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§172 as cerir fi, cerir di, cerir ef, etc., though Dr. Davies confesses that “omnia verba passiua ad naturam imperso&shy;nalium quam proxime accedunt” D. 101. It has been argued that a substan&shy;tival object has a soft initial, as gwêl ẟyn ‘he sees a man’; but this is a late use; the soft is rarely found after the 3rd sg. in Early Mn. poets. It arose to distin&shy;guish the subject from the obj., but in the case of the im&shy;personal there is no ambiguity. Intran&shy;sitive verbs including the verb ‘to be’ are frequent&shy;ly used in the imper&shy;sonal, and the forms are not felt to be in any way different from tran&shy;sitive imper&shy;sonals except that a trans. verb requires an object: cychwyn&shy;nir am ddau ‘a start will be made at two’.

The impersonal with its object is generally most con&shy;venient&shy;ly trans&shy;lated into English by a passive with its subject, thus cerir fi ‘I am loved’; but this should not blind us to the con&shy;struction in Welsh.

(1) Each verb has also a verbal noun and most have verbal adjec&shy;tives.

The verbal noun is not strictly an infinitive; it governs the genitive, not the accu&shy;sative, case. It may be used, like an abstract noun, with the article or an adj., as the subject or obj. of a verb or the obj. of a prepo&shy;sition; but it is suf&shy;ficient&shy;ly distinct from an ordinary abstract noun by reason of certain construc&shy;tions in which it cannot be replaced by the latter. See e.g. § 204 ii.

Verbal adjectives are used like ordinary adjectives, and have not developed the peculiar uses of parti&shy;ciples.

. i. The regular verb caraf ‘I love’ is conjugated as follows; Ml. forms are given in  type: