ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we discussed patterns of use of the mutations in Modern Spoken Welsh, and noted that many of the mutation triggers of Standard Welsh no longer appear to be active. This is thought by some not to be surprising; we can recall again P.W. Thomas’s (1984) comment, ‘perhaps the most amazing feature of the mutations…is the persistent nature of the alternations in some environments: considering their low information value and their marginality to the system’ (p. 234). So perhaps it is the survival of the system at all that is surprising, not that it appears to be undergoing change. However, as we noted in Chapters 6 and 8, while mutations may lack direct semantic connotations, they may be viewed as analogous to, for example, case inflections in other languages, and they certainly do show syntactic function in many instances.
