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I spent yesterday in Harlech [\u02c8harl\u025bx] with a friend looking round the castle, exploring the village and wandering along the beach. We wondered where the name Harlech comes from, so I thought I’d find out. According to Wikipedia<\/a>, there are two possible sources: from the Welsh ardd<\/em> (high; hill) llech<\/em> (stone) or from hardd<\/em> (beautiful) llech<\/em> (stone). Apparently it was referred to as ‘Harddlech’ up until the 19th century in some texts, so the second derivation might be more likely.<\/p>\n The word ardd<\/em> is not used in modern Welsh – high is usually uchel<\/em> and hill is bryn<\/em>. There are cognates in the other Celtic languages: arth<\/em> (hill) in Cornish; arz<\/em> (high) in Breton; ard<\/em> (head; ascent; incline; high; height; senior; advanced) in Irish; \u00e0rd<\/em> (high, lofty, tall; great; loud; chief, eminent, superior, supreme) in Scottish Gaelic; and ard<\/em> (high, towering, tall, big, loud, height, high place, fell, incline) in Manx. <\/p>\n These all come from from the Proto-Celtic *ardwos<\/em> (high), from the Proto-Indo-European *h\u2081rh\u2083dh-wo-<\/em> (high, steep), which is also the root of the Latin words arduus<\/em> (lofty, high, steep, tall, elevated) and arbor<\/em> (tree, mast, javelin), the Ancient Greek word \u1f40\u03c1\u03b8\u03cc\u03c2<\/em> (orth\u00f3s – straight), the English word arduous, [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent yesterday in Harlech [\u02c8harl\u025bx] with a friend looking round the castle, exploring the village and wandering along the beach. We wondered where the name Harlech comes from, so I thought I’d find out. According to Wikipedia, there are two possible sources: from the Welsh ardd (high; hill) llech (stone) or from hardd (beautiful) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,104,107,127,10,23,45,56,77,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breton","category-english","category-etymology","category-irish","category-language","category-manx","category-proto-indo-european","category-scottish-gaelic","category-welsh","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}