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Heaven: 2021 Proof Americans and Brits speak a different language

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  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    mousethief wrote: »
    I read long ago (source long lost) that the "en" on words like woolen, wooden, flaxen, golden, etc., was a genitive ending, which long ago stopped being productive, so the words passed into adjectives and so remain.

    Nothing's impossible, but only one relatively small class of OE nouns have -n in the Genitive; by far the largest class had -es (giving modern English 's).

    From what I can gather, -en is a Germanic suffix implying "made from" rather than an inflexion.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    An interesting edge case is "olden" - as in "olden days". It is the same suffix (I checked, there is another -en used to form verbs but this is the "made from" -en) but it's not literally a material.
  • cgichardcgichard Shipmate
    Swollen? Molten?
  • given, riven, driven
  • Past participles of verbs mostly. Or older forms thereof.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited July 2021
    Past participles of verbs mostly. Or older forms thereof.

    Yup. All of them actually.
  • Drunken, ashen, golden, are they participles?
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Drunken, ashen, golden, are they participles?

    Drunken is. Ashen - made of ash (if figuratively), golden - made of gold.

    When I said "they all are" I meant all the examples given in the two posts previous to @Jonah the Whale 's
  • DafydDafyd Hell Host
    edited July 2021
    Firenze wrote: »
    If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gavest nane
    The whinnies shall prick thee to the bare bane.
    Never set out to be poetry, but works for me (particularly in the setting by Britten).
    Included in many respectable anthologies of poetry in English. (Oxford Book of English Verse for one.)
  • AmosAmos Shipmate
    edited July 2021
    My husband used 'boughten' as a child in Worcestershire. His cousins used to tease him about the time he announced 'Mommy, I don't like Aunt Gertie's cake. It's boughten.' (Note: in Birmingham and the northern part of Worcestershire, it's always 'Mommy,' not 'Mummy'). He wasn't alone: the old folks in his village would say that they'd never have 'boughten bacon' in the house.
  • AmosAmos Shipmate
    edited July 2021
    Apologies for double post: 'Children' is a double plural, since 'childer' is plural of 'child'. I've known people (elderly, and in the north of England) who said 'childer.' 'Sistren' was common in the middle ages, died out, and was revived.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Why don't we have one of these words for collectively referring to nephews and nieces?
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    I don't think there's any traditional word for collective nephews and nieces but I know a lot of people are starting to use the word "niblings" for that purpose. No idea where it came from, though it's obviously related to "siblings." I've heard folks use it both for the singular child of a sibling who is non-binary and thus doesn't fit easily into the "niece" or "nephew" category ("I gave my nibling Dale a Lego set for their birthday") and as a plural for a mixed group of nephews and nieces ("I love when my brother brings the niblings over for the afternoon but I'm always exhausted by the time they leave"). It seems like a useful neologism as it fills a gap we haven't had a word for.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Good idea.
  • EnochEnoch Shipmate
    Amos wrote: »
    Apologies for double post: 'Children' is a double plural, since 'childer' is plural of 'child'. I've known people (elderly, and in the north of England) who said 'childer.' 'Sistren' was common in the middle ages, died out, and was revived.
    I'm not sure that's correct. I think 'children' and 'childer' are both irregular plurals but one has become standard English and the other is only found in dialects.

  • 'Niblings' are small characters in Tove Jansson's Moomin books. They are not always well behaved, so the word might fit quite well.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Enoch wrote: »
    Amos wrote: »
    Apologies for double post: 'Children' is a double plural, since 'childer' is plural of 'child'. I've known people (elderly, and in the north of England) who said 'childer.' 'Sistren' was common in the middle ages, died out, and was revived.
    I'm not sure that's correct. I think 'children' and 'childer' are both irregular plurals but one has become standard English and the other is only found in dialects.

    And, if memory serves me, in Cranmer's BCP - 'our children's childer'. And cognate with 'kinder' as in kindergarten.
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    'Niblings' are small characters in Tove Jansson's Moomin books. They are not always well behaved, so the word might fit quite well.

    Oh, that's probably the genesis of the term, then!
  • LydaLyda Shipmate
    Trudy wrote: »
    'Niblings' are small characters in Tove Jansson's Moomin books. They are not always well behaved, so the word might fit quite well.

    Oh, that's probably the genesis of the term, then!

    When I googled it, Merriam Webster said the word appeared sometime in the fifties and has become more popular recently. However that dictionary hasn't added it to their lexicon but is "watching it". Their essay on nibling says it's popularly ascribed to Yale professor Samuel Martin, but they didn't have a primary source on it.
  • orfeoorfeo Suspended
    Gramps49 wrote: »

    Ahem. You spelled that last word incorrectly...

    I don't think the headline of the article is correct in saying to rule out the mix of languages. It's both - it's both the mix of languages AND what the article says about timing and technology. And indeed some parts of the article itself seem to point to that, such as discussing what might have happened if English had stayed more purely Germanic.

  • From here: http://forums.shipoffools.com/discussion/comment/441833/#Comment_441833

    Quoting myself:

    Re the use of the word "yoof" to replace "youth".

    Is the use of it to describe a church when you were young is it meant to denigrate and ridicule that church, your youth within it or is this a UKism meaning something else? Like making fun of a lisping minister? I do derive a denigration but I could be wrong. Never heard nor seen this before. The internet doesn't answer the question either way adequately.
  • see the other thread you posted on.
  • LolaLola Shipmate Posts: 49
    I don’t think it’s meant to be denigrating. I think it’s suggesting young people might use more slang? Here is a Wikipedia article about f for th and it includes a pic of a famous film star proudly wearing a “Norf London” t shirt.

    (Sarf London also available!)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting

  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    edited August 2021
    It's a very old thing.Th-fronting. There's a village in Kent recorded before the Normans as Thengelsham, ie the ham belonging to a thengel or noble personage. It is now known as Finglesham, and has been since Domesday, when the nobleman was gone, and the Norman scribes wrote phonetically, unaware of meaning.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Penny S wrote: »
    It's a very old thing.Th-fronting. There's a village in Kent recorded before the Normans as Thengelsham, ie the ham belonging to a thengel or noble personage. It is now known as Finglesham, and has been since Domesday, when the nobleman was gone, and the Norman scribes wrote phonetically, unaware of meaning.

    Don't forget that French then, as now, had a F and didn't have a Th.
  • Isn't is just something that people just affect for fun and to emphasise roots or allegiance? For example, plenty of Aberdonians will slip bits of the Doric into their speech, ("Fit like, loon?") just because they can and they enjoy doing it. My oldest friend, who usually speaks painfully correct English, will often talk about living in Sarf Lunnon, because it has become part of his life.

    I liked Penny S's post above and will try to remember to use it as a test when I see more "F" names.
  • finelinefineline Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    North American friends have told me they associate th-fronting purely with little children who haven't yet developed the ability to say 'th,' so they find it strange when adults do it, so then I explain it is the way a lot of adults speak in the UK. I had a linguistics teacher who said that some linguists predict that the 'th' sound is dying out, as more and more young people use 'f' and 'v' instead, and in a few decades it will no longer be used. I imagine if this happens, it would only be in the UK, not in North America.

    And yes, when people talk about being a yoof worker, it's a fun thing, as Stercus Tauri is saying, and partly maybe because young people are more likely to say 'f' than 'th' than older people. Brits do that with quite a few words. So do Americans with different words, I notice - I have an American friend who writes about going on a bidness trip, and to me it sounds like she's doing baby talk, but when I asked her about it, there were various playful associations with the word when written like that.
  • finelinefineline Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Also, see a dictionary definition here. It's not specific to churches.
  • It's really not new. There's an old English tongue twister, that one of my teachers asked us to demonstrate when she was talking about th-fronting - I suspect because the mispronunciations were resulting in spelling errors:

    Forty thousand feathers on a thrushes breast.

    Half my class at that time, so 50 odd years ago, couldn't correctly differentiate between th and f sounds, including me at the time as I had no front teeth. That was in the Midlands, so not the south-east.
  • Gill HGill H Shipmate
    When I was about 6, we spent ages teaching my friend to say 'thumb' instead of 'fum' - and then that Christmas in school, we learned the carol which goes

    In a cold and dark December
    Fum, fum, fum


    And of course guess who ever-so-carefully sang 'Thumb, thumb, thumb'?

    I think the 'yoof' thing comes from middle-aged middle-class white guys trying to sound like black London rappers - 'I'm down wid da yoof, innit?' which is every bit as cringeworthy as it sounds.
  • @Gill H I disagree with your last paragraph because I heard that amongst white guys in London well before rap was a thing there, or anywhere else. That f to th, I think, was a thing in the east end when my grandparents were alive.
  • It's much more likely that a th sound would become a d to my Canadian ears. "Go to the badroom and have a badth after you change your clodes. What's duh madder width you dat you got so dirty you hoser" where I've put "dth" the sound is between a d and a th.

    We've also got t become d. Badderies to power something.
  • It's much more likely that a th sound would become a d to my Canadian ears. "Go to the badroom and have a badth after you change your clodes. What's duh madder width you dat you got so dirty you hoser" where I've put "dth" the sound is between a d and a th.

    We've also got t become d. Badderies to power something.
    To my Southern American ears, th becoming d sounds very New York/New Jersey/Northeastern, while th becoming f sounds very childlike, especially in words like wiff or baff (with or bath). That makes sense, it seems to me, since both are voiceless fricatives and so sound similar, but f doesn’t require the tongue manipulation that th does. Meanwhile, I often hear clothes become cloves in the mouths of children—again, the th in clothes and v are both voiced fricatives.

  • Gill HGill H Shipmate
    @Gill H I disagree with your last paragraph because I heard that amongst white guys in London well before rap was a thing there, or anywhere else. That f to th, I think, was a thing in the east end when my grandparents were alive.

    Oh, sure - I meant the phenomenon of people who don’t actually speak like that affecting the accent.

    Fings ain’t wot they used ter be…
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Nick Tamen wrote: »
    It's much more likely that a th sound would become a d to my Canadian ears. "Go to the badroom and have a badth after you change your clodes. What's duh madder width you dat you got so dirty you hoser" where I've put "dth" the sound is between a d and a th.

    We've also got t become d. Badderies to power something.
    To my Southern American ears, th becoming d sounds very New York/New Jersey/Northeastern, while th becoming f sounds very childlike, especially in words like wiff or baff (with or bath). That makes sense, it seems to me, since both are voiceless fricatives and so sound similar, but f doesn’t require the tongue manipulation that th does. Meanwhile, I often hear clothes become cloves in the mouths of children—again, the th in clothes and v are both voiced fricatives.

    I was going to say - the th sounds of thin and this are two different sounds. Even spelt differently in more logically written languages - Cornish th/dh, Welsh th/dd.

    I can imagine the voiced sound going to d (it does in Ebonics and some traditional Yorkshire accents*) but the unvoiced feels like a stretch - I'd expect t, although that could subsequently undergo voicing I suppose.

    *Sheffielders were traditionally called dee-dahs because of how they pronounced thee and thou.
  • betjemaniacbetjemaniac Shipmate
    edited August 2021
    Speaking of past participles, but this is slightly beyond the scope of this thread as it relates to antipodeans - I have heard some (not all) Kiwis and Aussies pronounce words like "known" and "grown" with an extra syllable. Has anybody else heard "knowen" and "growen"? Is it from particular regions?

    a real marker for the Black Country in England - knowen and growen etc. Mining and heavy industry land (and also a good amount of archaic English - how be'est thou is still an everyday greeting, though it comes out as Ow Bis? or Ow Bis Tha?)
  • Speaking of past participles, but this is slightly beyond the scope of this thread as it relates to antipodeans - I have heard some (not all) Kiwis and Aussies pronounce words like "known" and "grown" with an extra syllable. Has anybody else heard "knowen" and "growen"? Is it from particular regions?

    Have never heard “ knowen” or “growen” in Oz in the last 60 years but “ fillum” ( as in I watched one) was not uncommonly heard in my late primary years. I had spent the years from 4 to 9 in the USA then Singapore so was familiar with “movies” and “cinema”;so “ fillum” sounded quaint to me. The more commonly used “the flicks” as in going to same was a less genteel version.
  • Going back to 'yoof', this word if commonly used to refer to media and arts people trying t get down an dirty with the 'kids', a way of referring to children which I intensely dislike unless used between members of a family.
  • Re knowen and growen, some American accents to my ears don't quite say words like this with 2 syllables but they do something interesting which extends the word. The word "dog" and the name "Anne" are others. The latter is "an" to me but said Ah-un, with the "un" quite diminished. Dog as daw-og versus daug. But again the second syllable diminished versus a very short word.

    I've heard Australian "no" be extended also but not quite as much. No-ow. (We watched a few seasons of Offspring on Netflix; another topic, but they should have ended it 2 or 3 seasons earlier).
  • Meme for today.

    In America, you can drive for four hours and still be in the same country.
    In Great Britain, you can drive for two hours and have gone through two accent zones and one bread change.
  • Gramps49 wrote: »
    In America, you can drive for four hours and still be in the same country.
    There are plenty of places where you can drive for four hours and still be in the same state! (OK, there aren't quite so many places where you're not within four hours of the closest state border, but there are plenty of places where a four hour drive in a consistent direction fits within a single state.)
    Gramps49 wrote: »
    In Great Britain, you can drive for two hours and have gone through two accent zones and one bread change.

    That sounds about right. The other difference is that the two hour drive in the UK will mostly be spent stuck in traffic ;)
  • In my medium sized province in Canada, can drive easily drive 8 to 10 hours within. Sask is just a little smaller than Texas and not quite twice the size of California. American states are on average not huge. Someone may answer for Australia.
  • jedijudyjedijudy Heaven Host
    Driving from Key West to the Florida line will take about ten hours, depending on which part of the line you are driving to. Going to Pensacola will take more than twelve hours!
  • Huge is probably a matter of perspective. I tend to think of "far" as anything that requires more than a single day's driving. So around a thousand miles, then?
  • MarthaMartha Shipmate
    Whereas in the UK, far is anything over about an hour's drive, possibly 2 hours. Unless you frequently travel to or around Scotland, which I think alters your perspective again.

    I was talking to a friend who also used to live in the USA about just this topic - that there, we would happily drive an hour to go to the mall or for a meal, but here it feels like a long way.
  • Also very rural West Country, half an hour wouldn't get anyone far, an hour was what I drove to most things.

    And in this area, one of the standard big hospitals we're all referred to is well over an hour away by car, more like 2, 3 by public transport.

    Also commuter belt of London: going into London journeys by public transport start at an hour, can easily take two hours or more to get somewhere. I start turning party invitations down when it's a three hour journey as getting home is impossible. (That may only be 30-40 miles).
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    Nick Tamen wrote: »
    It's much more likely that a th sound would become a d to my Canadian ears. "Go to the badroom and have a badth after you change your clodes. What's duh madder width you dat you got so dirty you hoser" where I've put "dth" the sound is between a d and a th.

    We've also got t become d. Badderies to power something.
    To my Southern American ears, th becoming d sounds very New York/New Jersey/Northeastern, while th becoming f sounds very childlike, especially in words like wiff or baff (with or bath). That makes sense, it seems to me, since both are voiceless fricatives and so sound similar, but f doesn’t require the tongue manipulation that th does. Meanwhile, I often hear clothes become cloves in the mouths of children—again, the th in clothes and v are both voiced fricatives.
    I can imagine the voiced sound going to d (it does in Ebonics and some traditional Yorkshire accents*) but the unvoiced feels like a stretch - I'd expect t, although that could subsequently undergo voicing I suppose.
    That may depend on exactly what is meant by “Ebonics.” (FWIW, that term seems to be rarely used in the US anymore, except by those who want to denigrate the various dialects of African American English.) In my experience, that movement from a voiced th to a d happens in some dialects and accents of African American English, and it did become a feature of minstrel show songs and other stereotypes, but it’s not at all universal and sometimes overlaps with similar regional pronunciation.

    Gramps49 wrote: »
    In America, you can drive for four hours and still be in the same country.
    In Great Britain, you can drive for two hours and have gone through two accent zones and one bread change.
    Not sure what point that’s supposed to make, but it’s comparing apples and oranges. If you drive two hours (or four hours) in Britain, you’re still in the same country, just like with the US.

    Meanwhile, I have just driven four hours. I’m in the same US state as when I started, but I’ve covered at least two or three accent/dialect zones—quite likely more given the overlays of white dialects/accents and African American English dialects/accents—and two barbecue zones.

  • finelinefineline Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    From what I observe in linguistics groups on FB, the term for what used to be called Ebonics is now AAVE - African-American Vernacular English.
  • Yes, though I’m not sure AAVE was ever formally referred to as “Ebonics” by linguists in the US. This Wikipedia article gives an overview of the history and dynamics surrounding the use of the term, including the negative connotations it can carry and the reservations many have about it.

    But I was also allowing for the possibility that it might have different usage outside the US.

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