- Hed drosof hyda dir Esyllt
- O berfedd gwlad Wynedd wyllt.—D.G. 523.
‘Fly for my sake as far as the land of Essyllt from the heart of the wild region of Gwynedd.’
iii. The change takes place rarely in uncompounded polysyllables:
(1) Melyn ‘yellow’ has f. melen always.
(2) D.D. gives “manwl et manol” s.v. but cites (from L.G.C. 318) manwl f.; the form manol seems a variant (? late) of manwl rather than a f. For the f. of tywyll L.G.C. and D.E. wrote tywell, which is quite certainly a spurious form, for tywyll originally had in its ult. not y but w͡y § 38 x, § 111 i (2), and could no more take a. f. form than llŵyd ‘grey’. The true f. is tywyll: Stavell Gynẟylan ys tywyll r.p. 1045 ‘The hall of C. is dark’; Tywyll yw’r nos,… tywyll yw’r fro D.G. 267 ‘dark is the night, dark is the land’; rhan dywyll Luc xi 36. D. 54 states correctly that tywyll is com., quoting as violating usage (“sed dixit poeta”) the well-known couplet—
- Nos da i’r Ynys Dywell;
- Ni wn oes un ynys well.—L.G.C., m 146/140.
‘Good night to the dark island; I know not if a better island be.’ The name, which denotes Anglesey, is properly yr Ynys Dywyll (Ynis Dowyll Camden⁴ 681, Ynys Dowyll Mona Ant.¹ 24). Rowland 41 gives tywell as regular, and cites the couplet as an example, borrowing it from D. or his translator, but lacking D.’s scholarship. Some recent writers have used the form, having learnt it from these sources; and naturally Wms’s tywll nos is everywhere “corrected” to tywell nos in the new C.-M. hymnbook. The spoken language of course preserves the traditional form nos dywyll.
In Ml. and Early Mn. W. derivatives in ‑lyd had f. forms in ‑led: croc creuled b.b. 41 ‘bloody cross’; y ẟreic danllet s.g. 294, 329 ‘the fiery dragon’; arf wyarlled G.G1. d. 59 ‘gory weapon’;
- Ac uybren drymledb ledoer
- A’i lluwch yn gorchuddio’r lloer.—D.G. 229.
‘And a gloomy chilly sky, and its drift hiding the moon.’
(3) But the bulk of polysyllabic adjectives with w or ɥ in the ult., which are not conscious compounds, have no distinctive f. form: w: agwrdd ‘strong’ amlwg ‘evident’, chwimwth ‘quick’, teilwng ‘worthy’, etc.;—y: melys ‘sweet’, dyrys ‘intricate’, hysbys ‘known’, echrys ‘terrible’, newydd ‘new’, celfydd ‘skilful’, pybyr f. I.G. 111 ‘keen’, ufyll ‘humble’, serfyll ‘prostrate’, etc. etc.
iv. The affection often takes place in compounds:
(1) In the second element when it is an adj. as pen-grych r.m. 163 ‘curly-haired’, f. benn-grech do. 232 (but ben-grych in the earlier
