not so many as the Welsh requireth". This change was not popular at the time. The most common diacritic is the circumflex, which usually disambiguates long vowels, most often in the case of homographs, where the vowel is short in one word and long in the other: e.g. ("place") vs ("fine, small"). Morphology Welsh morphology has much in common with that of the other modern Insular Celtic languages, such as the use of initial consonant mutations and of so-called "conjugated prepositions" (prepositions that fuse with the personal pronouns that are their object). Welsh nouns belong to one of two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, but they are not inflected for case. Welsh has a variety of different endings and other methods to indicate the plural, and two endings to indicate the singular (technically the singulative) of some nouns. In spoken Welsh, verbal features are indicated primarily by the use of auxiliary verbs rather than by the inflection of the main verb. In literary Welsh, on the other hand, inflection of the main verb is usual. Syntax The canonical word order in Welsh is verb–subject–object (VSO). Colloquial Welsh inclines very strongly towards the use of auxiliaries with its verbs, as in English. The present tense is constructed with ("to be") as an auxiliary verb, with the main verb appearing as a verbnoun (used in a way loosely equivalent to an infinitive) after the particle yn: Siân is going to Llanelli. There, mae is a third-person singular present indicative form of bod, and mynd is the verb-noun meaning "to go". The imperfect is constructed in a similar manner, as are the periphrastic forms of the future and conditional tenses. In the preterite, future and conditional mood tenses, there are inflected forms of all verbs, which are used in the written language. However, speech now more commonly uses the verbnoun together with an inflected form of ("do"), so "I went" can be or ("I did go"). Mi is an example of a preverbal particle; such particles are common in Welsh, though less so in the spoken language. Welsh lacks separate pronouns for constructing subordinate clauses; instead, special verb forms or relative pronouns that appear identical to some preverbal particles are used. Possessives as direct objects of verbnouns The Welsh for "I like Rhodri" is (word for word, "am I [the] liking [of] Rhodri"), with Rhodri in a possessive relationship with hoffi. With personal