ubuntu-l10n-cy team mailing list archive

[Christopher Swift <christopher.swift@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ar Iau, 2010-09-23 am 18:52 +0200, ysgrifennodd Leandro Regueiro: 
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Leandro Regueiro
> <leandro.regueiro@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Tony Pursell
> > <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 16:20 +0200, Leandro Regueiro wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>> I am trying to design and build a terminology discussion system, and I
> >>> have some doubts about the plural forms. I am used to languages like
> >>> english, spanish or galician that have two plural forms that we call
> >>> "singular" and "plural", but since I plan to create a system able to
> >>> handle all languages I need some information about weird plural forms
> >>> (at least for me) like the Polish, Irish, Welsh, Russian, Serbian or
> >>> the Arabic ones, for mention some of them. Do you have a specific name
> >>> for every one of your language plural forms? Can you list that names?
> >>>
> >>> I also have doubts about the part of speech names. As I said above I
> >>> am used to certain languages where we have verbs, substantives,
> >>> adjectives, etc. Maybe the languages I chose are not the best ones,
> >>> and perhaps I should ask for languages from India, southwestern Asia
> >>> or Africa, but can you provide me a list of parts of speech for your
> >>> languages as well?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> A lot of thanks,
> >>>                           Leandro Regueiro
> >>>
> >>
> >> Hi Leandro
> >>
> >> Welsh has singular (unigol) and plural (lluosog) forms of nouns.
> >>
> >> The main problem with Welsh is that there are no 'regular' plurals (like
> >> the way adding an 's' forms the majority of plurals in English).  There
> >> are a number of ways plurals are formed but no easy rules to determine
> >> which applies to a particular noun (e.g adding 'au' or 'od') and no
> >> special terminology to describe the rules.
> 
> Sorry for replying again. In
> http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms#c I saw that
> Welsh has 4 plural forms, and if I see well you only talked about two.
> 
> >> Like many languages there are collective nouns, plural nouns and
> >> dual/double nouns, but these are, to me, just semantic distinctions as
> >> they generally all have singular forms.  For instance, 'dwylaw' (hands -
> >> literally 'two hands') can be called a dual noun, or just be seen as the
> >> irregular plural of 'llaw' (hand).
> >>
> >> Other parts of speech in Welsh are much the same as the languages you
> >> are familiar with. Welsh does have its own grammatical constructs which
> >> are not found in those languages (to my knowledge) but without knowing
> >> more about the requirements of your 'terminology discussion system' I
> >> would not know if discussion of them is relevant.
> >>
> >> Tony
> >
> > Thanks for your reply, Tony.
> >
> > Googling I found
> > http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Parts_of_speech which has links
> > to pages with part of speech lists for several languages (most of them
> > partial lists). I want to know if your language has parts of speech
> > different to: verb, adverb, noun, adjective, conjunction, pronoun,
> > preposition which are the ones I am used to. Since welsh is an
> > indo-european language I suppose it has common parts of speech to
> > other languages I know. I already said in my first message that maybe
> > is better to do this question for other languages (not indo-aryan
> > languages), but I appreciate your reply.
> >
> > Thanks again.
> >
Hello Leandro,
Welsh nouns can be formed into the either singular or plural nouns but
also into collective and unit nouns. An example of the singular/plural
system would be "llyfr" which is Welsh for "book" can be made plural by
adding -au to the end of the word, therefore "llyfrau" is "books" in
Welsh.

However when it comes to collective/unit nouns, the collective noun in
this case would be "coed" which in Welsh means a group of trees or
"wood" however the make a singular noun from that word "coed", you must
add -en to it to make "coeden" which is a "tree".  That is basically how
plurals are formed and how the unit nouns are formed from the collective
nouns.

Plurals in Welsh can be formed in many ways.  I've noted a few examples
below:
Appending letters to the root noun:
siop / siopau shop / shops
geiriadur / geiriaduron dictionary / dictionaries
capel / capeli chapel / chapels
merch / merched daughter / daughters

Changing one or more vowels in the root noun:
castell / cestyll castle / castles
car / ceir car / cars
corff / cyrff body / bodies
brân / brain crow / crows

Nouns can however use the above methods together to form plurals so
therefore they change an internal vowel and append an ending.
mab / meibion son / sons
gardd / gerddi garden / gardens
cyfaill / cyfeillion friend / friends
iaith / ieithoedd language / languages

It is possible to replace the ending of the singular noun with a new
ending to create the plural:
blodyn / blodau flower / flowers
oedolyn / oedolion adult / adults
sleisen / sleisys slice / slices

There is a lot more on the formation of plurals however to answer your
query about the sourceforge algorithm used for Welsh plurals.  In Welsh
we have a feature called an "initial consonant mutation" which changes
the initial letter of the word.  We have four states of mutation in
Welsh, the radical form of the word which is not mutated, the soft
mutation's form, the nasal mutation's form and the aspirate mutation.
There are some numbers in Welsh which cause a mutation of the following
word.  One, two and three all cause a mutation of the next word.

If we take for example ci which is Welsh for dog and is a masculine
singular noun.  One cat would translate as "un ci", two cats as "dau
gi", three cats as "tri chi" and six cats would be "chwe chi".
However cath which is Welsh for cat and is a feminine singular noun
would translate as the following.  One cat could be "un gath", two cats
would be "dwy gath", three cats as "tair cath" and six caths "chwe
chath".  As you can see for smaller numbers we use the singular plural,
i.e. we just say "two cat" for two cats in Welsh.  The plurals of cat
and dog are cathod (cats, cath is the singular) and cwn (dogs, ci is the
singular). For numbers such as those over 10 we use the plural form, so
14 dogs would be "14 cwn".

I hope this has helped a little and if anybody has anything to add feel
free,

Christopher Swift