This morning in Abergele I saw a road called Lôn Ffawydd. I know that lôn is the Welsh for lane, but wondered what ffawydd might mean as I hadn’t seen it before.
Ffawydd can mean beech tree, fir tree, chestnut tree, pine tree or fir tree. It appears in such expressions as:
– ffawydd Albanaidd = Scotch fir
– ffwaydd arian(naidd) = silver fir
– ffawydd coch = pitch-pine
– ffawydd coprog = copper-beach
– ffawydd gwyn = white pine/spruce
– ffawydd melyn = yellow pine
– ffawydd Norwy = Norway pine
– cnau ffawydd = beech-mast
– pen ffawydd = stupid person, simpleton, idiot, fool
That’s spectacularly imprecise. The most common meaning appears to be ‘beech’ (at least, that is the only translation at http://www.geiriadur.net/ )
Ffawydd looks like it should be connected with ffa (beans). But none of those trees produce anything that much resembles beans.
Why would they have one word for both evergreen and deciduous trees? This seems not logical in this climate (that has both).
The ffaw- part of the word is connected to the Breton faou (beech), as in the name of the picturesque village of Ar Faou (French: Le Faou) in Finistère. Both are in turn connected to the Latin fagus.
In one of those “hard-to-spot-until-it’s-pointed-out” transformations from Proto-Indo-European, Latin fagus and the Germanic root *bōk- (which gave us beech) have a common ancestor in the PIE *bhāgós.
The -wydd ending is, of course, just our old friend gwŷdd (tree/wood).
I should have spotted the connection with fagus. But that still does not explain why ffawydd is applied to various conifers. Perhaps the cones (or their kernels) were seen as having some kind of superficial resemblance to beech mast.
I don’t think I’ve noticed it mentioned in any dictionary that although the standard Welsh name for
beech is ffawydden, ffawydd however is used colloquially in North Walian to denote pine or fir.