On the bus to Conwy today I noticed that the Welsh name of one of the stops included the word teios, which I hadn’t come across before. In English the stop had the word cottages in it.
I wrote down what I thought I heard and saw: teilios, but couldn’t find that in any Welsh dictionary. When I looked for cottages however I found the word teios, which is a combination of tai (plural of tŷ, house) and the diminutive ending -os, which was most commonly-used in North Wales (in the 18th and 19th centuries), but spread to the rest of Wales, according to the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.
Translations of teios include small or poor houses; poor mean houses; and mean pitiful houses.
Some of the buses round here have a screen at the front that shows the name of the next stop in Welsh and English, and there are recorded announcements in both languages as well. The English announcements were recorded by someone with an English accent who mispronounces the Welsh names – he gets the consonants more or less right, but the vowels are often slightly off, and the stress is sometimes in the wrong place. I don’t know why they didn’t ask the guy who does the Welsh announcements to do the English ones as well.
When I hear a language or words pronounced in unusual ways it tends to grate a bit on my ears, just as out-of-tune singing or musical instruments do. There’s nothing wrong with foreign accents, but sometimes they can make comprehension more difficult. I try to speak languages (and sing and play instruments) as in tune as possibly. Do you?
