Harry Campbell: Welsh adjectives

[Elizabeth J. Pyatt]

Cross Posted from Welsh-L
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Approved-By: neil.shadrach at CORRYN.COM
X-Priority: 3
Date:         Thu, 7 Feb 2002 16:18:08 -0000
Reply-To: WELSH Language Bulletin Board <WELSH-L at LISTSERV.HEANET.IE>
Sender: WELSH Language Bulletin Board <WELSH-L at LISTSERV.HEANET.IE>
From: Harry Campbell <gwybodiadur at BIGFOOT.COM>
Subject:      Re: Welsh adjectives
To: WELSH-L at LISTSERV.HEANET.IE

>  I'm looking for Welsh adjectives that end in orthographic <u> followed
>  by a consonant, OTHER THAN those like 'hapus', 'parchus', 'gwybodus'
>  that contain the suffix "-us". I don't have a reverse dictionary of
>  Welsh (if such a thing even exists). Can anyone help me think of some?

>  You might like to consult The Welsh Rhyming Dictionary (Yr Odliadur)
>  so kindly donated by Andrew Hawke <ach at aber.ac.uk> over ten years ago
>  (Nov 1891) to GAELIC-L, and preserved ever since, courtesy G-L, on the
>  HEA (Higher Education Authority of Ireland) server
>  LISTSERV at LISTSERV.HEANET.IE

The text of Yr Odliadur (Roy Stephens) is also available on the Web thanks
to Geraint Jones of Wolfson College Oxford, at
http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/gwasg.aredig/odliadur.

Another, perhaps better, possibility would be Mark Nodine's online
dictionary, the Searching Lexicon
(http://www.cs.brown.edu/fun/welsh/LexiconForms.html), which can do quite
sophisticated "partial word" searches, ideal for cases like this.  To use
his example, the query string ^[cg]*i$ will find all the words that begin
with c or g and end with i.  Thus, the string ^*[u][bcdfglmnprst]$ should
find any word ending in u plus consonant (don't forget it will include a lot
of diphthongs like au and eu too).  That will be a LOT of words, so perhaps
you a less ambitious search might be better to start with, perhaps one
consonant at a time.  I'm not sure whether there is any way you could build
in a "part of speech" criterion to make it give you only adjectives.
Perhaps ask the man himself: mark.nodine at mot.com I believe.  (Then again you
could just copy the results into a text file and just search for the
"adj"s.)

Harry Campbell
--
GWYBODIADUR: A Welsh Informationary
** http://gwybodiadur.tripod.com **

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