Verb and Subject Order in Welsh

One of the most noteworthy things about Welsh that many people will recall is that the verb comes at the head of the sentence, followed by subject and object -- VSO is the linguistic shorthand for such languages. Many languages (I'd hazard a guess that it's 100% minus a tiny bit) are either SOV or SVO, where the subject comes first, followed by either verb-then-object, or object-then-verb.

English, for example, is SVO or Subject-Verb-Object, where we might say:

Mary likes ice cream.

Japanese, on the other hand, is SOV or Subject-Object-Verb, where the same sentence would be effectively written:

Mary-wa ice cream-no likes.

And it's often claimed that Welsh is VSO, where the verb starts the sentence off and the subject follows, with the object included last. On the surface, this seems accurate, but in reality things are a bit more complex, and Welsh's VSO-ness isn't quite as set in stone as most people would imagine.

Placing the Inflection at the Head of the Sentence

Consider "Mary likes ice cream" in Welsh:

Mae Mary'n hoffi hufen iā.

... where hoffi is "to like" and hufen iā is "ice cream."

If you've already begun studying Welsh, you'll know that the "mae" at the head of the sentence is actually the third person singular form of the verb "bod," or "to be," which is used as an auxiliary verb to conjugate damned near everything. (The 'n hanging around in front of the verb is a minor particle that you can ignore for the time being.) Since the "mae" is strictly speaking a verb and carries the inflection, the fact that it comes before the subject is used as evidence that Welsh is VSO, or Verb-Subject-Object.

But on second thought ... "mae" only carries the inflection, and not the actual meaning of the verb itself. (Welsh does this a whole lot, using auxiliary verbs to carry the inflection; verb tenses like this are called periphrastic.)

What's inflection? I hear you ask. That's the bit of stuff you stick on the verb (typically) to tell you what person and tense is being used. English barely inflects its verbs at all, so there are only a few places I can point out inflection in English verbs. In the sentence:

Mary likes ice cream.

... the inflection is the -s on the end of "likes." That's a little titch that we stick on to show that we're talking about third person singular present tense. We can also write:

Mary liked ice cream.

... and the -d on the end of "liked" tells us that it's past tense. Other languages, such as the Romance languages, have much more involved and complicated inflection systems for their verbs, but for now, all you have to keep in mind is that inflection is the marker that tells you the person and tense of the sentence. Sometimes, often with the most commonly use verbs, the inflection is more irregular and isn't a matter of just sticking an ending on. The past tense of the verb "to go," for example, isn't "goed," but "went." The third person singular present tense of "to be" isn't "bes," but "is." Again, the most commonly used verbs are often the most irregular in any language.

So now let's get back to sentence structure in Welsh. "Mae" is the (irregular) third person present tense of "bod," or "to be." It carries the inflection in the sentence:

Mae Mary'n hoffi hufen iā.

... but it's not actually the verb. The verb is hoffi, or "to like." And that word is placed after the subject, just like English. What's going on? A closer look at this supposed oddity reveals that verbs in Welsh declarative sentences are only doing something very similar to the way that English typically manages verbs in questions.

Let's start out looking at a sentence in English. It turns out that we can also use periphrastic tenses in English, although it's not the standard way of forming a sentence. Instead of using "to be," we use "to do." This auxiliary verb doesn't add any meaning to the sentence; it just functions as a placeholder verb to hang the inflection off of:

Mary does like ice cream.

Instead of putting the -s on the end of the verb "like," English speakers can use an auxiliary verb, "to do," and stick the inflection on that. (If you are about my age, you may recall that they were called "helping verbs" in grade school.) And you can do this for just about everything in the present tense and the past. "Mary does like ice cream." "They did eat barbecued ribs for dinner." You'll notice again that in both cases, the little bits that are stuck on to the verbs to denote things like third person singular present tense or past tense are not hung off the real verb, but instead off the placeholder auxiliary, "to do."

English doesn't do this very much for normal sentences (except for negation, as you'll notice by looking at this sentence itself). But it is possible to form perfectly grammatical sentences this way.

Where English does this all the time is when sentences are turned into questions. Consider the following two sentences:

Mary likes ice cream.
Does Mary like ice cream?

You'll notice that the second sentence here is nearly identical to the Welsh one in structure; when it comes to questions, we also like to push the inflection to the front of the line. The -s in the English sentence that would normally be hooked on the end of the "likes" to indicate tense, person, and number has been pulled off and pushed in front of everyone else, but you can't have a -s just hanging there in space; it's got to be stuck to something. Hence, the verb "to do" gets drafted as the placeholder, a sponge to soak up the inflection that's bubbled to the top of the sentence.

What Welsh does in its regular sentences is the same thing we do in questions. In their declarative sentences, they stick the inflection onto the verb "bod" and shove it up to the head of the sentence:

Mae Mary'n hoffi hufen iā.

Plainly, it's not the verb that comes before the subject, but the inflection. The verb -- hoffi in this case -- still comes after the subject in a much more typical spot.

Now, to be fair, it does get slightly stickier in Welsh. There are verb tenses that don't use auxiliaries, and in those cases, the inflection is stuck right onto the verb itself. Hence, when it bubbles to the head of the sentence, it drags the verb along with it. An example sentence, used in my discussion of the Soft Mutation, is the past preterite tense, the garden variety past tense:

Fe frathodd y ci geffyl -- "The dog bit a horse."

Plainly, this is indeed a VSO sentence; fe frathodd means "bit", and y ci is "the dog." Where the inflection is firmly attached to the verb, it will drag the verb up to the head of the sentence along with it.

However, even in this case, there is another method (used more and more frequently nowdays) for this sentence to be phrased using yet another auxiliary verb:

Fe wnaeth y ci frathu ceffyl.

Here, the wnaeth is a third person singular past tense form of gwneud. Once again, the inflection has stuck itself to that and left the actual verb, brathu, to sit after the subject, just where most languages would put it. (For a discussion of why brathu is rendered frathu, take a look at my page on the Soft Mutation.)

In fact, in all cases where the inflection sticks firmly to the verb (this past preterite that we've seen and a short-form future as well), there is a means of rendering the same verb tense using gwneud as the auxiliary. Thus even the verb tenses that seem to be ineradicably VSO have alternate forms that allow the actual verb to follow the noun while still allowing the inflection to shove itself to the top of the line as it wants so badly to do.

In abstract terms, English sentence structure is typically the following:

Subj + (V+Inf) + Obj

... whereas English question structure and Welsh sentence structure is:

Inf + Subj + V + Obj.

In other words:

Inf + SVO

Clearly, the Welsh claim to weirdness based on its VSO word order isn't quite as watertight as many people would believe. It even provides for alternate verb forms that preserve SVO order in cases where VSO is hard to avoid.