'Brwgaij' and 'cnau cyll' in 'Llyfr Glas Nebo' by Manon Steffan Ross

Welsh General / Questions
#1

Just been reading Manon Steffan Ross’s ‘Llyfr Glas Nebo’, for a bit of an easier interlude after finishing ‘Babel’ and going on to ‘Dadeni’. Excellent, and like all Manon’s stuff very clearly written; note also that Manon’s own English translation of the first chapter is available online, see https://waleslitexchange.org/en/books/view/llyfr-glas-nebo-the-blue-book-of-nebo . Just a couple of things that have stumped me:

‘Brwgaij’, as in ‘Ac yn gweld Ynys Llanddwyn a’r môr, a’r holl goed a chaeau a brwgaij oedd rhyngddan ni a’r dŵr’. What exactly is this word? - Manon translates it as ‘places I don’t know’, but I can’t find anything like it in the dictionaries, though there are a few instances of it online.

‘Cnau cyll’, as in ‘’Dan ni’n bwyta’r gwningen efo cnau cyll’. Manon translates this as ‘walnuts’ – ‘We eat the rabbit with walnuts’. And a little later we have ‘Ydi cnau coco fel cnau cyll?’ which Manon translates as ‘Are coconuts like walnuts?’. But surely ‘cnau cyll’ are hazelnuts, which are very different from walnuts, for which I thought the Welsh was ‘cnau Ffrengig’. I hesitate to suggest that Manon doesn’t know her nuts, so am I missing something?

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#2

I stumbled over brwgaij too, but I found brwgaets which means ‘brushwood, rank growth’ according to the GPC and could perhaps fit the context with perhaps brwgaij being a local way of spelling it (there’s no ‘j’ in the Welsh alphabet of course although it is used sometimes for English importations, slang)
Yes, I agree cnau cyll means hazelnuts, and there are certainly likely to be more hazel trees around Nebo than walnut trees managing to produce walnuts. :slightly_smiling_face: Perhaps it’s just that the English translation is a literary rather than a literal one - is the English translation also set in Nebo or has the setting been moved somewhere else? (I seem to remember that a New York(??) publisher was interested in publishing an English language version - if the translation is for a US audience that could explain some differences??)

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