yes we do say tha for you sometimes here
tha nowes?
is... you know?
the scentence read
ive spilt more ale down my waiscoat than you have drunk tonight
its from a strange northern song
Wow, that's something left behind from Elizabethan times...
thou know'st
tha knows...
Weird.
indeed i saw on tv once on calendar a local news program some old guy who sadly is probably dead now but he could speak fluent 'yorkshire' and it really did seem like old-er (middle-late ?) english (not old english
)
i could hardly understand any of it
Yeah, Late Middle English...
I wonder why Yorkshire is still like that, then. when it has always been a big part of England?
Drom, that's likely accurate, those of us who utilize English as our own language feel free to mold it after our own fashion. To be truthful, the most fluid and lyrical "King's English" I've ever heard wasn't from the UK or America or Australia or New Zealand--but Africa.
Yet, that figures too.
Conroy, the author of Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, originally taught black students on the islands off the coast of the Carolinas--his first book, Conrack, is about that period in his life. Conrack is how the local kids pronounced Conroy. Many, many years ago, before Conroy even arrived in those islands, there was a fascinating documentary done on the blacks of the coastal islands. Some were the descendants of escaped slaves, others the descendants of black settlers. Initially, when the English brought Africans to American, they were treated as though they were indentured servants. Most simply ended up as slaves; others learned enough to insist up a ticket of leave, and they went to those islands to assure they wouldn't be taken up and put in chains. This is why escaped slaves who knew of those islands would head there. The documentary i saw was done in the 1960's, at a time when many of them still spoke what was very nearly Elizabethan English. When i was at university, i read of a study which was done by one of the Ivy League schools (Harvard?) and the New York Times when the FDR administration had many projects to preserve disappearing cultures. People in Appalachia who were considered illiterate actually weren't--they were functionally illiterate, because they couldn't read the front page of The Times. However, many of the families of the first settlers had preserved copies of the King James Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress and Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Church, and they could read aloud fluently from texts from the 16th and early 17th century. Much of their speech which is considered quaint or ignorant is actually just antique--for example, using "air" for "are," and hence, "ain't" as a contraction of "air not." In Mario Pei's The Story of Language (i believe, it may have been his book on English) he asserts that "the common people" lag behind the literati by at least a century and often times longer, until the advent of modern communications media.
A little more than a century ago, and American scholar identified Thomas Mallory of Warwickshire as the author of Le Mort d'Artur. That Thomas Mallory was a convicted felon, and was accused of and on some occassions, convicted of rape, manslaughter, murder, kidnapping, extortion--hardly the type to tout chivalry and courtly love. But a recent study by an English scholar has identified Thomas Mallory of Yorkshire as the author. Caxton apparently printed the book (1485) in the original form of an edited manuscript. A manuscript of more than 1000 pages was found in the West Riding near Winchester in the 1930's, and the text uses the English of the north. The Thomas Mallory of Yorkshire was for many years a prisoner of the Duke of Armangac, his family not having the means to ransom him. The Duke was famous for his collection of French lais of the Arthurian cycle. Throughout the text, Mallory refers to "the Frensh booke." That Thomas Mallory died in 1471 or 1472, while still in captivity. He ends his work with a plea to the reader to pray for "an humble knight presoner," and states that he writes "in the ninth year of the reign of my Lord, King Edward." That would be 1470 or 1471--and Mallory would not have known that Edward was briefly deposed in 1470.
I have read that in remote parts of Yorkshire, until the era after the Second World War, there were men and women who were considered illiterate, but, like the "hillbillies" of Appalachia, they could easily and fluently read aloud from Mallory. Personally, i regret it that diversity in language dies with the spread of communications media.
far out set
you do know a great deal
seems like you know more about yorkshire than me
man those people still exist here.. they are just holding out in the hills
tha knows, not me, i know nowt . . .
That was fascinating, Setanta; thank you for it. I agree totally with you; why should people who have an English just as rich, if not richer, than what we have to-day, be considered ignorant? That everyone should speak one given dialect is tripe. Is anything at all being done to save the Appalachian patois?
im not so sure about that set
DetR, during the 1930's, the Roosevelt administration came up with a lot of "make-work" projects. One was to send people out to record speech and song of remote dialects. I don't know that anything has been done since then, although i suspect television and motion pictures have gone a long way to eroding the previous speech patterns. Hollywood was very picky about authenticity in those days, and there is an intersting little movie called Spitfire which was one of Katherine Hepburn's first roles--it may have been her first motion picture. Her role is that of a backwoods girl brought into collision with the "modern" world during the building of the dams in the Tennessee Valley project for rural electrification. I have heard commentators who say that she worked long and hard to speak the exact patois of Appalachia as it was spoken in "pre-media" Tennessee.
i heard they used native american indian( navaho or sioux) for spy communication in ww2 cos it was almost impossible for the enemy to understand ...is this right?
There were a group of Amerindians in the Marine Corps known as the Navajo Code Talkers, and they used Navajo, Zuni and Pima . . . i'll go dig up a link . . . they first did it with the telephone lines in the trenches in the Great War, and the Germans, who commonly "tapped" the lines, were completely baffled . . .
Here ya go, Boss . . .
The Navajo Code Talkers
I saw one of the Code Talkers interviewed on television once, and he said they had to make up a real code, because there were many words such as truck, airplane, tank, etc., which have no cognates in the native languages.
A, so her speech is accurate? Would you recommend the movie? Do you reckon that nearly all Appalachians speak a more standard American-English, now?
That's amazing, the Navajo code talkers. Perhaps there should be courses in Navajo, if there aren't any at the moment, to pass the language's difficulties on?
The movie was rather a pot-boiler, but it is interesting to hear Hepburn speak.
.