Cornish Literature

Grammatical Number in Welsh: Diachrony and Typology

“…Medieval French and English both had [numeral + plural] as their regular pattern, and this could have influenced Breton and Cornish respectively. This theory is strengthened by the fact that many of the examples in Tables and come from miracle plays which is a genre borrowed from medieval French literature and which becomes popular in Middle Breton and Cornish (as well as Middle English) while being completely absent from Welsh (see Murdoch : 5–6, 104). The inverted order [numerative + numeral] is a further difference; to my knowledge there are no Welsh examples of this.…”