You don’t need a zillion, of course - and they’re not ideograms either. Well…hardly any of them are. 
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Well, they’re definitely logograms in modern Chinese, aren’t they? Apart from a very few ideograms.
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What are the specific differences between Cwm, Dyffryn and Glyn? (My tad-cu’s name is glyn and I am Bryn! )
@aran Sorry to be a pain, but I still haven’t found out what ‘peltan’ is!! (you told your Mam you don’t want it in your book!)
Well a dyffryn is a broad flat valley, while a cwm is more of a scooped-out type thing.
Can you tell I DIDN’T do Geology at university?
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That ought to go in as a definition in the next edition of your dictionary.
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Slap…
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You are absolutely right, @owainlurch.
cwm (cymoedd) (m) - scooped-out valley type thingy
I think it works.
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And then how about this one for dyffryn:
dyffryn (-oedd) (m) - not a cwm
I think that works as well.
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so students at Coleg y cymoedd are “students of the college of the scooped out valley type of thingy”, Sounds like it has the makings of an English equivalent of Llanfair PG
Correct. That is what it means. Welsh is so much more succinct than English, isn’t it?
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Well, when you have a country full of scooped out valley type thingies and other impressive topograhical features, it pays to have succinct words for them. Many of these are mono-syllabic like cwm, pant, pwll, nant … and there are correspondingly fewer (and typically longer) words for the same features in English.
My Geiriadur Mawr spells that ‘pelten’!
Yn wir! “You or ewe or uw shaped valley” is confusing as well! Is it like defaid, i, or beth?
Pretty obvious that it is from something like that , so I can’t see you will get any argument- apart from possibly over the use of your word “just”. (Though I would also guess quite possibly from “belt” myself. )
When I was at school we went to Cwm Idwal on a Geography field trip (I still have the scar to prove it on my knee, but that’s another story). From what I remember the scoopy-out type cwm in English is a specific glacial feature, also known as a corrie or cirque (with aretes behind it). Cwm Idwal, I seem to remember, has some rocks with striations! (we had to draw field sketches under a plastic bag in the pouring rain, no taking photos in those days) Looking in my dictionary, the Welsh for this type of cwm is peiran.
Cwm (in Welsh) applied to other Welsh valleys seems to be used for narrower longer valleys. So locally, Cwm Llinau is a tributary of Dyffryn Dyfi, a much wider valley - makes sense to me.
Thinking about glacial features, the main car park in Dolgellau is called the Marian, the Welsh for moraine.
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what about all the different words for meadow, dol, rhos, waun even a rhigos and i bet theres loads more. I always think of waun as more like mooland, but only because of thinking about the ones i know.
“But”?
That’s pretty much a definition of how this language thing works, isn’t it? 
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oh yeah now you mention it