> Now to complicate matters, "hoff" can be (er, um) verbed. "Hoffi" is > a perfectly respectable verb. You canask the same question with the > long form of the verb, "Ydych chi'n hoffi hufen ia+?" and so on, and > the answer is still the same. However the short form doesn't sound > at all right to me: "Hoffwch chi hufen ia+?" ought undoubtedly to > mean the same thing, but sounds quite wrong. (No doubt an expert will > tell me why.) The number of verbs whose historical inflected present tense is actually used with present meaning these days is very small, and "hoffi", evidently, isn't one of them. The -af, -i, -0 etc. paradigm usually has a volitional/ immediate future sense, for which there's not a lot of use with a verb like "hoffi". This kind of case, incidentally, reveals the complete wrongness of equating the Welsh 'periphrastic' present with the English progressive (a topic that came up, I think, a few weeks ago). ************************ Nigel Love Linguistics Cape Town NLOVE@BEATTIE.UCT.AC.ZA ************************