Nia is an aspiring writer from Powys, Wales. She attended Welsh-medium primary and secondary school, and is passionate about preserving the beautiful Welsh language and culture. She speaks some French, and is currently learning Arabic.
As much as we might try to escape it, feeling sad is an unavoidable part of life. The Welsh word for sad is trist. trist sad Trist is a borrowing into Welsh from the Latin tristis, also meaning sad. It’s remained the same all the way from Old Welsh into modern Welsh. The Latin root …
Wales has over 2500 km of coastline, which is quite a lot for a very small country! Five of Wales’ seven cities sit on the coast, and even where I grew up in mid-Powys, one of the most inland parts of Wales, you were hardly ever more than an hour away from the seaside. The …
The Welsh word for young or youthful is ifanc. It can be used to describe people, animals, or plants. The plural form is ifainc. ifanc young Ifanc comes from the proto-Brythonic *jowank, meaning young. This root has another descendant in modern Welsh: ieuanc, which also means young or youthful. Both words are widely understood, but …
The word glas, meaning blue, turns up in a surprising number of Welsh phrases and expressions. This might not be expected, since Wales is usually associated with the colours green (gwyrdd) and red (coch). And we can’t exactly associate blue with Welsh skies, since they’re often more likely to be rainy (glawiog) and grey (llwyd)! …
How do you celebrate Dydd Gŵyl Dewi (Saint David’s Day)? As a child, I often went into school dressed in traditional Welsh costume, and we’d have a special assembly to sing songs and talk about lessons from the life of Dewi Sant (Saint David). Of course, I don’t do that anymore, but it’s still nice …
Eisiau is a very important Welsh word, used in a wide range of situations. It can be most simply translated as want, but in reality, it covers a variety of meanings, from desire, to need or lack. Although eisiau is technically a noun, it functions as a verbnoun in everyday speech, so we can translate …
Bread in Welsh is bara (plural: bara), and it’s as much of a staple in Wales as anywhere else. Plenty of classic Welsh dishes rely on bara – from bara brith, a dried fruit loaf flavoured with tea and spices, to caws pobi, the melted cheese-on-toast dish known across the border as Welsh rarebit, to …
The Welsh flag famously features a red dragon (draig goch), but you could argue that the green field it’s standing on is just as important. There are plenty of words for grass in Wales, which makes sense, because the country is well-known for being full of glaswelltiroedd (grassy pastures)and bryniau gwyrddlas gwelltog (grassy green hills). …
One of my favourite facts to tell people about Welsh is that there isn’t really a word for mind. The word meddwl (to think) might be used sometimes, and there is a word for brain (ymenydd). However, the word that is closest in usage to the English mind is probably cof (pl: cofion), which would …
It’s widely known that many Welsh speakers naturally blend Welsh and English in their daily lives – not just switching between languages from one conversation to the next, but even within sentences, and sometimes in the middle of a single word! One such word, that’s arguably equally Welsh and English, is the famous cwtsh (cuddle). …
