Appendix talk:Welsh conjugation

Contracted forms of bod, mutation of preterite/future/conditional, and questions regarding the norms for Welsh entries

This page quite sensibly omits regional/contracted forms in its table on imperfective conjugations of bod. However, I cannot help but feel that forms like o'n i, o't ti, (d)ych chi, etc., etc. should be included. I am unsure if there would be an objection to me editing them into the table, though, so I wanted to put something here about the proposal first. Perhaps an additional, collapsible, table would suffice, giving common contracted forms. Likewise I feel it should be mentioned that there is a tendency for soft mutation of the preterite, future, and conditional in questions and negatives in writing, and in speech, often in statements as well (particularly the future and conditional in the latter case), but, given the layout of the page, I am unsure where best to note this without doing a bit of a rewrite.

I suppose I might get to work on the literary section in the near future, but I have to ask - are there any established policies regarding which forms we use for literary and historical Welsh? That is, (1) How are we defining Literary Welsh? Whose forms do we use, given there are a number of grammars we could choose from? It has been a while since I examined many grammars, but I was under the impression that I recall some degree of variation between authors. And (2), how to differentiate historical Welsh? What is the cutoff point assumed on witkonary, and what are its motivations? (I personally believe the following is appropriate based on the little literature I've read: 7th-10th for Old Welsh, 11th-14th Middle, 15th onwards for Modern.) Is there a norm of spelling for Middle Welsh, like there is a norm used by the ONP for Norse, or do we just pick something at random and list alternatives as we encounter them in the wild, perhaps with an implicit preference for forms found in works like Evans' A grammar of Middle Welsh and Falileyev's Etymological glossary of Old Welsh, etc.? Iolo ap Rhys (talk) 16:27, 27 December 2020 (UTC)