Welsh Words

My favorite Welsh word so far: llwybr. (It means "path.")

I love this word because it looks like it has no vowels at all and should be impossible to pronounce, yet neither of these things is true!

And now I'm going to tell you why.

--The "ll" double consonant is perhaps Welsh's most wonderful possession; it represents a sound composed of first a "kh" sound as in the German word "Bach," followed by an "l" sound.

--"W" is a vowel in Welsh! As far as I can tell, it's basically just used instead of "o." Why, I wondered? Why, why, why write "w," when you could just write "o"? Then, walking down a snowy slope in the middle of nowhere, I was struck by an inspired idea (though I haven't had it confirmed by anyone, so it's still just a hunch).

I know that the various double consonants in Welsh were early scribes' attempts to represent, using the Latin alphabet, sounds not found in Latin. (This is the reason why we have "th," "sh" and such in English, consonant pairs invented to represent sounds that didn't exist in Latin.)

I'm not sure why something similar was necessary in the case of "w" (perhaps Welsh does actually have two slightly separate sounds, one represented by "o" and one by "w") but if you needed another way to represent the sound "o," and you decided to borrow the (lowercase) Greek letter omega, but render it in a Latin-based alphabet, you would write it as..."w."

Just for reference, here's omega, in upper and lower case:

(I can also tell you that my Greek friend who's lived in various countries around Europe - and not always with a Greek keyboard - sometimes writes to friends back home in Greek, but rendered in Latin letters. And she uses "w" for omega.)

--Anyway, when written together, the vowels "w" and "y" in Welsh apparently represent a diphthong pronounced something like "oo-ee."

--And "r" in Welsh is pleasantly rolled.

So taken all together, the word "llwybr" is pronounced something like "khloo-ee-brr." Not so bad, eh?

(My goal for this trip was to learn to pronounce the name of the village where we're staying - just as I achieved my goal of mastering Icelandic volcano Eyafjallajökull when I was there - and I've more or less got it. The village is Llandrillo - fiendish because of two of those "khl" sounds, and also the word's stress unexpectedly coming on the middle syllable - which comes out more or less as khlan-drri-khlo.)

Far more important than my happy mucking about with Welsh vowels and consonants, though, is the fact that people here in central-ish northern Wales really, actually speak Welsh.

Not the grandmothers still speak Welsh, or the kids learn Welsh under duress in school, but whole families and communities speak it with each other daily, supermarket employees calling questions across the aisles to each other, or a mom on a farm we passed by telling something to her kids or the guys in the local pub chatting over a pint. This is a living language - the bilingual road signs aren't just decoration!

("Araf" was the first Welsh word we learned, since it's all over these winding, narrow country roads.)