Breton grammar

Like many other European languages, Breton nouns have grammatical gender: masculine (gourel) and feminine (gwregel). The neuter (nepreizh), which existed in Breton's ancestor, Brittonic, survives in a few words, such as tra (thing), but these are now considered masculine but behave as if they were feminine.

The gender of a noun is mostly arbitrary and can often vary from dialect to dialect. However, certain semantic groups of word tend to belong to a particular gender. For example, names of countries and cites are feminine whereas most divisions of time are masculine. Some suffixes also have the same gender:

• Masculine suffixes include: -ach, -adur, -aj, -er, -lec'h, -our, -ti, -va.
• Feminine suffixes include: -eg, -ell, -enn (see "singulative" below), -enti, -er, -ez, -ezh, -ezon, -i.[1]

Nouns exist in two numbers, singular and plural. Most plural forms are formed with the addition of a suffix, often -ed for animate nouns and -(i)où for inanimates, for example, Breton "Breton", Bretoned "Bretons"; levr "book", levroù "books". Other suffixes also occur, for example, Saoz "Englishman", Saozaon "Englishmen". A few nouns form their plural via vowel alternation, such as kastell "castle", kestell "castles"; maen "stone", mein "stones", while others are irregular, like den "person", tud "people"; ki "dog", chas "dogs".[1][2]

As well as having a regular plural form, certain parts of the body display relics of a dual system, for example, singular lagad "eye", plural lagadoù "eyes", dual daoulagad "(pair of) eyes". Dual forms themselves can have a plural form, for example, daoulagadoù "(pairs of) eyes".[1]

A distinctive and unusual feature of Brythonic languages is a singulative marker, which in Breton is marked with the feminine suffix -enn. While the noun gwez, for instance, means "trees (collectively)", the word gwezenn means "(a single) tree". The latter can even be made into a regular plural gwezennoù with the meaning "several trees (individually)".

Breton forms diminutive nouns using the suffix -ig with the plural formed by reduplication of the suffix -où, for example, prad "meadow", pradig "little meadow", pradouigoù "little meadows" (cf. non-diminutive plural pradoù "meadows").[1]

Personal pronouns may be strong, post-clitic head or pre-clitic head. Strong pronouns have the same distribution as a full noun phrase and may be subjects, objects or prepositional objects. Post-clitic head pronouns tend to follow finite verbs, nouns or inflected prepositions. Pre-clitic head pronouns function as object pronouns preceding verb phrases and possessive determiners preceding noun phrases. The use of the "new" personal pronouns is more restricted. They derive from inflection of the partitive preposition a "of" and can function as an object pronoun, for example, E kêr e welas Yannig anezho "Yannig saw them in town", more literally "In the town Yannig saw of them", and occasionally function as subjects (with intransitive, usually negative, verbs).[1]

Demonstrative pronouns are post-head clitics used in conjunction with the definite article.[1][2]

Indefinite pronouns may be positive, such as re "some, ones" and holl "all" and negative, such as netra "nothing" and neblec'h "nowhere", and may be preceded by a determiner, for example an re "some" ("the ones") and da re "your" ("your ones").

Breton verbs can be conjugated to show tense, aspect, mood, person and number by adding suffixes to the verbal stem, seen in the following table.

Additional suffixes may form the verbal noun. The most common of these are:[2]

• -out as in lavarout "say", gallout "can, be able", klevout "hear, smell"
• -añ as in evañ "drink", gwiskañ "dress", skrivañ "write"
• -iñ as in debriñ "eat", deskiñ "learn", reiñ "give"

For other verbs, the stem itself is also the verbnoun, for example, gortoz "wait", lenn "read", kompren "understand".

Verbs also have a past participle formed with a suffix and a present participle form comprising the verbal noun preceded by the particle o, which causes a mixed mutation.

Most verbs are regular and stray little from the usual patterns.[1] The table shows and example of the regular verb debriñ "eat" (verbal stem debr-).

A few verbs are irregular, one example of which is ober "do".

Bezañ "be" is another irregular verb, which is conjugated for additional tense or aspect distinctions.

Another common irregular verb is eus "have", which combines a person marker with the tensed form. Eus is historically derived from bezañ[1] and a similar development is seen in Cornish.[6]

Ober, bezañ and eus can all be used as auxiliary verbs.[1]

In the present, Breton (like Cornish and Irish but unlike the other Celtic language) distinguishes between the simple and progressive present. The simple present is formed by either conjugating the verb or using the verbal noun with the present of ober. The progressive present, on the other hand, is formed with the present situative of bezañ combined with present participle. In addition to these two aspectual distinctions, Breton has a habitual present which utilises the present habitual of bezañ and the present participle.

Combining the past participle with either eus or bezañ is the usual way of forming the past tense, the conjugated forms being restricted to more literary language. The choice between eus or bezañ depends on whether the past participle is that of a transitive or intransitive verb respectively (similar to the passé composé of French).[2]

Non-tensed verbs are negated with bipartite ne ... ket either side of the verb.[1]

Similar to other Celtic languages, Breton has an underlying vigesimal counting system. "One" is un, ul, ur before a noun (the same as the indefinite article). "Two", "three" and "four" and derivative numbers have separate masculine and feminine forms. Interesting irregularities in the system are triwec'h "eighteen", literally "three sixes", and hanter kant "fifty", literally "half a hundred" (compare Welsh deunaw "two nines" and hanner cant "half a hundred").

A gender distinction can again be shown with some ordinal numbers.