Thou sleapest muche, and drynkest often, y rrain bethav yll dav ynt elynion i’r korff: notes on relatives in early modern Welsh grammars

Abstract

This case study presents in its first part evidence for a remarkable resemblance in their teaching on relative clauses between Pum Llyfr Kerddwriaeth, the mid-sixteenth-century final revision of the Welsh ‘bardic grammar’, and two roughly contemporary grammars of Latin in English and Latin which were authorised by a royal monopoly and thus enjoyed wide circulation. In the second part, it contextualises these observations with a small-scale exploration of the place of ‘relatives’ in early modern Welsh grammars and of the eventual emergence of the ‘relative pronoun’ as a distinct category in the grammar of Welsh. It also provides further evidence of the dependence of the Dwned, a grammatical text associated with Gutun Owain, on Middle English grammatical tracts.