Lle chwech (toilet): Uhhh?

That’s plausible too! :slight_smile:

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just read that wedi chwech is too late - maybe thats one for not making it in time lle wedi chwech!!!

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I’ve heard farm outhouses tended to have multiple seats for labourers, and the same for quarries… :slight_smile:

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I have seen a three-seater at a farm museum. Two adult seats and a little child seat in between.
Sue

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Thnking about it, for centuries, ordinary people lived in tiny cottages with many sharing sleeping accommodation sp privacy was unknown! Think of life below decks in RN! Even quite recently! And in Nelson’s navy men’s wives were smuggled aboard!!! I think personal space for anyone but the very rich is probably a post WW2 phenomenon!

Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has just this to say, a little puzzlingly and unhelpfully:


“six: A privy: Oxford University: ca.1870-1915. ? origin”

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just for interest - this is an ancient lle trideg chwech

My parents each had 6 siblings, and this was not uncommon in their generation. Some families were much larger, of course.

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You can now purchase novel things like this…

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Me want!

On a related note, my Mother likes to regail me with the story of when she was in her Welsh class as a girl (she’s English, but grew up in Wales for a time) and everyone laughed at her for saying she lived in a “ty bach”. I can see why “little house” would be a euphemism for toilet, but what should she have said to convey the idea of living in an actual “little house” as she intended to say?

She’s fuzzy on details, so is it likely she said “yn y ty bach” rather than “mewn ty bach” or something? Or is there a better was of saying “little house”?

Tŷ bychan would be the way to say ‘small house’ without it being mistaken. Alternatively, she probably would have got away with “tŷ bach twt”.

PS - she will by no means be the only one to have gone through that experience! :wink:

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Even in English, I always called my place on Gower a cottage (bwthyn), never a little house!

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How does bychan differ from bach? Is it a subtlety like the difference between “little” and “small” in English?

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Goodness, this was in Gower! Her step father was the lighthouse keeper at Rhossili. She lived near the Worm’s Head! Where are you? I think her house is now National Trust. I say “lighthouse keeper”, I may mean Coastguard. I don’t think there is a lighthouse there…

I am now in Yr Alban (Scotland) and nobody in Rhossili in my day spoke Welsh. In fact they were famous for being hard to teach it to! Friend of mine, kind hearted, willing girl, sad that she was so bad at Welsh in Gowerton school, was told, “Don’t worry, dear, we never succeed in teaching Welsh to any child from Gower!” This friend was much older than me. I am 76 and she died some years back!

Pretty much. In these cases it probably helps to think of tŷ bach and tŷ bychan as ‘idiomatic phrases’ rather than pairs of individual words.

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Brilliant! Well that was certainly true in my Mother’s case, as she can do no more than count to ten. She went to Gowerton Girls’ Grammar school. Perhaps she’ll find this some consolation!

p.s. The coastguard’s cottage had been National Trust for some time while I was still there. I did know verious coastguards by sight before that, but only really at the ‘going round carol singing at Christmas’ level. I am not Gower stock. I had an ‘auntie’ in the village, but she was from Swansea. ps anything else o this we will have to use PM (personal messages)

“Tŷ eitha bach” is the way SSiW mentions in one of the lessons to get around this.

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Which is also used in ysgol feithrin as the term for wendy house. :slight_smile:

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