LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.09.18 (10) [E]

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L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
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From: Críostóir Ó Ciardha <paada_please at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.09.19 (03) [E]


John Feather wrote:
"According to the paper I got my previous info from it is fairly common for
Danes, Norwegians and Swedes to adapt the way they speak their own language
to help comprehension. They speak more slowly, use words from the other
person's language, avoid colloquialisms and sometimes modify their
pronunciation."

I wonder if there are any Danes, Norwegian and Swedes who have learnt the
other two languages and can pass for Danish, Norwegian, Swedish. Swedes seem
very able to pass themselves off as English, Scots or Irish if they choose,
perhaps due to the extraordinarily wide range of vowels in Swedish - most
Swedes I have met have the accent of whatever part of Britain or Ireland
they happen to be living in.

Of course there is a large difference between the Ulrika Jonssons and
Sven-Goran Erikssons, so perhaps it's just a subset of well-established
Swedes who succeed in sounding English, Scottish or Irish. (There was a
Scottish-based Norwegian woman interviewed on television today and she
sounded to me to have an English accent.)

John also wrote:
"I thought Criostoir might like to get his teeth into (or grind them about)
the Abominable Bryson's statement that Cornish "survives only in two or
three dialect words, most notably _emmets_ ('ants'), the word locals use to
describe the tourists who come crawling over their gorgeous landscape each
summer." Even allowing that (as in the case of Pennsylvania Dutch) he is
confusing the language with the English dialect influenced by it, 'emmet' is
a good old OE word."

Usually I would not favour Bryson's opinion-as-fact generalisations with
comment (he strikes me as someone who skim reads an encyclopedia entry and
then tries to pass himself as an expert on whatever matter), but he is right
to refer to English tourists as _emmets_. But that is, as you say, a dialect
word. In Cornish there is a word _evet_ but that refers, I think, to newts
or more generally any sort of slimy four-legged creepy crawlie. Perhaps it
was borrowed from Old English _emet_ (with the standard Cornish sound shift
from [m] > [v]) and shifted semantically.

It is my experience that survival of Cornish lexicon in the Cornish variant
of English is regional and generational, with the older folk of West Penwith
maintaining most of them (forgive me: examples have slipped my mind). As
Cornwall has received so many uninvited settlers from England in the last
sixty years it is not surprising that indigenous forms have been severely
diluted - I am surprised that the Cornish accent itself has survived
considering the dominance of (mainly south eastern) English in many
localities.

Whilst not of the magnitude of the Loyalist reconfiguration of nascent
Canadian English, it is probably only because so many of the English
settlers in Cornwall are childless retirees that Cornish English has been
maintained. Probably a pessimistic assessment.

Criostóir.

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