Absolutely nothing. Love 'em. But an impenetrable mass about 60yards by 20yards is a few more than I need.
Well everywhere outside of Yorkshire is downhill isnât it?
Did you ever see the Hale and Pace spoof of Yorkshire Airlines? (I hope itâs still on Youtube).
They take off from Leeds International Airport and also land there, and never go anywhere else.
â'cos if it ent in Yorksheer, it ent worth goin to is it?â
Iâve not heard the radio play but Iâve got the ebook in my kindle account. Based on the escapades of William Madocks (of Porthmadoc cob fame) and his friends known as âThe Chaoticsâ apparently.
Ah interesting, thanks. It had the ring of âThe Pickwick Papersâ to me (without the serious bitsâŠ).
I think about this topic alot as it relates to the push for economic syntax in writing.
My professors always hated the way I wrote English. While everything I wrote was grammatically correct, they said it required them to hold on to information until the end of the sentence. This is something that that Celtic language all require because the subject often comes at the end. They also hated my use of Latin-rooted English words when a perfectly good English word of Germanic root was available. I would get word choice notes like, change mountain to hill or corpus to body. Imagine a hill 14,000 feet above sea level. My favorite was getting the banhammer on the word phylogony, rather than roots, which makes sense until you understand itâs a paper on ancestral traits in phylogonies of early hominids â like actual drawn phylogonies:
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^ This doesnt render properly. Too bad.
I get the whole, your granny should be able to read the paper at 4am principle. But why use a word shared with plant parts, tooth anatomy, hairdressing and other cultural contexts when you can use the term specific to Linnean taxanomy?
My mother went to a school taught in Latin, but my word preference might also be explained by ancestors one generation up. Any family that didnât come from Celtic language speaking places from the 1600s to the mid 1800s, spoke Romance languages until the 1970s. Like many US, East Coast people, I have a few puritans from Wales, Devon and Manchester/Lancashire in the wood pile, but most of my heritage since then is Scottish, Irish, Portuguese and Italian in that order.
I also had a writing tutor that found the comments of this particular group of professors odd. She wondered if it wasnât a hold-over from feelings about the Normand invasion in England.
She thought it significant that every one of my professorâs had Germanic, Anglo and Dutch origins. It made me wonder if, all of us could in advertenly be expressing syntax from older generations and coming up against a cultural zone of discomfort.
In fact, even in the comments I see Celtic features. âCupla three,â cupla is the Irish word for couple, probably shared with Cornish, Welsh and long gone West Country languages.
âA-googlingâ - definately an Irish thing but maybe not excluively. Thatâs just why itâs an Americanism from the Southeast. That quaint Appalachian way of expressing verbal nouns is directly taken from Irish where ag suil = running; ag ithe = eating, pronounced egg-shool, Ég-eehÉ. Over time it became a-runnin and a-eatâin and a-fighâin.
So to be clear, Iâm not making an argument about linguistic imperialism, but I am curious about how communication between people speaking English is effected, if at all, in subsequant generations when English was a second language to a previous generation.
Incidentally, Iâm told a feature of Irish is the unecessary conjuntion. So, Iâve avoided editing them out Now if only spellcheck on my phone workedâŠ
Whatever the cause, academia as a whole has a mandate towards this economy of language, and the cost is ecomony of thought. I worry itâs the death of prose. And I deeply want to understand how my mind differs from others. This is why I choose to study Cornish and Irish with Welsh on the to-do list. And I hope we all keep alive the things our grandparents said.
Ironic if they really were of Germanic origin: German is infamous for its verbs at the end of sometimes extremely long sentences!
However, as for using âgood plain Anglo Saxon words instead of fancy LatinismsâŠâ, well there definitely is a school of thought along those lines. I donât think your professors were unique in that respect, but it can be taken too far.
The irony there is that in science, German uses terms like âBremsstrahlingâ which are simple words joined up. Maybe OK if you are German, but I bet we wouldnât call it âstoppingradiationâ without even a hyphen!
Almost conjures up a bit of Schadenfreude.
CĂșpla comes from Old French - coupler. Same route as couple. The West Country languages had been pushed past the Tamar by 1300, so it may have been shared with them but likely came from the Norman presence.
Ah, an Environment Agency inspector asked me to assess the Bremsstrahlung effect of some test equipment that I used to own. I said âIâll get back to youâ
Did you ever succeed?
Fortunately, yes. My radiation protection advisor was the head of Medical Physics for Swansea NHS, so he drafted a reply for me. Apparently it didnât apply to me, but the young inspector was over-keen. In time we had a more mellow inspector.
Kate Crocket (BBC presenter) often says âDynna niâ
Something like âa-huntingâ actually comes from Old & Middle English, possibly influenced by Celtic languages. The âa-â comes from Old English âonâ, which gets weakened in all sorts of words in the Middle English period (like afoot, ahead, afield, apart, apiece, etc.).
Old English didnât really do continuous tenses like Modern English & Welsh do, but the two forms that wind up giving us the modern ones are ic wĂŠs huntende (I was huntinâ) and ic wĂŠs on huntunge (I was a-hunting). These two forms got mixed up in Middle English, but thatâs why youâre allowed (sort of) to âdrop your gâsâ.
and another I wonder about is the many ways we use âtoâ that I donât think is very common outside Wales. I canât think of a Welsh equivalent of âwhereâs that to thenâ, but it somehow feels like there should be one.
Do you mean like, âWhich of these queues is for the number 11 bus?â âWhereâs that to then?â
thatâs it, âwhereâs the queue for the leven bus to thenâ
It happens everywhere, these little dialect differences. I say, in English, âI live in mid-Argyll.â The locals say, in English âI stay in mid-Argyll.â I presume, yn Gyraeg, âDwy iân byw yma.â means it is where I live all the time, whereas âdwy iân aros yma.â Means Iâm just visiting!
My relatives in Glasgow/Paisley say that. Used to confuse me no end.
âIâm staying in Paisley just nowâ.
âOh, right, where do you normally liveâ.
âEh, ai just told youâŠâ.
(âJust nowâ is also a favourite Glasgow-ism - maybe in wider Scotland as well).
Similar to the Wenglish by now: Iâm living in Ystrad by now. Directly from the Welsh erbyn hyn.