You will probably be familiar with the word
glas as the Welsh equivalent of English
blue. However, you may notice that Welsh occasionally uses
glas to refer to plants with a fresh
green colour. For example, the Welsh word for living green grass is
glaswellt, which combines the colour term
glas with the noun
gwellt (grass,
straw, or hay). The other Celtic languages all use a word from the same root
as
glas to refer to colours ranging from fresh green to blue.
Breton and Cornish both have a word related to
gwyrdd,
but use it only for artificial shades of the colour. This difference between
Celtic languages and English in dividinig the colour spectrum explains why Welsh
sometimes uses
glas in idioms and compound words relating
to immaturity and lack of experience, where English might use
green instead. (See the entry
glas for examples.)