Welsh Word of the Day: Methu (to fail / to be unable)

No matter how talented someone may be, we all have our weaknesses and moments when things don’t go as planned. A particularly useful Welsh word to describe these situations is methu, which means to fail or to be unable.

Sometimes Southerners pronounce it a bit more like this:

Methu actually comes from a noun, meth (failure / deficiency), although the latter is the less used of the two words these days. Meth does turn up in its mutated form in the phrase yn ddi-feth (without fail), though.

Methu is a cognate of the Old Irish methaid, and both words likely come from a proto-Celtic root that would be something along the lines of *metom.

Rather than meth, today methiant is used to mean failure or error. Of course, this in turn is derived from methu. It can also be used as an abstract noun to mean cowardice, and its plural is methiannau or methiantau. One quite harsh Welsh turn of phrase is mynd yn fethiant (literally: go to failure) which means to go bankrupt!

I’ve briefly mentioned mutations. Methu, meth and methiant are all susceptible only to the soft mutation. For methu, this looks and sounds like:

Now let’s take a look at methu’s two meanings.

Firstly, methu means to be unable to. It’s perhaps best translated as cannot / can’t. The opposite of this is gallu or medru (to be able to / can). To give you a sense of how this works, here are some ways in which it might be used.

• Dw i’n methu nofio = I can’t swim
• Mae hi’n methu canu = She can’t sing
• Roeddet ti’n methu ei ddarllen = You couldn’t read it
• Bydd e’n methu deall = He won’t be able to understand
• Roedden ni’n methu ei gredu = We couldn’t believe it
• Basech chi’n methu ymdopi = You wouldn’t be able to cope

As you can see, the above examples vary in person and tense. What’s important is that methu comes before the verb that the subject is unable to do, just like cannot / can’t comes before the verb in English.

Secondly, methu means to fail. Again, this is a pretty simple equivalence which reflects how the word is used in English. You might methu prawf (fail a test), methu arholiad (fail an exam), or methu archwiliad (fail an inspection). In the South, colloquially, ffaelu is sometimes used instead.

In a related sense, methu can also be used to mean to become weak or to decay, usually for a living organism or organ. For example, methiant y galon is heart failure.

For this usage, diffygio and pallu are synonyms. If you are more specifically saying to weaken, you would say gwanhau instead. And some specific circumstances have their own words – for example my eyesight is failing is mae fy ngolwg yn tywyllu (my eyesight is darkening) or mae fy ngolwg yn pylu (my eyesight is dulling).

To succeed in Welsh is llwyddo, and to pass (as in passing a test) is pasio, although llwyddo is often used where pass would be in English, and is more formal.

In Welsh, conjugations of verbs are often periphrastic. This means that the main verb of its sentence is left in its root form, and auxiliary verbs are used to convey the tense and subject. So, it’s more important to learn the conjugations of some of the most basic verbs in Welsh, like bod (to be) and gwneud (to do / to make), than it is to learn the conjugations of every new verb you encounter.

However, in case you’re interested, here are the most commonly used conjugations of methu:

In English the idiom can’t see the wood for the trees is often used to mean that someone is focussing on small details and missing the bigger picture. This would be translated in Welsh as methu gweld y coed gan brennau, but it’s only common in the North of Wales.

A more widely used expression is dw i’n methu byw yn fy nghroen (I can’t live in my skin) which is used to express extreme excitement or anxiety.

We all have things we can’t do – but the good news is that now using methu isn’t one of these for you! Have a go at putting it into a sentence in the comments below.