Llygad yr haul

I heard the Welsh phrase llygad yr haul (eye of the sun) on the weather forecast on Radio Cymru this morning and thought it was a poetic way of describing sunny weather. I think it appears in a sentence something like Bydd sawl mannau dan llygad yr haul yfory (“Many places will be under the sun’s eye tomorrow”).

In English you might talk about the eye of a storm, but I haven’t heard the expression the eye of the sun or the sun’s eye used in relation to the weather. Are there similar expressions in other languages?


5 Responses to Llygad yr haul

  1. Juan Shimmin says:

    I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that – it seems to refer specifically to sunlight or places that are in sunlight, rather than sunny weather. I’m not an L1 speaker though, it could mean any of those.

    Another example: “Ro’n i’n eistedd ar y gwely – fy ngwely i! – yn llygad y haul. (“Ffrindiau”, Gareth F. Williams, p. 100). The narrator is in an attic bedroom where the sun streams in through a single window, so I interpret that as her sitting in the sunny patch on her bed.

  2. Yenlit says:

    In Welsh there is the somewhat conflated phrase:
    “yn wÿneb haul llygad goleuni” – in broad daylight.
    Literally: in (the) face (of) (the) sun (in) (the) eye (of) light.

  3. Jim M. says:

    In Indonesian the sun itself is “matahari”: eye of the day.

  4. I liked the meaning in Indonesia. Makes perfect sense.

    Btw in Portuguese I have seen “eye” used to describe the center of a hurricane: “O olho (eye) do furacão (hurricane)”.

  5. Jonathan says:

    The term “eye of the hurricane” is used as a technical and normal term here in the US as well.

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