lady-blackbird, is she aderyn ddu?
I doubt it, though it sounds nice. 
We’re talking about grammatical gender here which sometimes goes with the sex of animate objects, as with dyn and fenyw, but not always.
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Diolch yn fawr, Dee. I knew there would be someone out there, more ‘au fait’ with the Welsh language than I. I didn’t hang around long enough to learn about the agreement, with masculine and feminine nouns, of the mutations which occurred. Very grateful for all the help I can get.
I think “gafr wen, wen, wen” in oes gafr eto is a bit of a rule breaker though isn’t it, but sounds good.
Gafr is not only a female goat (heb ei godro) but also grammatically feminine so no problems there.
really, I never knew that - always thought it was masculine. Cheers
What is a billy goat? (Yn Gymraeg, I mean!)
I’ve been intrigued by this today and didn’t realise that bwrdd and bord were male and female forms of table. I have also been looking for other animals and can’t figure out Arth, because geiriadur.net has it down as both. Any ideas on Arth? - Is it one of those that is different in different dialects?.
This is interesting. I’ve just looked up billy-goat in my Geiriadur Mawr and it says “bwch gafr” which I hadn’t heard before. (Having once got caught in the position of holding a charging billy-goat back by its horns as a teenager while all my friends stood around laughing hysterically, I’m not so keen on billy-goats!)
The same Geiriadur Mawr has ‘arth’ for bear in general and ‘arthes’ for a she-bear, which I also didn’t know. I hope it comes up in a quiz somewhere sometime!
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Couldn’t resist looking that one up and found this story on a school website for tri Bili-bwch gafr. With Bili-bwch gafr bach and Bili-bwch gafr mawr.
http://www.ysgolabererch.org/downloads/300114-tri-bili-bwch-gafr.pdf
The troll in this is called yr ellyll erchyll - I have tried and I cannot say that one for the life of me.
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Love it!! and I agree - yr ellyll erchyll is a real tongue twister!
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Kept saying yr ellyll erchllyll
I thought they were made up words, but they are real and I am going to avoid ever trying to say them together:
Ellyll: goblin, elf, fairy, sprite, genius (of a place, &c.), apparition, phantom, spectre, wraith, ghost, shade, bogey; evil spirit, fiend, devil, demon, bibl. a kind of demon that haunts ruins, satyr, familiar spirit; a diabolically cruel person.
Erchyll:horrible, hideous, ghastly, dire, terrible, dreadful, awful, frightful.
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