The concept of tomorrow is at once really simple and incredibly poetic. It’s a word which is used in many languages to represent not just the day after heddiw (today), but the future in general – one which we have gobaith (hope) will be better than today.
The Welsh word for tomorrow is yfory, often shortened to ‘fory. It can be used adverbially or as a noun. When it’s a noun, it’s masculine. It doesn’t normally need to be pluralised and I suspect if it were, Welsh speakers would choose to pluralise it in a million different ways! Personally, I’d go for yforïau (tomorrows).
yfory
tomorrow
Now, yfory actually comes from the Welsh word for morning, which is bore. As is very common in Welsh etymology, bore has clearly taken its soft-mutated form by having the first letter b turn into f.
Why the vowel y has been added onto the start is less obvious. But we could compare it to the quite similar words eleni (this year), and of course heddiw (today). Both of these words have a short vowel-based syllable added in front of a traceable etymological chunk. And it’s not necessarily important exactly what the vowel is – in older texts, yfory is often found written as afory.
In the case of eleni, it comes from the proto-Celtic *bleidani (year), ancestor of the Welsh blwyddyn (year). In the case of heddiw, you may recognise the second syllable as being very similar to the word diwrnod (day). That’s because they both come from proto-Celtic *diyos. So clearly this is a pattern for Welsh words about amser (time).
Wna i o ‘fory – ges i ddim yr amser ddoe.
I’ll do it tomorrow – I didn’t have time yesterday.
The etymology of ddoe (yesterday) is unfortunately not quite as interesting. It evolved directly from the proto-Celtic *gdesi, which meant yesterday itself, too.
But what is really fun is that Welsh has words for the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow that are in common usage. English used to have these too, ereyesterday and overmorrow, but they’re sadly completely obsolete.
On the other hand, their Welsh equivalents are very common. You’ll often get people telling you what they did echdoe (the day before yesterday) or wanting to make plans for trenydd (the day after tomorrow). If they’re thinking really far in advance, they may even want to knock up an agenda for tradwy (the day after the day after tomorrow)!
You can refer to different parts of the day in relation to yfory (tomorrow) just as you would with a day of the week. For instance, you might casually say bore ‘fory (tomorrow morning), prynhawn ‘fory (tomorrow afternoon), noswaith ‘fory (tomorrow evening), or nos ‘fory (tomorrow night).
One adverbial phrase I particularly like is ben bore yfory, which means “first thing tomorrow morning.” It’s a great example of how pen (head / top) is often used in Welsh to refer to the beginning of something – a neat little linguistic pattern you’ll spot in other expressions too.
There’s a really fun variant of this which is common in a lot of parts of Wales, yfory nesaf or just fory nesa. Though this literally means next tomorrow, it’s actually used just like the more familiar ben bore yfory to mean first thing tomorrow. Though even with the best of intentions, fory nesa can quickly turn into trenydd or even wythnos i yfory (a week from tomorrow)…
Ymlusg yfory ac yfory fyth, yn y cerdded salw hwn o ddydd i ddydd…
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day…
I mentioned that tomorrow is often used in a highly romanticised way across many languages, because of the sense of gobaith (hope / optimism) it represents. But it can also bring a sense of dirgelwch (mystery) and even perygl (danger).
That’s well-conveyed in the Welsh proverb gŵr dieithr yw yfory – tomorrow is a stranger. It just means that tomorrow is another day, but to me it hints at the anxiety of the unknown in a way the English equivalent doesn’t quite manage.
Of course, we shouldn’t spend all our time focussing on yfory whilst forgetting about heddiw. I often need to be reminded gad yfory tan yfory (leave tomorrow to tomorrow) as caiff yfory ofalu amdano’i hun (tomorrow can look after itself), because I’m quite the poenwr (worrier)!
And it rarely pays to focus too much on what we might gain in the future at the expense of appreciating what we already have. That’s the wisdom behind the classic English proverb “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” which in Welsh becomes gwell wy heddiw na iâr yfory – “better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow.” After all, the only thing we can be certain about yfory is that we can’t be certain of it at all.
