Alfred, do you know Gaelic?

No, not at all (apart from the numbers up to ten or so, and the odd phrase or sentence like the one I quoted).

Interestingly the word for 'black' is du, which can soft mutate to ddu.

The word for cat in Welsh is cath.

I noticed that in Welsh, cath is grammatically feminine, whereas in French, the French word for cat, namely chat, is grammatically masculine.

Alfred, do you know Gaelic?

There is a Duolingo course for Gaelic.

Here is a link to a page with the list of available courses.

https://www.duolingo.com/courses

They changed the structure recently.

I don't know how it is now, but when I started one could do the first lesson without registering, but one needed to register to continue.

But it is free. One point, there is a profile, which was, maybe still is, default public, but one can easily make it private.

William

Interestingly, in Welsh the verb comes first.

That’s also true of Gaelic; e.g. “Bha an cat dubh” = “The cat was black”. Maybe it’s a general Celtic thing.

Eg, Je fais dormir - I am (doing) sleep.

Nous faisons dormir - We are (doing) sleeping. we sleep.

(Hope I've got that right - it's trying to use Google translate in line.). These are not the only translations, either way, for the concepts of the actions.

It is snowing.

So what is "it"?

French has

Il neige.

Likewise what is "il"?

Esperanto just has

Neĝas.

The circumflex above the letter g is not a problem, in fact it is helpful, because in Esperanto, a letter g is pronounced hard as in the English word 'gate' and a letter 'ĝ' is pronounced soft as in the English word 'gemstone'.

So no 'it'

I am learning Welsh, and I found that it appears that Welsh does not use a verb for snowing but has something that literally is something like, as far as I can tell as a learner, that is

is casting snow.

Or perhaps

is doing casting snow

Mae'n bwrw eira.

Welsh has a word 'yn' which is said not to translate into English, but which seems to me could be thought of as meaning 'doing', similarly to that in English we can have

I do like parsnips.

We would more often say

I like parsnips.

The Welsh,

Dw i'n hoffi pannas.

is that the yn has become 'n appended to a previous word that ends in a vowel.

It seems to me (though I am just a beginner) to mean

I am doing liking parsnips.

Interestingly, in Welsh the verb comes first.

So in

Dw i'n hoffi pannas.

the word Dw is 'am' and the i is 'I'.

It is quite fascinating.

I am brushing up my Esperanto and learning Welsh on Duolingo.com and although there are paid options, there is free use supported by advertisements, but the advertisements are not intrusive, they are not within lessons, just a small static advertisement within a page between lessons. One a few days ago was for Serif Affinity software.

The translation Mae'n bwrw eira. is listed in Google translate as having been marked as correct by Google translate users.

I find the following interesting.

In English, whatever "It" is, is actually snowing as an activity.

Whereas in Welsh, the implied "It" is casting snow. Sort of in a similar manner to a person is casting seeds to grow.

William