S’mae pawb - a quick question I haven’t been able to find an answer on, probably due to not using the right query terms.
In phrases where a noun is being used as an adjective - for example, asgwrn y gynnen, “the bone of contention” - why does yr follow the noun asgwrn?
If I were trying to construct a phrase like this myself, I’d render it yr asgwrn o gynnen. I can see that gynnen in the original is a noun being used as an adjective, ie “the contention bone,” so perhaps that’s triggering the move of yr, but I’m still not sure exactly why.
Any thoughts or clarification on this matter would be much appreciated! Diolch!
It’s because the two nouns here are in a genitive (indicating possession or close association) relationship.
In Welsh, the way we do this is to always say “the xxx of the xxx”, and mentally remove the “of” and the first “the”, leaving us with “xxx the xxx”, because there is no definite article (the) at the beginning of a genitive noun phrase.
So although in your example the English does indeed say “(a/the) bone of contention”, in Welsh we still have to follow the genitive pattern and say “bone the contention”
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Thank you very much! Referring to the genitive helps me quite a bit. In the OP I was analyzing this as something like “the contention bone,” treating contention as an adjective (and in practical meaning that’s not far off), but a proper English genitive construction would instead be “contention’s bone” or “bone of the contention.” Under that light, the Welsh makes a lot more sense.
I probably could have picked a better example that would’ve made it clearer, but this was the one I read that reminded me I’ve wondered about this for a while.
Thanks again!
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You’re welcome!
Now you recognise the construction, you’ll see it everywhere 
A lot of place names employ this too, Penybont (pen y bont = the end of the bridge = Bridgend), for instance 
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This is such a great question (and, of course, a great answer from Siaron). It’s one of those things that makes Welsh … Welsh. And I’ve noticed that as one becomes more used to a language, these things that seem odd at first (because they do things differently from what we’re used to in English) become normal and part of the “flavour” of the language as we own it more and more.
I’m grappling with word order in Dutch at the moment, and whereas at first I was having to really stop and think about what goes where and why, more and more it’s beginning to “sound/feel Dutch” to do it that way.
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