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.
Many people see snakes as a symbol of evil or danger, an image that traces its origin all the way back to the Bible, with the demon that tempted Eve often represented as a snake. In more modern popular culture, the snake is the chosen pet of Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. The Welsh …
The Welsh word for happy is very easy to learn if you’re a first language English speaker: it’s the very simple hapus. hapus happy Hapus merges the word hap (chance or luck) with the suffix –us, which is used in Welsh to indicate a characteristic. This is a loan translation of the English happy, using …
It’s a well-known fact that British people eat a lot of boiled food – from potatoes, to meat, to vegetables like carrots and peas. Still, the most common use of boiling in the UK has surely got to be boiling the kettle to make a cup of tea. The Welsh word for the verb to …
The Welsh word hwyl (pl: hwyliau) has a staggering list of meanings, ranging from a sail, to a journey, to someone’s mood or temper. However, it’s also by far the most common way to say say goodbye. This is because hwyl is also the noun form of fun, and can convey a sense of enthusiasm …
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 …
