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
a bad aftertaste
adflasau
bad aftertastes
There’s no indigenous word that I know of in Welsh for aftertaste that doesn’t have a negative connotation, but you can literally translate the English word to create the calque ôl-flas.
The words cynffon / cwt (tail) are used in parts of West Wales to mean aftertaste, but like adflas, they mean an unpleasant aftertaste, or sometimes just an unpleasant taste generally. Smach means a strong taste and is often negative, but doesn’t have to be an aftertaste.
Adflas’ etymology is very typical for a Welsh word – it comes from another word with a prefix added to the front of it. In this case, the word is of course blas (a taste), and the prefix is ad-.
Ad-, which also sometimes appears as at- has two uses as a prefix. One is to intensify the meaning of an adjective that it modifies. For example, while cas is nasty or mean, atgas is hateful. As you can see, the prefix has caused the second part of the word to soft mutate. Prefixes almost always do this in Welsh, but sometimes, usually in the case of negative prefixes, they cause a nasal mutation instead.
The other use of ad-, which is what we see in this word, is to suggest that something is being repeated or reversed. Ail- is often also used in this way. So an adflas is like the repetition of the original blas. We also see ad- being used in this way in the word adlais (an echo), which is built on llais (a voice). And in adlais and adflas, as in atgas, we can again see the prefix causing the soft mutation.
The second part of the word is blas. We use this both to mean a particular taste and to refer to the sense of taste more generally, much as we do in English. It comes from the proto-Celtic *mlasto and the same word appears in Cornish and in Irish Gaelic too. Interestingly, the Russian word molsat (to suck) is from the same ultimate root.
Adflas is joined by many very useful pieces of vocabulary derived from blas, including blasus (tasty), cyflas (a flavouring), blasu (to taste), and even diflas (boring).
Sori, dw i’n credu bod rhyw adflas ar y caws ‘ma.
Sorry, I think this cheese has some kind of nasty tang to it.
In older Welsh, adflas was sometimes used to mean a taste in general, or to convey that someone has lost interest in food. Nowadays it is only used to mean a bad aftertaste.
So how do you actually use this word? Well, in Welsh, when it comes to blas (taste) and arogl (smell), the most idiomatic way to describe something is to say that the blas or arogl is arno fo (on it). So you would say mae adflas ar y cwrw (the beer has a bad aftertaste, literally).
In modern colloquial Welsh it is also generally considered acceptable to literally translate the English, making the previous example mae gan y cwrw adflas. But in my opinion, this doesn’t sound quite as good 😉
A piece of bwyd (food) could have an adflas, also sometimes translated as a tang, for many reasons. Perhaps it’s chwerw (bitter) or prepared yn anghywir (incorrectly) by an inexperienced chef, or maybe you simply don’t cael o at eich dant (find it to your taste, literally get it to your teeth).
Or, worst of all, perhaps it has a cam flas (another way to say bad taste, literally mis-taste) because it’s gone off. There are plenty of ways to talk about bwyd being off in Welsh. You can say it’s wedi troi (literally has turned), wedi mynd yn ddrwg (literally has gone bad), or just gwael (literally very bad). If you’re really anffodus (unfortunate) your bwyd may be pwdr (rotten) or even wedi llwydo (mouldy).
Of course, what causes an adflas is also very subjective. Apparently, there’s even one specific genyn (gene) which determines whether or not a person likes the blas of coriander (coriander). Depending on the variation of this genyn, some people enjoy this perlysieuyn (herb), and others find it tastes like sebon (soap)… which doesn’t sound like a very pleasant adflas at all.
