LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.20 (01) [E]

Fri Aug 20 14:58:37 UTC 2004

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From: Utz H. Woltmann <uwoltmann at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.19 (06) [E]

>From: GoodbyColumbus at aol.com <GoodbyColumbus at aol.com>
>Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.19 (02) [E]
>
>Sorry to perhaps go out of bounds on this, but thinking of this "weather"
>and "time/tide" connection, I think of French, "le temps" , meaning both
>weather and time.
>
>Brad
>
Moin alltohoop,

I think it is the same with "il tempo" in Italian language, isn´t it?

Kumpelmenten
Utz H. Woltmann

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From: john feather <johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Phonology

Re "mill girls": The comedian Les Dawson did a turn involving two women
talking over the garden wall in which he used the exaggerated lip movements
and "nudge-nudge wink-wink" non-vocalisation which John D referred to. Worth
looking out for.

I have a feeling that factory workers and sweatshop employees lived in very
different worlds both geographically and socially but I've never gone into
the subject in detail.

I don't know if the UK TV series "Cold Feet" has made it abroad but it's set
in Manchester and the actress Fay Ripley has talked publicly about her "cod"
Manchester accent. It doesn't stop her making a good living doing TV ads
using the same voice.

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: Críostóir Ó Ciardha <paada_please at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.19 (10) [E]

Dan Ryan-Prohaska wheag writes:
"Originally the London dialect was Eastern Saxon, thus very southern in
character. Strong influence, probably through continuous migration into the
city, from other dialect regions caused many southern forms to be replaced
with midland, west country and northern forms."

Do you have any examples of the original Eastern Saxon dialect of London and
of the forms that replaced it? I was under the impression that London was
solidly Midland-speaking by 1400, so the Saxon, West Country and Northern
forms cannot have survived that long.

Gwra'massi!

Críostóir.

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From: john feather <johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Language varieties

Dan wrote:
"Interestingly enough the traditional dialect boundaries are still very
close
to the ones that were established in the Old English period."

On a related point one often reads that there is still a marked difference
between the language of the Danelaw (the area roughly north and east of a
line between London and Chester - say Liverpool if you don't know where
Chester is) and the rest of England. I tested this using the 90 entries
(words and pronunciations collected over the period 1948-61) in the OUP's
"Atlas of English Dialects" and found only a couple of things which were
close to this pattern, and they were French borrowings. The old Northumbrian
area tends to be rather different linguistically but everywhere else is
pretty mixed up. Maybe if I'd been looking at other linguistic boundaries
I'd have found a different result.

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: Daniel Prohaska <daniel at ryan-prohaska.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties"

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Bill Wigham  asked (under "Etymology"):

>>>    Qs:  Where does Pennsylvania deutsch stand regarding our list
>>>(above)

R. F. Hahn wrote:

>>Pennsylvania German (or "Pennsylvanish") is primarily based on Hessian
>>*German*, German not being included here, or only playing a peripheral
>>role whenever relevant to "Low" discussions.  The dialects that are called
>>"Central" German (_Mitteldeutsch_) are those in the transitional "buffer"
>>zone between Lowlands Saxon and German, various isoglosses running through
>>it.

Dear Reinhard, Bill,

In danger of moving a little off-topic I wanted to add that Pensylvania
German is a colonial language which show many central German features and
influence from both high and low German dialects. I would say, after having
looked into the language some years back, that it is firmly based on the
Palatinate dialects rather than Hessian. Of course old world Hessian and
Palatinate dialects are neighbours and form a continuum to a certain degree,
but PG does show features which mark its base as being Palatinate, both in
lexical terms, morphology and phonology. PG also has some Swabian and even
Swiss German, Westphalian, Alsace and Hesse features, and I assume that
dialect levelling happened early and in the first generation after
settlement in America.

Today PG is spoken almost exclusively among the sectarian Amish and Old
Order Mennonites. The more secular PG Germans, who were up to the early 20th
century still numerically the strongest and linguistically the most
conservative group, assimilated to English in the course of the 20th
century.

It is among the sectarians that the language is flourishing today. All
generations speak it and its development has been very progressive with loss
of case distinctions and a strong influx of lexical items from English.

Dan

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From: Dan Prohaska <daniel at ryan-prohaska.com>
Subject: Phonology

John Duckworth:

> You seem to be paying close attention to the interrelationships of the
> "Coronation Street" characters, Ron!

Hello John,
My family's from north Manchester and like many north Mancunians of Irish
origin. Thy emigrated sometime in the 1880s. My granddad grew up as a
Lancashire dialect speaker and I still rmember hearing sentences from him
such as "wur asta bin?" "where have you been?" And his using "tha"s and
"thi"s, as well as "thisen" (and not thisel). My mother remembers more
dialect, but she was raised in a day and age where dialect certainly and
mostly a regional accent was very frowned upon by the educated. She "did her
best" to loose her regional features, though she retains a northern flavour.
Having spent almost every summer holiday in Manchester and having lived
there for two years my Manchester accent is a lot stronger that hers. But
I'm not a dialect speaker as are very few of my age (31).

I can ask my mother about dialect forms. What she says is: "Hang on - Dad
would have said: ....." and then follows a wonderful sentence of Lanky.

She has these typical conflicting mixed feelings towards dialect speech (a
lot like the speaker of other minority languages and dialects) of both pride
in knowing it to certain degree and being far to ashamed to use it or even
pass it on to her children. The latter really bugs me ;-)

I'm quite familiar with the phonology of the traditional dialects of
Middleton, Oldham and Bolton, but I don't know many grammatical forms and
specific vocabulary. Have you got any ideas on dialect literature or
linguistic material concerning the Lancashire dialects? Maybe you could
point me to some. I'd also be very interested in a description of your own
dialect: specific vocabulary and idioms, grammatical forms such as the
paradigm of 'to be' and 'to have' and the other modal auxiliary verbs,
plural of nouns when they differ from standard English etc. I know this is a
lot to ask and there is no rush, but I'm sure the list would benefit from a
description of the dialect of Preston.

Thanks, and with best wishes,
Dan

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From: Dan Prohaska <daniel at ryan-prohaska.com>
Subject: Phonology

John Duckworth:

>>The way the character moves her mouth when she speaks actually reminds me
>>of older Lancashire women who worked all their lives in the cotton mills.
>>The cotton mills were very noisy places, but the women didn't want the
>>machinery
>>to stop them from chatting; consequently they all developed a habit of
>>talking very loudly, as well as an uncanny ability to lipread. In order to
>>facilitate lipreading, they would move their mouths more vigorously when
>>enunciating sounds. These habits remained with them for life, whether in
>>the
>>factories or out, and it used to be amusing sometimes when they would
>>shout
>>out three quarters of a sentence and then silenty mouth the ending -
>>especially if it concerned something normally kept from children or
>>strangers!

>>Bruce Jones, the actor who plays Les Battersby - Janice's husband - comes
>>from Manchester, so his accent is a bona fide Manchester accent.

Dear John, and others,

 My dad, who is a surprisingly apt instinct driven lay-phonetician came up
with a very interesting theory concerning the Manchester city dialect. Not
only do the women articulate more 'visibly', but they also developed a very
nasal, piercing twang. As a trained singer he realised as nasal placement of
voice projection can help to deliver the voice across loud noise such as an
orchestra or even the cotton mills, well in the latter case probably only
when standing next to one another. The really interesting thing he noticed
though were similar speech habits in the Wuppertal city area in
north-western Germany. It also had a large cotton industry and workers
worked on similarly noisy machines. He found the nasality of voice
projection and abundance of glottal stops in the speech of Wuppertal and
Manchester too striking as not to see a connection in overcoming the noise
of the cotton mills....any thoughts?

Best wishes,
Dan

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From: Bill Wigham <redbilly2 at earthlink.net>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2004.08.19 (05) [E]

Mike & Al:
      Thanks Mike for your thoughts on the New England dialects.  I must
interject that
rightly or wrongly us folks from west of Worcester to the NY line do not
think of our way of speaking as being anythere near as barbaric as that of
the greater Boston area.  In fact we are quite convinced that we speak a
polished form of standard english...a linguistic light on a hill, if you
will.  Somehow  the speeches by rich politicians from the eastern end of the
state sound like overdone comedy routines.

      You probably know more than I do about the Algonquian influence on our
New England language.  What started out as a friendly co-existance, ended
with a cruel war in 1675.  Not much cultural interaction after that.

      Cheers,
      Bill Wigham
      von Westfelde, MA

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From: Bill Wigham <redbilly2 at earthlink.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.08.19 (06) [E]

Dan & Al:
      Thanks for a very interesting view of the varieties of language that
many of us focused on.  I have read that the coastal tribes that moved to
Britain were under considerable pressure from Germanic tribes allied with
King Etsel.  Your reasoning for the ancestors of a modern England sounds
equally possible, however.
Cheers,
Bill Wigham

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