A 14975/107 ‘seven (men) could not take his life’; θεός γ’ ἐθέλων … ἀμείνονας … ἵππους δωρήσαιτο, K 556 = W. rhoisai (plup.) duw ewyllysgar well meirch; Vedic yát páceyuḥ kravyā́daṃ kuryuḥ = W. pes pobynt gwnaent [y tân] yn gnawd-ysol (carnivorous), etc. It denotes a possible or hypothetical as opposed to an actual thing; cf. O na welwn Wms. 508 ‘Oh that I am unable to see’ i.e. would that I saw! The impf. use comes through forms like gwelai ‘he could see’ > ‘he saw’, as in ef a welei lannerch … ef a welei carw etc. w.m. 1. The form oeẟ ‘would be’ w.m. 17, l. 29, has passed over entirely to the impf. sense, and forms periphrastic impfs. in the spoken lang., which does not use the impf. of other verbs in that sense. In speaking, we do not say fe safai ’r dref or y bryn ‘the town stood on the hill’ as the expression of a fact, but we do say fe safai Dafydd yn segur am oriau ‘D. would stand idle for hours’ expressing a possibility; we say fe welai rywbeth ‘he saw something’ (could see), but not fe safai yno ‘he stood there’ (was standing).
(3) The past is in the vast majority of cases aorist in meaning, as it is predominantly in derivation. It may however have a perfect meaning, as some verbs have perfect instead of aorist forms, as treuliais fy nghlod D.G. 138 ‘I have spent my reputation’.
(4) The plup. ind. is very rarely plup. ind. in meaning; it usually means ‘would have’, ‘could have’, etc.; see (2).
(5) The pres. subj. in a principal sentence expresses a wish. In a dependent sentence it expresses a general, as opposed to a particular, contingency; thus doed a ddêl ‘come what may come’, as opposed to y byd a ddaw ‘the world which will come’.
(6) The impf. subj. is used in dependent clauses only; it either stands in the protasis before the impf. ind., or represents the past of the pres. subj.
The uses of the tenses can only be dealt with fully in the Syntax.
iii. (1) Each tense is inflected for the three persons of the sg. and pl.
(2) Each tense has in addition an impersonal form, whose implied indefinite subject means ‘some one, some, they’, Fr. ‘on’, Germ. ‘man’; as dywedir ‘they say, there is a saying, on dit’.
The impersonal form is generally spoken of as a “passive”; but as it takes after it pronouns in the accusative case, it cannot be parsed as a passive. Thus fe’m cerir or cerir fi ‘on m’aime’ (not *cerir i ‘I am loved’). The older grammarians pretended to inflect it for the different persons by adding accusative affixed pronouns § 160 iii (1);
