Middle Welsh (Welsh: Cymraeg Canol, Middle Welsh: Kymraec) is the label attached to the Welsh language of the 12th to 15th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This form of Welsh developed directly from Old Welsh (Welsh: Hen Gymraeg).
Literature and history
Middle Welsh is the language of a rich body of literature. Nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion are written in it, although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of most of the manuscripts of mediaeval Welsh law. There are many translations and adaptations of chivalric romances (e.g. of the Grail and Charlemagne cycles), mostly from French. There are also a number of historical works translated from Latin, including a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, and Brut y Tywysogyon, a chronicle of Welsh history from the late 7th to the 13th (later to the 14th) century. A large number of religious works, such as lives of saints and theological tracts, based on Latin originals are preserved. There are also geographical and didactic works, proverbs, medical tracts, genealogies, grammars for the instruction of bards and lists of triads.
There is a sizable corpus of poetry in Middle Welsh. Some early poetry from a time preceding the Middle Welsh period is nevertheless preserved mostly in the linguistic form of that era: that includes Y Gododdin and the poems of Taliesin. From the Middle Welsh period itself, there are the works of the court poets (Gogynfeirdd) of 1100-1350, chiefly praise poems and commemorative poems, as well as a considerable number of religious ones. In the 14th century, a new style using primarily the cywydd metre developed, with its most notable representative being Dafydd ap Gwilym. The language of that period is sometimes described as early Modern Welsh, but poets writing until the early 15th century still used Middle Welsh forms and constructions.
Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day Welsh speaker.
Phonology
The phonology of Middle Welsh is quite similar to that of modern Welsh, with only a few differences. The letter u, which today represents /ɨ/ in North Western Welsh dialects and /i/ in South Welsh and North East Welsh dialects, represented the close central rounded vowel /ʉ/ in Middle Welsh. The diphthong aw is found in unstressed final syllables in Middle Welsh, while in Modern Welsh it has become o (e.g. Middle Welsh marchawc = Modern Welsh marchog "horseman"). Similarly, the Middle Welsh diphthongs ei and eu have become ai and au in final syllables, e. g. Middle Welsh seith = modern saith "seven", Middle Welsh heul = modern haul "sun".
The vowels are as follows:
Vowel length is predictable: vowels are long in monosyllables unless followed by a geminate or one of the consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /ŋ/. The vowels could combine into the following falling diphthongs:
1. ending in /w/: /aw/, /ew/, /iw/, /ɨw/ ~ /əw/
2. ending in /ɨ/: /aɨ/, /oɨ/, /uɨ/
3. others: /ej/, /eʉ/ (and possibly /æj/, /æʉ/)
The diphthongs /æj/ and /æʉ/, whose first component gradually changed into /a/, were originally allophones of /ej/ and /eʉ/, respectively, and no distinction between the two was expressed in Middle Welsh spelling, so their presence during most of Middle Welsh is not immediately observable. However, the fact that the modern pronunciations beginning with an /a/ occur in all word-final syllables, regardless of stress, makes it plausible that their distinctness from /ej/ and /eʉ/ was a legacy from the time before the stress shifted from final to penultimate syllables in Old Welsh. The full opening to /aj/ and /aʉ/ may have been completed at some point in later Middle Welsh, possibly the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.
The consonants are as follows:
Consonants may be geminate. /ʃ/ is mostly found in loanwords such as siacet 'jacket'.
Stress was placed on the penultimate syllable with some exceptions such as the causative verbs in -háu, e.g. sicrháu ('to make things secure' from sicr 'secure'). In terms of intonation, the tonal peak must have been aligned with the post-stress syllable, reflecting the earlier final stress of the late Brythonic period, since this persists even in Modern Welsh.
Orthography
Differences from modern Welsh
The orthography of Middle Welsh was not standardised, and there is great variation between manuscripts in how certain sounds are spelled. Some generalisations of differences between Middle Welsh spelling and Modern Welsh spelling can be made. For example, the possessive adjectives ei "his, her", eu "their" and the preposition i "to" are very commonly spelled y in Middle Welsh, and are thus spelled the same as the definite article y and the indirect relative particle y. A phrase such as y gath is therefore ambiguous in Middle Welsh between the meaning "the cat" (spelled the same in Modern Welsh), the meaning "his cat" (modern ei gath), and the meaning "to a cat" (modern i gath). The voiced stop consonants /d ɡ/ are represented by the letters t c at the end of a word, e.g. diffryt "protection" (modern diffryd), redec "running" (modern rhedeg). The sound /k/ is very often spelled k before the vowels e i y (in Modern Welsh, it is always spelled with a c, e.g. Middle Welsh keivyn = modern ceifn "third cousin"). The sound /β/ is usually spelled with a u or v (these are interchangeable as in Latin MSS), except at the end of a word, where it is spelled with an f (in Modern Welsh, it is always spelled with a f, e.g. Middle Welsh auall = modern afal "apple tree"). The sound /ð/ is usually spelled with a d (in Modern Welsh, it is spelled with a dd, e.g. Middle Welsh dyd = modern dydd "day"). The sound /r̥/ is spelled r and is thus not distinguished from /r/ (in Modern Welsh, they are distinguished as rh and r respectively, e.g. Middle Welsh redec "running" vs. modern rhedeg). The epenthetic vowel /ə/ is usually written, in contrast to Modern Welsh: e.g. mwnwgyl rather than mwnwgl "neck".
Letter-sound correspondences
In general, the spelling is both variable and historical and does not reflect some sound changes that had taken place by the Middle Welsh period, most notably the lenition. Some of the less predictable letter-sound correspondences are the following:
Grammar
Morphology
Notable differences from modern Welsh
Middle Welsh is closer to the other medieval Celtic languages, e.g. Old Irish, in its morphology. For example, the endings -wŷs, -ws, -es and -as are used for 3rd person singular of the preterite in Middle Welsh as well as the form -odd. In the same person and tense exists the old reduplicated preterite kigleu 'he heard' of the verb klywet 'to hear', which corresponds to the Old Irish ·cúalae '(s)he heard' from the verb ro·cluinethar '(s)he hears'.
Middle Welsh also retains more plural forms of adjectives that do not appear in modern Welsh, e.g. cochion, plural of coch 'red'.
The nominal plural ending -awr is very common in Middle Welsh, but has been replaced in modern Welsh by -au.
Morphonology
Like modern Welsh, Middle Welsh exhibits in its morphology numerous vowel alternations as well as the typical Insular Celtic initial consonant mutations.
Vowels
There is a productive alternation between final syllables and non-final syllables known as mutation or centring (), which is by necessity triggered by the addition of any suffix and operates as follows:
The centring mutation is due to a process of vowel reduction that operated earlier, in late Brythonic, when the stress was placed on the last syllable.
Further, there are two types of alternations that are caused by following vowels (extant or lost) and are no longer entirely productive, but nonetheless very frequent in the morphology. The first type is ultimate affection, which occurs in the last syllable of a word and is caused by a vowel that used to be located in the next syllable. The originally triggering vowel is either i or a, hence the alternations are referred to as i-affection and a-affection. The more common type is i-affection, which occurs in plurals with a zero ending and in the present singular of many verbs. In addition, in some cases, the singular has an affected vowel, but the plural does not (this has been termed 'reversion'). The alternation operates as follows:
Ultimate a-affection is found, most notably, in the feminine forms of adjectives that do have gender declension, and it changes the stem vowels as follows:
The second type of affection is triggered by (typically) extant close vowels or semivowels in the following syllables, and is hence known as penultimate affection (in fact, it also reaches the antepenult in Middle Welsh). The effect varies somewhat depending on the triggering vowel, hence one may speak more specifically, for instance, of y-affection (). Penultimate y-affection is a regular feature of verb forms with an ending containing y (e.g. the second person singular and plural in the present indicative). Both it and other types of penultimate affection may also occur due to the addition of suffixes containing the respective vowels, e.g. in the plural of nouns.
Penultimate and ultimate affection may occur in one and the same form, e.g. castell 'castle' – pl. kestyll, manach 'monk' – meneich 'monks', or, with reversion, elein 'fawn' – pl. alaned (the latter two may then be termed cases of 'ei-affection').
Consonants
In contrast to modern Welsh, the consonant mutations are not always reflected in Middle Welsh orthography; this is especially true of the nasal mutation.
1. Lenition / soft mutation
Lenition turns voiceless stop consonants into voiced ones and voiced stops into fricatives (further turning into zero in the case of /ɣ/).
It occurs most notably:
a. in the second members of compounds: march 'horse' > moruarch 'sea-horse, whale';
b. in a noun preceded by the possessive pronouns for 3rd singular masculine and 2nd singular possessors (y 'his' and dy/th 'thy'): kyuoeth 'wealth, realm' > y gyuoeth 'his wealth, realm';
c. in a noun preceded by the numerals 1, 2 and 7: march 'horse' > deu uarch 'two horses';
d. in a noun or adjective preceded by a name that it describes: brenhin 'king' > Keredic Vrenhin 'Ceredig the king'; bendigeit 'blessed' > Catwaladyr Uendigeit 'Cadwaladr the blessed';
e. in a possessor noun or an adjective preceded by a feminine singular noun or a semantically dual noun: Morgant > gulat Uorgant 'the land of Morgan', tec 'fair' > y wreic deccaf 'the fairest lady', mawr 'big' > deu uarch uawr 'two big horses';
f. in a feminine singular noun preceded by the definite article: gwreig > y wreig 'the woman';
g. in a noun following the prepositions a, am, ar, at, dan, gan, heb, hyt, y, is, o, tros, trwy, uch, wrth, the conjunction neu or the vocative particle a;
h. in a noun functioning as the subject after some verbal forms (in contrast to modern Welsh). It is common after many 3rd person forms of the verb 'to be', and after the 3rd person singular imperfect and pluperfect (sometimes also preterite) of other verbs. It also occurs in subjects separated from their verbs;
i. in a noun functioning as the object after most verbal forms, but sometimes not after the 3rd singular present and preterite;
j. in a noun or adjective functioning as a nominal predicate after the verb 'to be' or the predicative particles yn and y: mawr 'big' > ot oed uawr ef 'if he was big';
k. in a noun or adjective used adverbially (including after the adverbial particle yn);
l. in a verb after the relative pronoun a, the interrogative pronouns pa, py and cwt, the interrogative particle a, the negative particles ny and na, the affirmative particles neu, ry and a, the particle yt, many prefixes such as go- and di-, the conjunctions pan, tra and yny;
m. in the verb 'to be' after a nominal predicate.
2. Nasal mutation
The nasal mutation replaces stops with corresponding nasals (while keeping them voiceless if the original stops were voiceless):
It occurs:
a. after the preposition yn 'in' (and sometimes also the predicative and adverbial particle yn): pob 'every' > ymhob 'in every'. This does not occur with verbal nouns.
b. the possessive pronoun vy 'my': brawt 'brother' > vy mrawt 'my brother'
c. the numerals 7, 9, 19, 12, 15, 100, and by extension some others.