Welsh Word of the Day: Llythyren (letter)

If you’ve got ieithoedd (languages) on the mind, one useful gair (word) to be aware of is definitely llythyren. This is the Welsh for letter, as in a letter of yr wyddor (the alphabet). The plural form is llythrennau (letters).

It’s important to remember that there is actually a different word for a letter as in correspondence, which is llythyr. And this is actually the key to the etymology of llythyren. The word was formed by adding the diminutive suffix en onto llythyr, which is an older word, and comes from the same Latin root as the English letter.

Diminutives don’t show up that often in Welsh, especially in the modern language, but there are some examples. They occur when en (feminine) or yn (masculine) is suffixed onto the end of an existing word to make a new word, that refers to something that is a bit like a smaller version of the first. A good example would be lloeren (satellite), which comes from lloer, an old-fashioned word for moon.

But the en and yn suffixes occur in a lot of other contexts too, for example to form the singular version of words that are plural in their default form, like plentyn (child) from plant (children).

Something else which is a bit fun about llythyren is that it starts with the letter ll. Okay, this isn’t all that rare in Welsh – in fact, loads of words start with this letter. But it’s still an interesting one, because ll, as you can see, is written with two Latin-script letters (a double l) but is strictly considered one letter in the Welsh language. It even appears in yr wyddor.

Ll words are also interesting because they pose a bit of an exception to mutation rules. At first glance, things seem simple, as ll becomes just l when affected by a soft mutation.

However, this behaves slightly differently from a typical soft mutation. While most instances of soft mutation affect words starting with ll like any other, there is something called the limited soft mutation. This refers to specific grammatical situations where a soft mutation applies, but words beginning with ll or rh remain unaffected. In these cases, they do not mutate to l or r as they would under a full soft mutation.

The most common and significant example of a limited soft mutation occurs with feminine nouns following the definite article y (the). For instance, the word llythyren (letter) is feminine, so you might expect it to mutate to y lythyren (the letter). However, that’s not the case! Instead, it stays as y llythyren. It’s a subtle rule that’s easy to overlook.

Literacy in Welsh is llythrennedd, and to be literate is to be llythrennog. Llythrennol is another related word, which means literal. As of the time of this article’s writing, Welsh-speaking teenagers haven’t developed the common Anglophone habit of saying yn llythrennol (literally) in every sentence, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time!

Welsh uses yr wyddor Ladin (the Latin alphabet), but it’s a slightly different version to English, with twenty-nine letters. It’s changed and adapted over time – famously the letter j was only recently introduced to Welsh officially to reflect changes in Cymraeg llafar (colloquial Welsh).

Because of the use of yr wyddor Ladin, written Welsh looks fairly familiar to English speakers, compared to, say, Arabeg (Arabic), with its completely different gwyddor (alphabet). It’s written left to right, features priflythrennau (capital letters) and llythrennau bychain (small letters), and the fact that there are so many loanwords from English doesn’t hurt either.

But there are definitely differences. One of my favourite things about Welsh is the fact that deugraffau (digraphs) like ll are included as letters in their own right in yr wyddor. Colloquially, and especially when teaching children, deugraffau might be called llythrennau dwbl.

The others that show up are ch, dd, ff, ng, ph, rh, and th. And there are a lot of other common deugraffau Cymraeg, too, made of both cytseiniad (consonants) and llafariaid (vowels).

Another difference is the use of acennau (accents), which are very uncommon in English. The most common Welsh accent is the to bach (circumflex, literally little roof), which is used to mark long vowels. But the acen ddisgynedig (grave accent), acen ddyrchafedig (acute accent), and didolnod (diaeresis) show up too. They tend to be left out in informal writing – especially the first two.

Orgraff y Gymraeg (Welsh orthography) is generally fairly natural. It definitely helps that the language is almost completely ffonetig (phonetic), meaning that once you know how each llythyren should sound, you can in theory pronounce any word you read, even if you don’t know the meaning.

There’s lots of difficult things about Welsh – but its intuitive sillafu (spelling) is a real blessing. Thank goodness for llythrennau!