18 January 2023

What are "foraminifera" in Welsh?

If you do a talk about foraminifera in Welsh, the first thing you need to know is the word for foraminifera in Welsh. And that immediately proved a bit of a stumbling block! None of my dictionaries has heard of it. And the University has a special website where you can look up academic and scientific terms in Welsh, but even that site hadn't heard of them. Now what?

With a term like this, it's not unreasonable to just take the English word and Welshify it a bit. So I devised ‘fforaminiferaidd’ and ‘fforaminiferoedd’ (Welsh has very many ways of turning a singular into a plural), but also figured that maybe an actual translation was a possibility. Foraminifera just means ‘bearers of holes’. Surely I could turn that into Welsh! To carry or to bear is ‘cludo’ and a hole is a ‘twll’ so hole-bearers would be twllgludwyr. 

You can see the holes in this picture

At the beginning of my presentation in the front of the other advanced Welsh learners among the academic staff, I threw the question into the group. What did they think? And they were pretty much unanimously in favour of twllgludwyr. And the tutor even said that the website with specialist terms I mentioned above is made in the house; maybe they should just add my concoction to it? I don't think there are many people who do discuss foraminifera in Welsh, but just suppose that there are, they might want to find this word!

I am actually quite chuffed at the thought that I might be contributing a word to the Welsh language. Let's see if this really happens! If so, it will sure end up here on this blog! 

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