Our Welsh word of the day today is gwag. This is an adjective which means empty – including empty-headed! It can also, for some contexts, mean vain. The antonym is llawn or llond (full), depending on the context.
gwag
empty
Gwag has been a Welsh word for a very long time, appearing in Old Welsh as guac. It was originally borrowed into the Brittonic language, from which modern Cymraeg (Welsh), Cernyweg (Cornish) and Llydaweg (Breton) developed, from the Vulgar Latin spoken by Roman soldiers when they invaded Britain.
Their word vacus was a version of the Latin adjective vacuus, meaning empty, from which English gets many words, like vacant, vacuous, and vacuum.
Cernyweg has the exact same word gwag, used more broadly to mean empty, hollow, blank, hungry, and even a cave as a noun. I couldn’t find any record of a word in this family surviving in Llydaweg, but if we have any Llydaweg-speaking readers please do let me know if I’m mistaken!
Soft mutation
wag
Nasal mutation
ngwag
Aspirate mutation
N/A
Many useful words are derived from gwag, like:
- gwagio / gwacáu = to empty
- gwagle / gwagla = an empty space
- gwactod = a vacuum
- gwacter = emptiness
- gwagedd / gwegi = vanity
- gwag-smera = to dawdle
- gwaglaw = empty-handed
- penwag = empty-headed
- pennog = a herring
Pennog is definitely the weirdest one here, and it doesn’t even look like it comes from gwag, but it does! It’s a corruption of the word above it, penwag. I guess in Wales we don’t think much of the intelligence of poor penwaig (herrings)…
By the way, the word gwactod only refers to a vacuum in ffiseg (physics). A vacuum cleaner is a sugnwr llwch (literally dust sucker) or just a hwfer (from the brand Hoover).
Arhosa ‘da ni; mae gennyn ni ‘stafell wag.
Stay with us; we have an empty room.
Gwag appears in a lot of interesting terms that you don’t see in English. One that you’ll likely hear frequently used by native speakers is cam gwag (mistake, stumble or disappointment, literally empty step). One that’s similar in meaning but reserved to the North is caff gwag, relying on the word caff which is grasp.
In cerddoriaeth (music) theory, a rest is a curiad gwag (empty beat). This is much more pleasant than cyfogi gwag (literally empty vomiting, meaning retching without actually vomiting)!
I feel very sorry for anyone contending with cyfogi gwag since gwell tŷ gwag na thenant wael. This literally means better an empty house than a bad tenant, which is like better out than in. I’m applying it here to cyfogi but normally we say it about rhechan (farting).
Maybe someone feels the need to cyfogi because they had been bwyta (eating) more than they really wanted to. If only they’d been warned by a wise Welsh person that bola llawn sy’n hollti, nid bola gwag (it’s a full belly that splits, not an empty belly).
Or maybe all of this rhechan and cyfogi is happening because of a problem with the coluddyn gwag (jejunum) – that’s a part of the perfeddyn bach / coluddyn bach (small intestine).
Mae fy mab yn bwyta cymaint – mae fy oergell wastad yn wag!
My son eats so much – my fridge is always empty!
Lastly, we can use gwag in a non-literal sense, as we do in English with empty. You might say that someone is making bygythion gwag (empty threats) or engaging in siarad gwag (idle, empty talk). In this sense it may sometimes be interchangeable with ofer (worthless, vain, frivolous).
I hope you haven’t found this erthygl (article) to be just full of siarad gwag, and that you’ve learnt something new about this Welsh word today!
