I picked up what I thought was a fascist titbit from my mother last night.
She is a native speaker from Anglesey, but she hasn’t lived there for a long time, so by her own admission, her Welsh can be a bit old-fashioned.
She was completely thrown the other night by my use of ymlachio for relax. So she went away to think about it and last night she told me that the phrase she would use for relax translates literally as ’ have a nice stay’ ( so a little like take a break in English) . She would use ymlachio for things like unscrewing jam jar lids ( so conceptually a bit like unwind in English).
I thought others might be interested in these connections and associations.
That’s one of the more startling opening sentences to a post I’ve seen in some time - but I’m guessing we might have a little auto-correct magic going on here?..
Interesting stuff - what was the actual phrase she would use, in Welsh?
Oh that’s awful. I’m so sorry. I was having all sorts of problems with autocorrect as I wrote the message and kept having to go back and change things, but I missed that completely. Word blindness! I’m really sorry.
I will ask her what the phrase was. She did tell me, but I was struggling to understand it word by word.
Interesting. “Llacio” can mean loosen, slacken, relax according to my dictionary, and “ymlacio” in theory is the reflexive form of “llacio”, so loosen, slacken, relax yourself - in English relax can mean both to relax something, and to relax yourself - the more common meaning these days, I’d say. Maybe there has been a meaning shift in Welsh the other way, from “llacio rhywbeth” to “ymlacio rhywbeth”?
We also have the adjective ‘lax’ (often used in a pejorative sense) meaning ‘loose’.
e.g. (perhaps used by a “new broom”)
“things are getting a bit lax around here…”
The adjective “slack” was used about people in the old girls’ stories that I read in my youth. It seemed to describe the sort of girl who was not always ready to run onto the hockey pitch.
Sue
