ubuntu-l10n-cy team mailing list archive

[Tony Pursell <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 18:52 +0200, Leandro Regueiro wrote:
> 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.
> 

Ok. This is as a consequence of the Welsh system of 'mutations'. Some
initial letters of nouns change in particular circumstances. 

For instance, after 2 ('dau' or 'dwy' - masculine/feminine) a 'soft'
mutation occurs as follows:

p > b
t > d
c > g
b > f
d > dd
g is lost
ll > l
rh > r
m > f

resulting in different forms of the words beginning with these letters.
Similar mutations happen for other numbers. After 'un' (one) soft
mutation happens, but only for feminine nouns.

Also, after numbers, Welsh always uses the singular form of the noun.

But mutated nouns are still either 'singular' or 'plural'.  

Does that explain things for you.

Tony