One wonderful thing about learning a new language is all the words you can encounter that can’t necessarily be said in quite the same way in your first. One word I like in Welsh that English can’t capture is adflas, which means an unpleasant aftertaste. It’s a masculine noun with the plural form adflasau. adflas …
Did you know that around 84% of the British population drink at least one paned (cuppa, usually of tea) a day? All that te (tea) going down is often paired with a sweet treat – Brits eat by far more bisgedi (biscuits) than the population of any other country in the world. Like a lot …
Language is more than just a way of communicating about the world – it is a way of understanding it. Often words don’t map neatly onto each other from one language to another. I find that this is particularly the case for adjectives. Parhaol is a great example of this, as it can mean lasting, …
Today’s Welsh word of the day is ymostwng. It has two meanings, one of which is a literal version of the other – it means either to bend down, or, more figuratively, to submit oneself / to capitulate. As with most Welsh words that begin with y, that first vowel is sometimes clipped off in …
Today’s word of the day may not be used in everyday ordinary conversation, but since it’s actually a grammatical term itself, it’s an excuse for us to talk a bit about one of the most crucial concepts to grasp in a new language – how to use adferfau (adverbs). Adferfau is the plural form of …
Today’s word of the day is llif, a word with many different meanings including flow, flood and even saw! llif flood, flow, current, saw Llif is only susceptible to the soft mutation. Soft mutationlif Nasal mutationN/A Aspirate mutationN/A The gender of llif varies according to its meaning. When llif means flow, current or flood, it …
The Welsh verb meaning to save or saving is achub. Achub is a loan word from Latin, but it was borrowed into Brittonic rather than into Welsh. Normally this would mean that we would also see versions of it in Cornish and Breton, but in this case these languages’ words for to save are actually …
Today’s Welsh word of the day is gwlân, which means wool. One thing to watch out for with this word is that it looks very similar to gwylan (seagull)! Gwlân usually functions as a noun, in which case it’s masculine, but can also sometimes work as an adjective. Although it’s not that often at all …
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 …
Adeg is a bit of a hard one to translate, because it doesn’t correspond perfectly to any single English word. Really it means time, but only in a very specific sense. Time in the abstract sense that usually first comes to mind is amser, as in expressions such as amser maith yn ôl (a long …