LL-L: "Ethnonyms" LOWLANDS-L, 23.OCT.1999 (02) [E]

Sat Oct 23 17:20:02 UTC 1999

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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Kinship terms

Sandy wrote:

>>Another example of a useful West Country word not found in standard
English would be "didicoy", which means someone who lives a traveller's
lifestyle, but isn't of Romani
descent.<<

The Oxford "Atlas of English Dialects" gives "didicoy" as the West Country
term for what in the rest of England is generally called a "gypsy" (or some
version of that word), and that's how I would understand it. "Gypsy", of
course, can mean either a Romani or someone living in similar circumstances,
ie an itinerant worker such as a tinker or horse-breaker.

 "Didicoy" (with various spellings) is a Romani word used by the Romani to
describe other "gypsies". I doubt if the distinction is one which has
(historically) been of great concern to the settled population. "Gypsy" has
become politically incorrect, I feel.

Nowadays "traveller" has come to mean a person who lives either as a "gypsy"
or has adopted a travelling lifestyle unconnected with work, as in "New Age
traveller".

The "Atlas" shows "butty" (workmate) outcropping in three smallish
South-Western areas within a sea of "mate". "Pal" (used in the same sense in
the North-East) is from Romani "plal".

We (East London suburbs, 1940s) called our next-door neighbours
"Uncle/Auntie
Mayhew" but our parents came from Norfolk so this might not have been normal
local usage. My memory is that my parents called neighbours by their surname
so perhaps that was the determining principle.
In the 19th century (George Eliot and Jerome K Jerome come to mind) it seems
to have been common to call aunts and uncles by their surname.

According to my mother, around 1950 the term "uncle" was used by local
children
further down the social scale to describe their mother's lover, but I'm not
sure that this is really a distinct usage.

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

----------

From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk]
Subject:  "Specialised terms"

> From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
> Subject: Kinship terms
>
> Sandy wrote:
>
> >>Another example of a useful West Country word not found in standard
> English would be "didicoy", which means someone who lives a traveller's
> lifestyle, but isn't of Romani
> descent.<<
>
> The Oxford "Atlas of English Dialects" gives "didicoy" as the West Country
> term for what in the rest of England is generally called a
> "gypsy" (or some

The OAED isn't a dictionary, though - I wouldn't go turning to it for
precise definitions (having said that I should point out I haven't actually
managed to get a look at it!).

The definition I gave was how it was explained to me by a (non-itenarant,
non-Romani) Devon man. The Oxford English Dictionary entry is interesting -
it says the word comes from Romani itself and means "our people". However,
the sequence of quotes in the dictionary seems to suggest the use of it just
to mean "gypsy" in C18 until the final quote (1966) actually makes an
explicit distinction between didicoys "such as the Irish tinkers around
London" and "the true Romani". So I think my informant may have simply been
giving the modern usage.

> The "Atlas" shows "butty" (workmate) outcropping in three smallish
> South-Western areas within a sea of "mate". "Pal" (used in the
> same sense in
> the North-East) is from Romani "plal".

The OED isn't very helpful with "butty" - it only lists the original
specialist use as a mining or engineering middleman. Wright's mutli-volume
Dictionary of English Dialects (early C20) lists it as meaning either a
"fellow worker" or an "intimate friend". My experience of the word is that
while if you used it in the plural, especially outside of work, it would be
taken to mean "workmates", but in the singular, especially in work, it would
mean "intimate friend amongst workmates". For example, I remember hesitating
to mention personal matter to a young girl in work in south east Wales
because of another girl within earshot. She said, "You can tell Julie, she's
my butty." Yet these girls lived in the same village and never visited one
another. When they left work they still stayed in the same village as me,
but when I asked one about the other a few years later, I found that they'd
never visited each other or spoken at any length since they left work.

I'm a bit surprised by there only being three outcroppings in the West
Country - there must be an area in south Wales too, because all the Welsh
seemed to know this word when I lived there. Does the OAED give information
on the questionaires used? I'd be interested to know what the question was
that brought forth the geographical information about "butty". If it simply
asked what the word for "someone you work with" was, then the results would
be seriously narrowed, because "butty" doesn't quite mean that!

Sandy
http://scotstext.org

----------

From: Roger P. G. Thijs [roger.thijs at village.uunet.be]
Subject: LL-L: "Ethnonyms" LOWLANDS-L, 22.OCT.1999 (06) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
> Subject: Ethnonyms
> > Incidentally, the traditional Low Saxon name for "Gypsy" is not
_Zigeuner_
> > (which is German) but _tatar_!  I assume Swedish _tattare_ 'Gypsy' is a
> Middle
> > Low Saxon loanword.
>
In my Limburgian (Vliermaal, Belgium) we used "boheimers" for gipsy's.
Regards,
Roger

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