This simple idea is often recommended as one way to remember the gender of a noun. The ubiquitous phrase hwyl fawr is a prime example ... after the feminine "hwyl" the adjective, mawr, mutates to fawr. no problems there.
But what they don't tell you is what happens when there is a string of adjectives after a feminine singular noun ... do they all get SM'd, or just the first one?
In other words, is it a "contact mutation" or not ?
Having mentioned this in passing a little while ago, I thought I would investigate ... so folks, here's what I did and what I found out.... exciting isn't it !
First off, I started looking for these little strings of adjectives trailing after a noun as I did my reading ... it's a bit like the way they collect "fish manure" ... they follow the fish around with a little net to catch the little strings of poo they trail behind them. It's exactly like that !
Here's a few I caught in my little mental net ...
Porffor hyfryd cyfoethog ... useless ... porffor is masculine
Het silc ddu ... aha ... paydirt ... feminine noun, silc un-SM-able, du SM'd to ddu !
Wyneb pinc bach ...... huh! Wyneb is masculine.
Y llift mawr gwydr .... bah ... can't find the gender of llift... I'm guessing masculine.[ It is]
Botymau bach du ...... blast .... botymau is plural and botwm is masculine anyway.
Het silc ddu ryfeddol ... ho-ho ... both du and rhyfeddol have been SM'd! Crikey.
As you can see, all this trawling is hard work ... there's loads of Fool's Gold in the form of billions of bloody masculine nouns and blasted plurals, not to mention these lazy authors who only put 1 measly adjective after their nouns... how unimaginative is that ! ... but so far, it does seem that the mutation carries on down the line of adjectives... based on a sample of of two, both based on the same bloody hat. Hardly a towering edifice of proof.More like a tatty old run-down gold prospector's tin hut.
Here's a good one... it's a bit of a duck-billed platypus of the Welsh Adjective String Universe .
Sbectol haul fawr ddu !
What we have there, on the face of it, is a feminine noun ( sbectol) followed by a masculine noun ( which might be considered as being used adjectivally here) followed by two soft-mutated adjectives ! Wow ! A horse designed by a committee !
Well readers, if any, research can be more fun than you think ! I'm going to do a "part 2" for this in which I reveal my secret weapon in the Welsh Adjective String Universe truth-quest.
But now we will have the highly thematic Llwybr Llaethog song, Pam ?