Basic Welsh vocabulary: People, Age & Gender
Baby: baban (-od) (m)
Child: plentyn (plant) (m)
Adult: oedolyn (oedolion) (m)
These are mostly straightforward, but note that plentyn is a singulative: the base form, plant, is a collective (already plural).
Person: person (m) (pobl (f))
Pobl is the normal word for talking about more than one person, but it’s more than an irregular plural - it’s a different word. Therefore, person is singular masculine and pobl is singular feminine. There is a regular plural as well, personau, but it sounds formal/legal, like “persons” in english. Personiaid actually means parsons (priests). Pobl can also be pluralised: pobloedd, peoples.
From here on things will get complicated, with lots of different dialect forms. As a beginner, I’m not trying to memorise all this information, but this is basic vocabulary, so being able to recognise it in a variety of dialects is very useful. The following words’ genders can all be inferred from their meaning (with one exception), so I’ve left out them to avoid visual clutter.
Man:
dyn (dynion)
bachan (no pl) (inf)
Dyn is the standard word for man across dialects. Bachan is an informal South Welsh word derived from bachgen (boy), used similarly to guy/lad. There’s also gŵr (gwŷr) and its feminine counterpart gwraig (gwragedd), but these are mostly used to mean husband and wife.
Woman:
dynes (-au) N
menyw (-od) S
benyw (-od) S
Boy:
bachgen (bechgyn) S, NE
hogyn (hogiau) NW
crwt (cryts) S
Girl:
merch (-ed) S
hogan (gennod) NW
geneth (-od) N
The word merch can mean girl, daughter or woman. Hogan is the female counterpart to hogyn, but for some mysterious reason it’s grammatically masculine. Other words for boy also have female counterparts that are grammatically feminine (bachgennes, croten) but as far as I can tell these are much less commonly used.
Sources: Duolingo notes; Geiriadur Bangor; Wiktionary
