Today’s Welsh word of the day is a bit of a quirky one, and one you may not even have come across before! It’s deiliant, and it means foliage, or sometimes more specifically newly sprouted leaves.
deiliant
foliage
There is no plural of deiliant. This is for two reasons. Firstly, it originally comes from the verb, deilio, meaning to sprout or to bear leaves. And deilio itself is a form of dail (leaves). It’s a great word, sharing a semantic field with verbs like blodeuo (to flower), blaguro / egino (to sprout), and glasu (to turn green with new growth).
Deiliant isn’t just a weird version of deilio – it’s actually a conjugation of it! In very literary Welsh, verbs gain the ending –ant in the third person plural future tense. So deiliant is like saying they will sprout. Isn’t that cute?!
So since deiliant is technically a form of a verb, rather than a noun in its own right, it has never needed a plural. And that seems reasonable since foliage is something collective; it’s not really countable. This is our second reason, meaning that even though it is thought to function as a masculine noun, you’ll only ever hear it in the form deiliant no matter how much of it we’re talking about.
Soft mutation
ddeiliant
Nasal mutation
neiliant
Aspirate mutation
N/A
Deiliant has one direct synonym, which is deiliach. This has a slightly different etymology, as it comes straight from dail / deilen (a leaf) rather than needing to move through an intermediary verb.
Deiliach doesn’t have a plural either because it is itself treated as a kind of non-standard plural of deilen – the suffixes –iach and –ach are sometimes used in Welsh to create a plural ending that suggests something is messy, worthless, small or unimportant. For example, dilladach (old, worthless clothes) comes from dillad (clothes), and pethach (unimportant things) comes from peth (a thing).
It’s interesting that deiliant and deiliach have the same primary meaning, foliage, but they sprout (haha) from different ways of looking at what foliage means. While you could literally translate deiliant as they will sprout, deiliach is more like a mess of small leaves.
You can use this distinction to your advantage – when describing your gardd (garden), you could draw a contrast between the healthy green blagur (shoots) that you call deiliant, and the mushy fallen dail (leaves) on the ground that you call deiliach.
Because deiliant sounds more positive, you’d also use this when talking about introducing some gwyrdd (green) into a tusw blodau (bouquet of flowers) or purposely growing a planhigyn deiliant (foliage plant). Indeed some plants are grown specifically for their beautiful or unique deiliant – like the ysgafn (light, feathery) texture of ferfaen (verbena) or the bold shiny dail of iorwg / eiddew (ivy).
Don’t stress too much about getting it perfectly right though, as dail (leaves) is perfectly appropriate for most deiliog (leafy) situations. Deiliant is just a fun alternative when you’re looking for some variety or flowery language!
Rydyn ni’n edmygu’r deiliant unigryw ar y goeden hon.
We’re admiring the unique foliage on this tree.
The word dail isn’t the father of just deiliant and nothing else – it’s actually included in loads of compound words that describe interesting or attractive kinds of dail. I just mentioned eiddew, and in fact eiddewddail is actually an adjective to describe something with leaves that look like eiddew!
You could also describe something as llydanddail (broad-leaved) or on the other hand meinddail (narrow-leaved). There’s even the fabulously specific manddryllddail which means that a plant has leaves so fine that they almost look broken.
Welsh is very permissive when it comes to the combination of words to make new ones, so you could really combine any adjective with the suffix –ddail (it’s the soft mutation of dail) to describe different kinds of deiliant, and it would likely sound pretty natural to whoever you’re talking to! Why not be the Welsh Shakespeare and think up some fun adjectives to describe the deiliant in your gardd?
