British Expat Newsletter

17 August 2005

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

This week: Mind your language
On the website
Virtual Snacks
Sponsor
Bizarre Searches
Joke and quotation

This week

Don't you find regional variations in language interesting? Dave and I certainly do, and from the frequent exchanges on the BE Forum it seems we're far from alone in this.

When I was growing up the language most people spoke at home was called Doric. Most outsiders (even other Scots) couldn't understand even one word of what was being said - it's as far removed from English as that. Bits of it sound more German or Danish than English! At one stage some council or other (I think it was Moray) started making some of their publications available in Doric as well as English, and I believe you can now take evening classes in some places.

Of course, promoting minority languages happens elsewhere in the UK. (Only in recent years, mind you. I well remember that we were all forbidden to speak Doric at school, and in years gone by some schools used to impose quite shocking punishments on pupils who were caught speaking their native tongue instead of English.) You can't go far in Wales without seeing plenty of evidence of the Welsh language (it even got its own television channel in 1982 with the creation of Sianel 4 Cymru). And the same has happened - to a lesser extent - with Scots Gaelic in the Highlands, particularly in the Western Isles. They've even started putting Gaelic street names up in Inverness, although I can't imagine there are many Gaelic speakers living there.

But more recently this promotion has extended to variations of English. Various councils in Scotland have started including Lallans in their letterheads, and in Northern Ireland I gather you can now see the same thing happening with Ulster Scots (and Irish). I'm not sure whether anywhere in England has gone as far as this, though it seems doubtful.

So why are we looking at language this week? Well, our pal Jayne recently posted on the BE Forum about a Doric poetry website she'd found. The BE Forum seems to have become a haven for Doric speakers - there are a good half-dozen or more who either speak it, or can at least understand it. Anyway, in the course of the discussion Jayne also posted some extracts of writing in Middle English (English as it was written and spoken round about the 13th century) and Old English (about the 7th-8th century). It's a stretch to understand the Middle English - it's well nigh impossible to make any sense at all of the Old English (Dave had a real struggle, even after having studied Old High German and Old Icelandic at university).

In the meantime we've been watching "The Forsyte Saga" on video. Some of the language used there is quite jarring to the contemporary ear - for instance, literature with explicit sexual content is described as "advanced" rather than "adult". (Calling it "adult" is a personal bugbear of mine - I think "adult" should simply mean "for grown-ups".) It's funny how even apparently well-established words have changed their meanings over the years. "Gay" is an obvious example. But a couple of hundred years ago "nice" was a rather insulting word meaning "nit-picking" (as in a "nice distinction") and "silly" was a perfectly inoffensive word meaning "innocent"!

Did you grow up speaking something other than "standard" English? Why not tell us about it on the forum?
http://www.britishexpat.com/expatforum/viewforum.php?f=37

On the Website

The mention of the Fairy Queen steam train trip in last week's newsletter resulted in some great feedback, so I thought I'd make it a regular feature to mention some earlier articles on BE which you may have missed first time around. Here are my picks for this week:

Crooked Mary - Let Mike Clark take you back in time to 1798 and the tale of the notorious lugger, the "Crooked Mary". This is a ripping yarn about the thriving smuggling trade which prevailed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Scotland's north-east.

Heaven and Hell in the Big Easy - Oliver Hennessey probes behind the heat to find the sultry attractions of New Orleans.

Canal Capers - the story of when Dave and I had a holiday aboard a houseboat on the Canal du Midi in France. We also gave the article to Mike Kingdom-Hockings and he published it on his website with the title "Midi Muddle". 'Nuff said!

Virtual Snacks

The British Library have an interesting collection of soundfiles of dialects going back to the early 1950s. Unfortunately it only covers England and one or two Isle of Man speakers.
British Library - English Dialects

To redress the balance a bit (at least as far as Scots is concerned) here's a link to Wir Ain Leid, an online introduction to Modern Scots:
Wir Ain Leid

Sponsor

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CurrencyUK - cheaper exchange rates

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

penis pitchers
moose going to bathroom
high-heels in heat
dog being humped by chicken
what kind of people are dentists
buttock dance lesson in la
funny bones in a dark street
spouse bangers
best rbl spam current weekly
come near me at bed
bbq terms and conditions joke
expat sex box

Till next time...
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright (1856-1950), in the preface to "Pygmalion" (1912)

Joke

Noddy Holder goes into a tailor's to be fitted for a new outfit.

After decking him out in the finest velvet suit with wide lapels and windjammer flares, the tailor asks him, "How would Sir like a nice kipper tie?"

"Ar, goo on," Noddy replies. "Milk and two sugars, please."