Breton grammar

Breton grammar

The grammar of the Breton language.

Nouns

Gender

Breton has two genders, masculine ("gourel") and feminine ("gwregel"). The neuter ("nepreizh"), which did exist in Brythonic survives in a few words such as "tra" (thing) considered as masculine but which behave like a feminine.

The gender of a noun is mostly arbitrary and can vary from place to place.

Article

In Breton, unlike other Celtic languages, there are two forms of the article, definite and indefinite. The definite article is "an" (the), and the indefinite article is "un" (a). These final consonant, 'n', in these articles changes depending on the following consonant. It is realized as 'n' in front of 'n', 'd', 't', 'h', and vowels, as 'l' in front of 'l' and as 'r' in front of all other consonants.

Adjectives

There are two kinds of adjectives in Breton, synthetic adjectives, for example "bras" (big) inflects as -ø (stative), -oc’h (comparative), -añ (superlative) and -at (exclamative). Other adjectives, for example "heñval" (similar) do not inflect.

Adverbs

Adverbs do not inflect.

Prepositions

Like other Celtic languages, prepositions in Breton come in two forms, non-conjugated and conjugated.

Pronouns

Personal

References

* Press, I. (1986) "A Grammar of Modern Breton" (Mouton De Gruyter)


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