If you’ve ever been to Wales, and are sufficiently sad, you may have noticed that the Welsh appear to have two words for “miles” – specifically, “milltir” and “filltir”. We’ve all been there. We’ve all been happily driving along, enjoying the scenery and the words like “ysgol”, “ysbyty” and “canol-y-dref” and trying to work out what they mean and how they can possibly be pronounced, and you drive past a sign with a picture of a car slipping about, and it says, “Am 6 milltir”. This is alarming enough, the prospect of your car sliding around the road for 6 miles, but what’s deeply confusing is that a mile further down the road, you’ll come across the same sign but with the inscription “Am 5 filltir.” And there’s no reason why it’s changed.
You think about this for a while, then if you’re sensible, you forget about it and concentrate on the happy fact that you’re likely to have some damned good fish and chips for tea (because, although the Welsh can’t make up their minds how to say “miles”, they do know how to make good fish and chips). If, on the other hand, you’re not sensible (this is a category including me, my dad and my sister, and no one else, as far as I’m aware), you puzzle over this little conundrum for the rest of the day. Then you wake up the next day still worrying about it. This continues for years. I know I’ve been considering this for at least five years, because today I discovered on my computer an aborted article on this very subject that I started writing in 2004.
But now it’s finally time to consider the question properly. Why do the Welsh have two words where one would be perfectly acceptable? What is the difference between “milltir” and “filltir”?
The question becomes more interesting – I’d even claim it becomes a little sinister, if I didn’t think I’d be laughed off the internet – when you realise that the Welsh themselves are exceptionally cagey about this question. I remember my dad and I were very confused about this issue back in the early years of this decade, and that as a result of this, when one evening I found myself needing a taxi from Haverfordwest to Broad Haven, I decided to take the opportunity to ask a real live Welsh person what the situation was. I said, “So, why do the signs sometimes say milltir and sometimes say filltir?”
My response was a curt, “I’ve never noticed that. Ever.” There was a definite implication that if I pursued the subject I might find myself abandoned on the road and forced to walk. Or possibly even bundled into the boot and shot for asking too many questions.
This summer another real Welsh person became available for the asking of this very question. He was a less than reliable source, being fair, because his knowledge of Welsh appeared to be limited to “araf”, “heddlu”, etc – all those words that even the most obtuse English person can pick up from a visit to Wales (especially if, like me, you’ve been stopped by the heddlu for not going araf enough). He was also not very reliable due to his curious reluctance to be pinned down vis-a-vis his job, preferring to describe himself as an “entrepreneur”, which was interpreted variously as “drug dealer”, “prostitute trafficker”, and “man whore”. He was also wearing a bra made out of plastic bags. In short, he was the sort of person you wouldn’t trust if he told you that grass was green.
Anyway, he was asked about the great filltir-milltir debate. Normally a talkative if vaguely nonsensical fellow, he instantly clammed up. “I don’t think so,” he claimed. He was presented with photographic evidence, and still denied it. When pressed, he emptied a jug of water into my sister’s handbag, and hastily made his exit in the ensuing chaos.
So, you see, there’s an aura of mystery concerning this oddity of the Welsh language. I mean, okay, it may just have been that my taxi driver was a not particularly chatty person, and that my Welsh acquaintance was a complete loony, but still, it seems peculiar. Frankly, I think it smacks of a conspiracy. The milltir signs probably mean “miles”, and the filltir ones mean something else entirely to those in the know – the ranks of which obviously include the taxi driver and the entrepreneur. But what could it mean?
I suspect that underneath every filltir sign, there is something buried. A pot of gold, perhaps, or a weapon of mass destruction. And the architects of this conspiracy are relying on nobody noticing the different letter in the signs which indicate an ideal spot to go digging. I reckon that if we were to start uprooting all the filltir signs, the heddlu might show up pretty quick and try to stop us, and that would obviously be because we’d be getting close to finding out the truth. Or possibly it’s just because they’re doing their jobs and trying to prevent wanton vandalism. But I think it would prove a point, which is why I’m going to Wales next weekend and digging up every filltir sign I can find.
Alternatively, it could simply be that when the signs were commissioned, some (well, quite a lot) were made with a misprint. Rather than order these defective signs be replaced, the government reasoned that Welsh is so incomprehensible anyway, no one would notice. But they reckoned without me, a crusader dedicated to the discovery and explanation of lexigraphical oddities. (Microsoft Word spell-checker, my old friend, seems to think that “lexigraphical” is a lexigraphical oddity, but I’m sure it’s a word. I’d even go and check my dictionary if I could be bothered.)
However, I don’t think the spelling mistake explanation is very likely. If that were the case, there’d be an explanation of this fact somewhere on the internet, but there isn’t. In fact, just you try googling “milltir”, “filltir” or “milltir filltir”. You won’t get anything useful. Obviously, most of it’s in Welsh, so there’s no way of telling if it’s useful or not, but I reckon it isn’t. If it wasn’t a conspiracy among the Welsh, then there’d be an English explanation. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?
And in fact, I think I’ve figured out the purpose of the conspiracy! It’s to distract the world’s greatest genius (i.e. me) for at least five years so that he cannot achieve his full potential, instead wasting his time on lexigraphical (yes, Microsoft Word, I said “lexigraphical” again, and I’ll say it as often as I please) puzzles that have no solution!
Well, I am happy now to proclaim that I shall not let it distract me any further! Prepare to see a considerable increase of genius-like things happening, now that I’m not bothering with milltirs and filltirs anymore!
Prepare yourselves. It shall happen soon. And the first genius-like thing that might well happen is the removal of bloody confusing signs in Wales.