...it can indicate a brief mood .. peevish, skittish, childish, foolish .
... sometimes it's a permanent condition .. British, waspish,
.. it can mean "roughly, approximately" ... big-ish, half-ish, 20-ish, thin-ish, soon-ish
..and it's that "roughly" meaning that I can't find an equivalent for .. it's such a useful thing to be able to tack onto a word ...
I'll be back soon-ish
Is Alan fat ? Well, he's fat-ish.
He's not really old... 40-ish ?
Is the pub crowded on Thursdays ? Well, it's full-ish.
I know it's not exactly clean, but it's clean-ish.
I tried to find out by looking up -ish words in my increasingly massive-ish heap of Welsh dictionaries.... but you can't really look up 20-ish in a dictionary !
Then I tried typing " Andrew is forty-ish, fat-ish and rich-ish into google translate and got this
" Roedd Andrew deugain-ish, braster-ish a chyfoethog-ish"
Very helpful ! It did the same trick with French as well so it's nothing anti-Welsh.
Then there's other things ..... what about "wonky."
This drill is a bit wonky.
My car is a bit wonky.
It's gone all wonky.
My finances are rather wonky
Andrew's always been a bit wonky.
A bit related to wonky is "knackered", and maybe you could use blino-related words, but in normal use "knackered" can cover a host of possibilities all in one handy word. It sort of means broken /partially broken but also "tired/worn out" or " over the hill" .... " heavily worn /battered" etc. There is also a subtle unstated assumption of multiple small imperfections adding up to general unreliability .What a brilliant word !
There's more of these ideas that I can't find a Welsh version of but those three will do for now ... come on all you native speakers, what's your opinion on -ish, wonky and knackered ?
Meanwhile, here's an Euros Childs song, Blaidd tu fas y drws ....