Full English

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bmforre
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Re: Full English

Post by bmforre » Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:28 pm

Thanks all for these very interesting informations on Tim and related and opposed names and matters.

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Re: Full English

Post by raven » Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:40 pm

Finally read the whole thread. Very interesting.

I could add to the whole Catholic/Protestant thing that many years ago I was totally gobsmacked to hear that the lovely wee lass from the highlands who we shared a flat with in Edinburgh couldn't introduce her boyfriend to her grandnother because he was Catholic and she wasn't.

On there not being English-Americans, is that because that's what WASPs are? I've never been sure.

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Re: Full English

Post by bolo » Thu Apr 01, 2021 5:34 pm

raven wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:40 pm
On there not being English-Americans, is that because that's what WASPs are? I've never been sure.
I suspect hyphenated terms like Italian-American and Mexican-American became popular as ways to reclaim pride in identities that others looked down on. Americans of English descent were never in that situation. There may have been anti-Britain sentiment in the early United States, but I don't think it was really anti-British, and I doubt that the hyphenated terms are that old anyway. Certainly these days you are much more likely to encounter anglophilia than anything anti-English, except in certain pockets, e.g. among some Irish-Americans. As to WASPs, yes, I suppose that strictly speaking they are more or less English-Americans, but the term WASP is pejorative rather than pride-reclaiming so it has a different feel to it.

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Re: Full English

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Apr 01, 2021 6:21 pm

bolo wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 5:34 pm
raven wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:40 pm
On there not being English-Americans, is that because that's what WASPs are? I've never been sure.
I suspect hyphenated terms like Italian-American and Mexican-American became popular as ways to reclaim pride in identities that others looked down on. Americans of English descent were never in that situation. There may have been anti-Britain sentiment in the early United States, but I don't think it was really anti-British, and I doubt that the hyphenated terms are that old anyway.
Definitely. There may have been some anti-British sentiment in the years after the war of independence. But by the 19th Century elite Americans gravitated toward Britain. Their universities and fee-paying schools were modelled on British examples and educated Americans spoke with what was termed a mid-Atlantic accent which was a blend of British and American forms of speech. A vestige of it was still spoken in the mid-20th Century by people like William F Buckley. Here's a clip of him being interviewed with Christopher Hitchens and you can hear how some of Buckley's intonations resemble Hitchens'.

You can hear some other examples from old movies here.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries you could tell someone was a member of the educated East Coast upper classes because they spoke a bit like their English counterpart.

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Re: Full English

Post by Allo V Psycho » Fri Apr 02, 2021 8:50 am

Lew Dolby wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:45 pm
Allo V Psycho wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:04 pm

"Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm no sae f.cking silly,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim"
Personally, I've always found that thing of writing how someone else speaks english full of mis-spelling so that someone saying it in your accent would sound vaguely like the original's accent to be fairly insulting.

In the above, maybe the origin dialect would use no for not, but ah'm and sae for I'm and so ! I'd take convincing that the original speaker / singer thought they weren't saying I'm and so.
Not quite understanding here. Should Burns not have written
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
and, since he was perfectly familiar with standard written English, why did he choose to use it sometimes and not others?

With regard to 'ah'm', of course the original speakers (Me! This is my original accent!) knew they were using the first person of the verb to be, but they weren't thinking RP 'I'm' - 'but falsely spelling it 'Ah'm'. 'Ah'm' is an attempt to represent how it sounds phonetically (in an informal way - I don't understand the phonetic symbols you get in dictionaries).

Of course it is difficult to represent all the sounds accurately, or even consistently, since the dominance of standard written English mean that many of the words are rarely written down. In the case of the song, I sang it over to myself, and then attempted to write down what the sounds in my head might be transcribed as. Sometimes the impact changes with the sound: for instance, the phrase "Going to not do that?" does not quite capture the force of what I can only transcribe as "Goanny no dae that?" I don't think I was trying to insult anyone, far less myself or fellow Glaswegians. (And as an aside, I've always been delighted that 'glottal stop' for me actually contains a glo'al stop).

The song verse above is relatively straightforward. It is even more difficult where there is no direct equivalent at all. Some words are not present in standard English - "Keich" for shite, 'smirrin' for very light rain on the edge of mist, or mist on the edge of rain. I don't think I've ever seen them written down so I don't know the 'standard English' version. Another example might be the third person, which in standard English is ambiguous as to number. A Glaswegian hearing what I shall write down as 'Youse' knows that it is addressed to the plural number without needing context (an improvement, and grammatically quite logical).

And those who write poetry in a local dialect, would, I think assert (as Burns presumably did) that that they intend a different set of sounds to the standard written English version and that is of significance to the verse.

tl;dr: Goanny gie's a brek, here, pal?

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Re: Full English

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Apr 02, 2021 9:13 am

Allo V Psycho wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 8:50 am
Lew Dolby wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:45 pm
Allo V Psycho wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:04 pm

"Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm no sae f.cking silly,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim"
Personally, I've always found that thing of writing how someone else speaks english full of mis-spelling so that someone saying it in your accent would sound vaguely like the original's accent to be fairly insulting.

In the above, maybe the origin dialect would use no for not, but ah'm and sae for I'm and so ! I'd take convincing that the original speaker / singer thought they weren't saying I'm and so.
Not quite understanding here. Should Burns not have written
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
and, since he was perfectly familiar with standard written English, why did he choose to use it sometimes and not others?

With regard to 'ah'm', of course the original speakers (Me! This is my original accent!) knew they were using the first person of the verb to be, but they weren't thinking RP 'I'm' - 'but falsely spelling it 'Ah'm'. 'Ah'm' is an attempt to represent how it sounds phonetically (in an informal way - I don't understand the phonetic symbols you get in dictionaries).

Of course it is difficult to represent all the sounds accurately, or even consistently, since the dominance of standard written English mean that many of the words are rarely written down. In the case of the song, I sang it over to myself, and then attempted to write down what the sounds in my head might be transcribed as. Sometimes the impact changes with the sound: for instance, the phrase "Going to not do that?" does not quite capture the force of what I can only transcribe as "Goanny no dae that?" I don't think I was trying to insult anyone, far less myself or fellow Glaswegians. (And as an aside, I've always been delighted that 'glottal stop' for me actually contains a glo'al stop).

The song verse above is relatively straightforward. It is even more difficult where there is no direct equivalent at all. Some words are not present in standard English - "Keich" for shite, 'smirrin' for very light rain on the edge of mist, or mist on the edge of rain. I don't think I've ever seen them written down so I don't know the 'standard English' version. Another example might be the third person, which in standard English is ambiguous as to number. A Glaswegian hearing what I shall write down as 'Youse' knows that it is addressed to the plural number without needing context (an improvement, and grammatically quite logical).

And those who write poetry in a local dialect, would, I think assert (as Burns presumably did) that that they intend a different set of sounds to the standard written English version and that is of significance to the verse.

tl;dr: Goanny gie's a brek, here, pal?
Yes, or alternatively. In poetry or a song things like rhythm, rhyme, alliteration etc are vital. They are different in standard English. Someone could write "I'm not a Billy, I'm a Tim" but the rhythm is different so its a different song.

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Re: Full English

Post by Lew Dolby » Fri Apr 02, 2021 9:30 am

bl..dy Hell, are you guys really arguing with my post above where all I said was I find it insulting ?? Are you really trying to tell me I don't find it so ?? :)
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Re: Full English

Post by sTeamTraen » Fri Apr 02, 2021 12:08 pm

I've been paying a bit more attention to the English/British/UK/England distinction on the social media wot I frequent over the last few days, and it seems that there are a lot of English people who use "English/England" to mean British, with no overtones [that they are aware of] of racism or cultural hegemony.

Samples:
"I have an English car, can I still import it to Spain after Brexit?"
"If they make people wear masks on the beach, hardly any English tourists will come"
"People from Northern Ireland are English, though, right? It's Southern Ireland* that's another country. I think they're still in the EU".

To correct these people with "Er, actually, I think you mean British" would be to invite the comment with "Oh f.ck off, everyone knows what s/he meant".

So while there is sometimes a racist aspect to it, and were I interested in running a racist political movement I might try to play on this, I think that a lot of the time this elision is just [perhaps understandable] laziness in speech (or, on social media, dashed-off writing). England is about 85% of the UK by population and a very large number of English people have never set foot in any of the other constituent nations of the UK.


*Yes, I know, but this is the actual term used by probably the *majority* of Brits. We have to deal with the world as it is.
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Re: Full English

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Fri Apr 02, 2021 1:26 pm

sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 12:08 pm
England is about 85% of the UK by population and a very large number of English people have never set foot in any of the other constituent nations of the UK.
Do you have any stats for this? I assume by "very large number", you mean a decent proportion, since even a fairly small fraction of the English population is by its nature a very large number, not least the 400,000 or so babies born in England in 2020.

The tourism survey 2019 says on page 60 that around 5.9m trips were taken by English people to Scotland in that year, and 8.5m trips were taken to Wales. Now, obviously, trips doesn't equal people, and this is one year only, but I'd be quite surprised if the number of English people who'd not visited Scotland or Wales at least were more than, say, a quarter of the population.
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Re: Full English

Post by sTeamTraen » Fri Apr 02, 2021 1:40 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 1:26 pm
Do you have any stats for this? I assume by "very large number", you mean a decent proportion, since even a fairly small fraction of the English population is by its nature a very large number, not least the 400,000 or so babies born in England in 2020.
I don't have stats; it's just based on talking to people. As such my claim should probably be treated with a great deal of caution. But I would not be surprised if half of the people who were born and bred south of the Severn-Wash line had never visited Scotland, for example. I know several well-educated, well-travelled people who have never been to Scotland (starting with Mrs sTeamTraen; I've only been twice, both times for work), and I would guess that the number of English people who have ever been to Northern Ireland unless they have family there is not much more than the population of Northern Ireland.

Those numbers for one year's visits are impressive, but for the lifetime total a lot will depend on duplicates. I presume that a certain percentage of people who go on holiday to Scotland in each year are regulars (cf. large numbers of people from Birmingham and environs going to Llandudno every year).

Clearly we need research on this. :)
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Re: Full English

Post by Allo V Psycho » Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:31 pm

Lew Dolby wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 9:30 am
bl..dy Hell, are you guys really arguing with my post above where all I said was I find it insulting ?? Are you really trying to tell me I don't find it so ?? :)
No, not at all. I said I wasn't trying to insult anyone, which is true. The post might, I suppose, be taken as me saying 'I don't think it is actually insulting', but that is just me expressing my opinion. I didn't suggest that you don't find it insulting - I have no reasons to doubt that you do indeed find it so, since that is what you wrote.
Are we slightly at cross purposes here?

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Re: Full English

Post by Lew Dolby » Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:33 pm

Come to that, we live in the British Isles. How many of these islands have most people been to ?? Just interested - I'm into the low 50s.

[Since I buggered my back and counting mountains is now out, I've been doing islands instead]
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Re: Full English

Post by Allo V Psycho » Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:44 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 6:21 pm
bolo wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 5:34 pm
raven wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:40 pm
On there not being English-Americans, is that because that's what WASPs are? I've never been sure.
I suspect hyphenated terms like Italian-American and Mexican-American became popular as ways to reclaim pride in identities that others looked down on. Americans of English descent were never in that situation. There may have been anti-Britain sentiment in the early United States, but I don't think it was really anti-British, and I doubt that the hyphenated terms are that old anyway.
Definitely. There may have been some anti-British sentiment in the years after the war of independence. But by the 19th Century elite Americans gravitated toward Britain. Their universities and fee-paying schools were modelled on British examples and educated Americans spoke with what was termed a mid-Atlantic accent which was a blend of British and American forms of speech. A vestige of it was still spoken in the mid-20th Century by people like William F Buckley. Here's a clip of him being interviewed with Christopher Hitchens and you can hear how some of Buckley's intonations resemble Hitchens'.

You can hear some other examples from old movies here.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries you could tell someone was a member of the educated East Coast upper classes because they spoke a bit like their English counterpart.
Thanks Woodchopper, that's interesting. I would add though that there was considerable anti-British feeling in certain communities, particularly the Irish but also, in proximity to wars particularly, the German community. The Wiki says of Admiral King, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet during WW2,
King, who was an Anglophobe, displayed stunning and uncharacteristic incompetence and disregard for the lives of American sailors by ignoring valuable British advice regarding convoys and up-to-date British intelligence on U-boat operations in the Atlantic
and if I recall correctly, he was of Scottish origin, and 'Anglophobe' is used in the strict sense. American Irish support for Republican movements in Ireland has been extensive (and lethal) until quite recent times, and I doubt if it has altogether gone away. Joe Biden, reportedly, may act economically in support of of the GFA, and his Irish roots may be a factor. Sadly, I fear time will tell, if a new wave of Troubles breaks out.

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Re: Full English

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:51 pm

Yes, there certainly was anti-British sentiment among Irish immigrants. And until the end of the 20th Century their descendants donated money for the struggle back in Ireland.

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Re: Full English

Post by bolo » Fri Apr 02, 2021 5:43 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:51 pm
And until the end of the 20th Century their descendants donated money for the struggle back in Ireland.
As a student in the Boston area in the 1980s, I was solicited for such donations on the street at least twice.

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Re: Full English

Post by Martin Y » Fri Apr 02, 2021 6:18 pm

Lew Dolby wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:33 pm
Come to that, we live in the British Isles. How many of these islands have most people been to ?? Just interested - I'm into the low 50s.
Oh, that's a good one. Never really thought about it. Wow, 50 is pretty good going.

I can barely scrape a dozen: GB & Ireland mainlands plus Jersey, Isle of Wight, Anglesey, Cumbrae, Bute, Mull, Skye, Seil and Lindisfarne. Plus I *think* I've been to Arran as a kid but I struggle to remember for sure.

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Re: Full English

Post by Lew Dolby » Fri Apr 02, 2021 7:59 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:51 pm
Yes, there certainly was anti-British sentiment among Irish immigrants. And until the end of the 20th Century their descendants donated money for the struggle back in Ireland.
Interestingly, even Irish-Americans descended from prodestant Ulterpeople would migrated would financially give to support the IRA/SF
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Re: Full English

Post by FairySmall » Fri Apr 02, 2021 8:40 pm

I've just read this thread straight through so my thoughts are probably long behind the direction of conversation. But what the hell...

Thinking of verse in dialects makes me think of this brilliant poem: https://mobile.twitter.com/lenniesaurus ... 21?lang=en. Personally I find it easier to instantly get when hearing as opposed to reading (I end up reading it aloud which I wouldn't do for most things) but I'd say the same about Chaucer too, and frankly some bits of Shakespeare (other authors also included).

As for Britishness/Englishness, aside from the culinary aspects*, the thing that gives me a sense of belonging is our myths and legends. King Arthur, faeries, selkies, magic etc. The things that inspired everything from La Belle Dame Sans Merci to Harry Potter to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to The Dark is Rising. And Tolkien. I have always loved stories that riff off these. I'm guessing this probably doesn't feature in the official definition and it's ironic that the thing that most seems British to me is complete fiction. Oh well...

* Tea. Cream teas. Bacon butties. Fish and chips. Cider. And more tea. Yes I don't care how many of them are authentic.

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Re: Full English

Post by Grumble » Fri Apr 02, 2021 9:52 pm

Lew Dolby wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:45 pm
Allo V Psycho wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:04 pm

"Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm no sae f.cking silly,
Ah'm no a Billy, ah'm a Tim"
Personally, I've always found that thing of writing how someone else speaks english full of mis-spelling so that someone saying it in your accent would sound vaguely like the original's accent to be fairly insulting.

In the above, maybe the origin dialect would use no for not, but ah'm and sae for I'm and so ! I'd take convincing that the original speaker / singer thought they weren't saying I'm and so.

[sorry, personal hobby-horse ever since our local paper where I grew up (Lancashire] used to publish "dialect tales" that were mainly not dialect but just badly spelled english. grrr]
Goes back to at least Chaucer writing in “dialect” - of course in Chaucer’s day the dialects really were almost separate languages. The different characters in the Canterbury Tales speak in quite different ways, when their speech is the text.
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Re: Full English

Post by dyqik » Fri Apr 02, 2021 11:44 pm

bolo wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 5:43 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 3:51 pm
And until the end of the 20th Century their descendants donated money for the struggle back in Ireland.
As a student in the Boston area in the 1980s, I was solicited for such donations on the street at least twice.
My friend (and former colleague) was handed an .45 automatic in a jiffy bag in a bar in Southie and told to go back and give the British hell.

There are still murals with balaclava'd provisionals carrying AK-47s on houses there.

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Re: Full English

Post by raven » Sat Apr 03, 2021 9:10 pm

FairySmall wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 8:40 pm
Thinking of verse in dialects makes me think of this brilliant poem: https://mobile.twitter.com/lenniesaurus ... 21?lang=en.
Thank you for that. *Dinnae fash yoursel' and greetin' for crying bring back fond memories of living in Edinburgh. I love Tom Leonard's 'Six O'clock News' for similar reasons, which I discovered when the kids studied it for GCSE.

(*Sorry if my spelling doesn't make sense;I suck at phonics, or phonetics, or whichever one it is for translating sounds in your head to letters on the page....)

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Re: Full English

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Apr 04, 2021 1:19 am

There seems to be a pretty consistent set of "mis-spellings" for Scottish English and Scots anyway. So ISTM more like an alternative/regional orthography than trying to recreate individuals' accents?
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Re: Full English

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Apr 04, 2021 7:12 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Apr 04, 2021 1:19 am
There seems to be a pretty consistent set of "mis-spellings" for Scottish English and Scots anyway. So ISTM more like an alternative/regional orthography than trying to recreate individuals' accents?
Scots-English dictionaries have existed for hundreds of years. For example:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Th ... YLvu3PHvIC

https://books.google.com/books/about/A_ ... hB74CuCtUC

https://books.google.com/books/about/Ja ... s3AQAAIAAJ

There isn’t an objective test for the difference between a language or a dialect. But it is clear that it’s a distinctive way of speaking that has existed for over a thousand years.

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