Welsh Word of the Day: Teipio (to type)

Whenever I’m speaking to a Welsh learner and they want to express a verb for which they don’t know the word in Welsh, they invariably resort to trying out the English version in a Welsh accent with –io added to the end. Rudimentary as this strategy might be, sometimes, it actually works!

One example of a word where you’d get quite close to the real thing by employing this method is teipio (to type).

Do be careful with the pronunciation of this one though. A common mistake is to render it exactly like the English type, with a harder initial vowel sound more like I as in I am than ay as in hay, which is what we really want. There is also a bit of variance here as many Southerners say teipo instead of teipio.

Long before it was an English word, to type originated in ancient Greek, being tupto (I strike). From there it became Latin typus (figure, image, type), then English type as both a noun and a verb, and then eventually the Welsh teipio which is first recorded in the early 1900s.

Here is how teipio mutates:

For this word only the soft mutation is regularly necessary.

Teipio usually refers to teipio on a cyfrifiadur (computer), ffôn (phone) or llechen (tablet), although when it first began to be used teipiaduron (typewriters) were more relevant. That was a world where just teipio itself was considered a very valuable skill, and many people found gwaith (work) as teipyddesau / teipyddion (typists, feminine / masculine).

The singular of teipiaduron is teipiadur and the plural of cyfrifiadur is cyfrifiaduron, so you can see that the two words share almost the exact same form, with the only difference being the prefix. Teip– in teipiadur of course comes from our word of the day and cyfrif– is from cyfrifo (to calculate, to count). The suffix –adur also appears in geiriadur (a dictionary, from gair meaning word) and many other words.

Teipio is also used to mean to type as in to type blood or to type infections, but there is also grwpio (to group) for this kind of usage. Most of the time when we say it, we are referring to gwasgu botymau (pressing buttons) on a bysellfwrdd (keyboard) to produce ysgrifen (here means written information, but employed quite broadly including often to mean handwriting).

And how does type the noun fit into all this? Well, it all depends what type of type you mean…

Type as in a kind of thing is usually math, although teip and siort can both be heard in spoken dialect. Type as in typeface is teip or print. We would translate the phrase large type as print bras, but for in type you could say mewn teip.

The word teip as a noun is in fact a much older borrowing in Welsh than the verb teipio. However, it’s not used as widely because for most usages there are indigenous Welsh words that do the same job – whereas teipio as a verb is pretty indispensable in the modern world.

While some people need to look at the bysellfwrdd (keyboard) while teipio, others are accomplished at cyffyrdd–deipio (touch-typing), making the process much quicker. Cyflymder (speed) of teipio is measured in geiriau’r munud / geiriau’r funud (words per minute, in Northern / Southern Welsh).

Being able to teipio quickly and accurately is fast becoming a less important and impressive sgil (skill), given the rise of meddalwedd (software) that converts speech to text. That being said, this kind of meddalwedd is often less reliable when it comes to non-English languages and especially less widely spoken ieithoedd (languages) like Cymraeg (Welsh).

The Welsh National Language Technologies Portal, which works widely on developing new technoleg (technology) that will support the development and persistence of Cymraeg, runs the program Trawsgrifiwr (Transcriber). It’s available online, as a desktop app, and as a software app, and is being continuously updated. If you do prefer to use dictation meddalwedd, go for Trawsgrifiwr – other options out there will be much less accurate for Cymraeg.