For those learning Welsh from books, recordings, or an on-line course, there’s one mutation your course has probably left out. In wandering around the BBC Cymru web-site, I stumbled upon this page:
Llond platiad o jips!The key phrase here is platiad o jibs (plate of chips).
For a bit of background, words which come after the preposition o change the first letter of the word—where possible. This sort of change is called a “mutation”.
- the p in the word pobl changes to b: llawer o bobl (lots of people)
- the c in the word ceir changes to g: ychydig o geir (a few cars)
Neither the sound /tʃ/ spelled “ch” in English “chess”, nor /dʒ/ spelled “j” in English “jump” are found in Welsh words except for relatively recent borrowings—mostly from English, such as wats (watch) and jam (jam), both pronounced pretty much like their English counterparts. As these sounds are not part of the traditional phonology they are, at least I thought they were, exempt from the mutation system.
So I was interested to see the title of the article linked above, where the word chips (chips) had been mutated to jips. Looking further down in the article, I see that the unmutated form chips shows up so using the letter j in jips isn’t some kind of spelling convention. Of course, this mutation might have been around for a while, and I just didn’t notice it because I hadn’t seen it in writing; we always used the word sglodion instead of chips. But this instance of a mutated /tʃ/ does indicate two things:
- There’s a new addition to the soft mutation: /tʃ/ -> /dʒ/
- The sounds /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are truly part of the Welsh language now. If only there were a consistent way to spell /tʃ/, the spelling ‹ch› is already used for the sound /x/ as in Scottish loch.
Now I’m curious, is there an aspirate mutation of /tʃ/ to /ʃ/, so that “fish and chips” would be pysgod a sips? Then again, maybe the writer of this article is just playing with the language and wouldn’t say jips normally. Nevertheless, I’ll be saying platiad o jips from now on!
