> Welsh falls within the majority of the Indo-European languages (of > which English is an exception in this regard) in assigning an often > arbitrary gender to every noun. Welsh has only two genders: > masculine and feminine. You can always tell feminine nouns, because > they're the ones that wear fingernail polish. > > More seriously, those nouns for which the gender is obviously > intrinsic to the noun (e.g., girl, son) have the obvious gender ... > _Note:_ Nouns in this category that end in '-yn' are masculine and > those that end in '-en' are feminine. Gender is indeed arbitrary, of course, but there are some rules of thumb; to expand Mark's note, nouns containing "o" or "e" tend to be feminine (fel rheol, if you'll excuse the pun), and those containing "y" are often masculine. I suppose the obvious exception would be "bachgen", but that's not really hard to remember... Aren't most of those abstract nouns ending "-aeth" feminine? (not gwasanaeth) - in fact most nouns of quality possibly? Nouns ending "-iad" are masc. Having tired of combing the dictionary for evidence, I now look forward to being corrected by sb who knows what they're talking about... Oes rheolau/syniadau eraill? Harri