I’m aware that in Welsh, it is common for adverbial phrases to mutate, such as ‘on Monday’ for example, changing to ‘ddydd Llun’. I was told the reason it mutates is to specify the date on which something is occurring.
I’m confused as to why in the examples below, dydd does not mutate to ddydd, despite the clause specifying Monday is when these actions are occurring?
Mae John yn mynd adre dydd Llun.
Ble rwyt ti’n mynd dydd Llun?
Am I missing something, or is this just simply a preference, i.e. would ddydd Llun also be grammatically correct in the above examples?
Where are these examples from? Like you said, adverbials of time should get a soft mutation, so it should be ddydd Llun in both cases in order to be grammatically correct. In an academic setting, this would be a mistake, but in day-to-day conversation these things happen, and no-one would think twice about it. (“He who hath never missed a mutation may cast the first stone” )
Both examples were from the Dysgu Cymraeg Mynediad course! I can only imagine they wanted to avoid confusion and so ignored the mutation on dydd, but it’s good to know I’m not going crazy! diolch yn fawr Hendrik!
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the Dysgu Cymraeg course doesn’t cover this mutation until the Canolradd (or even Uwch) course. I’m not sure what their reasoning for it is - perhaps there’s a feeling that the “correct” mutation belongs to the more formal register that also gets introduced at that level.
Adding to this, I’ve also seen dydd/nos Wener used instead of Gwener. Is this a mistake or is there a circumstance in which this is correct? (In my head, i reconstructed this as being a… carried? mutation from “nos” as that word cannot mutate to give the dydd/ddydd distinction, but I started doubting this explanation when i came across “dydd Wener” as well )
Hmmm… I don’t think I would say “dydd Wener”, so I don’t quite know why that would have happened. (Unless perhaps it’s a slip of the keyboard somewhere for someone?)
I probably would write “dydd/nos Wener”, as it would feel right to me to mutate after “nos”. I couldn’t tell you why that is, gramatically, though (i.e. why the second of the either/or construction is ruling the mutation) - I’ll leave that to other more knowledgeable folk
Nos Wener is correct, dydd Wener is not. The difference here is that dydd is masculine and nos feminine. This is the same rule that gives you siop flodau (flower shop) and Amgueddfa Ŵlan (Wool Musuem), because like nos, siop and amgueddfa are feminine.
Note that Nos da sounds like an anomaly, as you’d think with nos being feminine it would be dda like noswaith dda but there is a little rule in Welsh that says that when the word ends in ‘s’ the mutation doesn’t always happen
I know that the grammatical frameworks in Welsh and English here are quite different, but this brought to mind the common pattern in spoken English “Where are you going Monday?”, whereas it would be more usual to hear the sentence as “Where are you going on Monday?” in more formal English.
My point is that informal language, probably by definition, does not have to follow the rules of the formal registers. It’s important to be exposed to both.
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