A couple of months ago, we shared an article about the word unig (only or lonely). And today’s word is actually based on that one. We’re going to talk through the word unigolyn, meaning an individual.
This is a masculine noun. It’s perfectly fine to use it to describe women, too, but even in these cases it still behaves grammatically masculine. The plural form is unigolion.
unigolyn
an individual
unigolion
individuals
So unigolyn comes from unig, but there’s an intermediate stage here, which is unigol. Here unigol also means individual or singular, but this time as an adjective. The suffix –ol, used to form adjectives, has been added to unig, and then we’ve also appended –yn, which denotes one of something, or a masculine person. So we could literally translate unigolyn as an only-ish one!
Individual is a useful word in English, but I would say that unigolyn is even more useful. This is because it can be surprisingly difficult to talk about individual people in Welsh, which as a language, is often biased towards discussing things in group terms.
Frequently, the default and most-used form of a noun is the plural, rather than the singular. This is especially common when discussing planhigion (plants) – notice here, by the way, that planhigyn (plant) and planhigion follow the same pluralisation pattern as unigolyn and unigolion.
Mae’n bwysig trin pob myfyriwr fel unigolyn.
It’s important to treat each student as an individual.
One example of this phenomenon that can be tricky is the word pobl (people). There is no native word for one person. The English person is often simply borrowed as person.
Now, this is okay, and native speakers do use it when the sentence really calls for it. However, some strict grammarians frown on this usage. If you can, it’s better to phrase things so that the word isn’t necessary. For example, we would say pedwar o bobl (four of people), rather than pedwar person (four person, which is the expected format for counting nouns in Welsh).
If you do have to talk about a human in the singular, and you can’t simply say dyn (man) or dynes (woman), that’s where words like rhywun (someone), bod dynol (a human being), and unigolyn (an individual) can come in handy. They don’t always work perfectly as a translation for person, but sometimes they do, and it can prevent you relying on the controversial loan word person!
One example of this using unigolyn is the phrase person-centred care, often used in the field of gwasanaethau cymdeithasol (social services). The preferred translation of this in Welsh is gofal sy’n canolbwyntio ar yr unigolyn (literally care that concentrates on the individual).
Another alternative that’s particularly fun in Welsh is creadur (a creature). If you’re talking about someone’s personal idiosyncrasies, you could say something like mae’n greadur rhyfedd (he’s a funny creature) or, for example, mae’n greadur penderfynol (he’s a strong-minded creature). You can even just say mae’n greadur, te? (he’s a creature, right?) – which could come off either as fond or slightly insulting depending on your tone, so be careful!
The noun form unigolyn is often used in Welsh where we would really be meaning it as an adjective in English. For example, we would say seicoleg yr unigolyn (literally psychology of the individual) for individual psychology, and atebolrwydd unigolyn for individual liability.
But unigol does get used too, as does the longer adjectival form unigolyddol. The latter is used especially when you mean individual in the sense of personal, in which case the word personol is also appropriate.
Cafodd ei ddatgan yn unigolyn coll.
He was declared a missing person.
Unigolyn works well as a way to counter Welsh’s grammatical tendency to favour the collective. Yet the word itself, in its own way, makes me wonder whether that tendency is something that needs fixing in the first place.
We know that the base of unigolyn is unig, which means unique, but also lonely. So in a way, we could translate unigolyn not just as an only-ish one but also a lonely-ish one. This is really just a linguistic quirk – but I do think it’s telling.
There’s some evidence that people who perceive themselves as living in individualistic societies report greater levels of loneliness, despite all the worldly goods that such hyper-individual cultures claim to proffer. Maybe rather than rearranging Welsh so that we can speak about things mewn ffordd unigol (in an individual way), we should take the opportunity its grammar provides to think about things mewn ffordd cynulliadol (in a collective way).
