vii. metha gan ‘fails’, synna ar ‘is astonished’:
Pan fethodd genni’ ddyfeisio b.c. 15 ‘when I failed to guess’, lit. ‘when guessing failed with me’; metha gan y buan ddïanc Amos ii 14; synnawdd arnaf D.G. 386 ‘I was astonished at’, synnodd arnynt Matt. xiii 54.
These verbs began to take the person for the subject in the Late Mn. period; as synnodd pawb Marc ii 12. The transition stage is seen in synnodd arno wrth weled Act. viii 1 3, where weled is no longer, as it should be, the subject; the next step is synnodd ef; then synnais, etc., in all persons.
Other verbs are used in a similar way in the 3rd sg., but not exclusively; hiraethodd arno ‘he longed’; llawenhaodd arno ‘he was rejoiced’; lleshaodd iddo ‘profited him’; gorfu arno or iddo ‘he was obliged’; perthyn iddo or arno ‘belongs to him’; digwyddodd iddo ‘it happened to him’, etc. The subject is usually a v.n.: digwyddodd iddo syrthio ‘he happened to fall’; gorfu arno fyned ‘he was obliged to go’.
§ 197. i. The verb genir ‘is born’ is used in the impersonal only; ind. pres. (and fut.) genir, impf. genid, aor. ganed, also Late Mn. W. ganwyd, plup. Ml. ganadoeẟ, ganydoeẟ, ganyssit, Mn. ganasid; subj. pres. ganer; v.n. geni.
Although the forms, except in the pres., are, as in other verbs, passive in origin, they take the impers. construction, being accompanied by objective pronouns. The v.n. takes the obj. gen.: cyn fy ngeni ‘before my birth’, lit. ‘before the bearing of me’.
genir, ganer, ganet Ỻ.A. 37, genit, geni do. 11, ganadoeẟ h.m. ii 263, ganydoeẟ r.b.b. 111, ganyssit do. 286.
A 3rd. sg. aor. genis ‘begat’ occurs in c.m. 19, in a translation, and is prob. artificial.
ii. genir < Brit. *ganī-re < *g̑ₑnē‑, √g̑enē‑: Lat. gigno, Gk. γίγνομαι, etc. The ganad- in the plup. is the perf. pass. part. *ganatos < *g̑ₑnə-to‑s; prob. ‑yd- is due to the anal. of ydoedd.
§ 198. i. Ml. W. heb yr, heb y, or heb ‘says, said’ is used for all persons and numbers; the yr or y is not the definite article, as it occurs not only before proper names, but before pronouns. The Mn. W. forms corresponding to the above are ebr, ebe, eb. In Recent W. the form ebe (with ‑e for Ml. y § 16 iv (2)) is sometimes wrongly written ebai, the ‑e being mistaken for a dialectal reduction of the impf. ending ‑ai § 6 iii.
