I’ve been interested in Welsh for a long time but have never taken the time to learn it. I asked an AI assistant (grok.com) how to pronounce cwrwgl and it told me there’s no vowel between the g and the l at the end, and the “wrw” is a diphthong despite being two vowels with a trilled r in between… ??? How is this possible: cwrwgl is one syllable? If that’s even partly true, I’ll need to hear a native speaker actually say the word, preferably in a sentence. Can anyone help me with a recording? I’m an American so I would say “KOO-roo-gull”. No doubt a Welsh person would not know what I was talking about if I said it that way.
The word is pretty much pronounced as it is written. A very helpful resource in working out pronunciations is forvo.com, they have a ton of recordings by real persons. Here is the entry on cwrwgl:
https://forvo.com/search/Cwrwgl/
I hope that helps.
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One of the problems with using AI is that they don’t know anything, so I’m not surprised that you got bad pronunciation advice from it. In this case, it’s definitely wrong - w is a vowel in Welsh
Cwrwgl is pronounced pretty much as you suggested, koo-roo-gl (there’s not vowel between the g and the l, so it’s the shortest possible of schwa sounds there).
YouTube can sometimes be a good place to check pronunciations. Here’s a clip where native speakers are talking about going out in a cwrwgl, and you can hear his pronunciation quite clearly.
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Please let that be your personal moment of realization that text-generating AI assistants often fail in giving useful information, and I would advise not to use ChatGPT or Grok in such scenarios. The main problem is that these bots simply generate text, without any in-built mechanisms to even fact-check the simplest statements. Many times they produce correct statements, out of sheer luck, but oftentimes it is truth intermingled with half-truths and outright fabrications.
It’s usually more helpful to run a “classic” Google search for example searching Google for “cwrwgl pronunciation” would have led you straight to the website that I linked to in my first answer. The difference between a “classic” Google search and an AI-approach is that with a classic search Google still trawls through millions of webpages, but for one entry in the result list it always stays within one webpage. Many people misunderstand AIs as a “Google search on steroids”, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Large-language model AIs are very good at mimicking human language, but they have no concept of what is fact, and they have no real understanding of language, either.
Of course you are more than welcome to ask here, we are always happy to help people who are interested in learning more about Welsh.
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Yes, I agree with all those remarks. I once asked Grok about a niche topic and was ecstatic to learn that I was right about everything when I read its reply. Then I realized it was just quoting me off of some website where I’d posted years earlier.
I’m happy to learn that cwrwgl is pronounced as I thought it should be. It was nice of you to send me that video link, that was exactly what I needed.
I hope that I do something with my interest in Welsh, it’s been a lifetime now. The reality of learning a language is more time-consuming than reading those novels that got me fired up on the topic when I was a kid. When I was 13 I spent my whole summer drooling over a rare facsimile edition of the Black Book of Carmarthen.
Thanks again for your quick responses, and I hope we meet again.
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The video’s great and it reminds me of watching the annual cwrwgl races on the Teifi River at Cilgerran. It’s a fabulous day, and the novice’s race is particularly entertaining - with half the entries having to be towed by an expert to the finish line after going round and round in circles 
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I genuinely do not know how anyone gets a cwrwgl to go in a straight line at all! I’m pretty sure I’d go round in circles and then fall in.
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I’ve had a go a couple of times. You have to really concentrate on doing even strokes. If you’re slightly stronger in one direction, you can’t go straight. I managed it, but only on very still water in a small lake. The first time was on the Teifi, in the flowing water, but an expert sat in the cwrwgl with me!
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That sounds like fun! So long as it’s a nice, warm summer’s day and not, as Scott Quinnell experienced, a cold and rainy one.
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