The Bluestocking women's Pub- spring is sprunging and MN's name generator can do one!

[lcakethereforeIam]

Welcome to the Bluestocking women's pub. Men are directed to the Staunch Ally just down the road. Otherwise all are welcome. Pull up a chair, give your order to the Wait Gerbil or the Gerbil behind the bar.

Don't forget to name change if you wish to.

Lots of it is really minor adjustments, like whether you order kava s mlijekom or kafa s mlekom. My teacher was from Slavonija, so fairly central in accent and vocab. Some of the Croatian dialects down on the coast get quite funky.

I have a couple of books somewhere on language policy in the USSR, and that gets really interesting. I've heard, though I don't know if it's true, that because Tajikistan was such a backwater in Soviet times - and still is today to be honest - Tajik Persian is not only written in Cyrillic but has a bunch of archaic forms that have long fallen out of use in Iranian Persian.

Ah Weary, if only you’d been able to visit Insouciance rather than Nice you’d have been able to let ‘em go and carry on commando.

Yes, I remember trying to remember to use Jekavian as opposed to Ekavian when travelling through Croatia some years back. The last time I was on holiday in Montenegro, I remember seeing both forms on official signs.

When I was in Leningrad, one of my room-mates was half-Azeri. I recall her scorn when she heard that a Russian lecturer had told the Brits that the Soviet Union had gifted the Azeri the Cyrillic alphabet because there was no written form of their language...She explained that they had previously used a form of the Arabic alphabet and that she had been taught it by her grandmother.

I'm unclear as to what the official Azeri alphabet is now. I don't know about what happened in Tajikistan, but I wonder whether it was a case of the Russians imposing their alphabet on the other nationalities as a whole.

I seem to recall that Mongolian is written in Cyrilic - or at least it was in Soviet times (even though it was just a satellite state).

When I lived in the Moris Torez Hostel in Moscow, previous students had put a sign with "Mongolia" written in Cyrillic on our room door. The result of that was that an irate Russian hostel manager brought a couple of new Mongolian students to our room and demanded to know why we'd put that sign.

Certainly, my impression was that for all the speech about equality etc, Russians could be quite patronising towards other nationalities. [Also see: "Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian"...]

Perhaps she’ll saunter through Insouciance on the way?

Thank you. Pedantry corner sounds like a cool place to visit.

Pleasantly warm. Unlike the main MN Pedants’ Corner which is liable to swing between frosty and overheated.

It is! It's not all about apostrophes and grammar, it's mostly about 'Hey isn't this interesting?' and 'Have you ever wondered about...?'

Apostrophes did crop up in the past, prompted by a sign that said NURSES STATION and was NURSE'S STATION just as bad because there was more than one nurse? so it should be NURSES' STATION, but I made the case that as the nurses were not in possession of the station, 'nurses' was being used adjectivally and not as a possessive, so NURSES STATION was OK by me.
You can imagine the murmurs of horrified dissent that caused in Pedantry Corner😄

Maybe we should re-name it Curiosity Corner. Or Kuriosity Korner.😁

Currently I'm curious about those taps that they advertise on telly, the ones that - no seriously, they really do this: DISPENSE BOILING WATER!
Forcing water heated to 100deg at 29psi out of a narrow pipe in a domestic setting - hey, what could possibly go wrong?😬

These things occupy part of my mind, like the etymology of coffee; It's nice to have somewhere in the Bluey to discuss them.
Pedantry Corner is that place 💙

It sounds right up my street. I can't find it though.

Like a church, it is wherever two or three of us are gathered together to discuss language. Not to be confused with Pedants’ Corner
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/pedants_corner

Yes, it's a virtual, pop-up Pedantry Corner, Stars, and only comes into existence when somebody thinks 'Hey this is so abstruse it would be good in Pedantry Corner!', lots of musing and reflecting and curiosity goes on in the main area of the Bluestocking as well

Pops head in while passing to say while talking about language, there’s a book called ‘Why Q Needs a U’ by Danny Bate. A fast track through the alphabet looking at history and derivations. Just occasionally it’s a bit too formal linguistics for my brain but mostly fascinating stuff. Just don’t ask me to remember any of it just now…
And we have one of them there boiling water taps - I try not to think about how it works and what might go wrong.

It is the Walrus' birthday. We had a lovely full on cooked breakfast followed by pancakes with bacon and maple syrup at a local restaurant. I then bought flowers at the flower shop. They were for someone else but the florist just said they'd make up another bouquet for that order.

A pleasant walk home by the river where we will eat at our favourite local restaurant this evening (after presents) which reopens today!

My DSD's birthday was last week and her present arrived yesterday (she didn't let us know what she wanted until it was too late, and of course it had a 10 day delivery lag). When the Walrus opens his presents this evening, hers will be among them and he will say, oh this one has your name on it. So she will have a lovely surprise too.

We bought a sofa yesterday which will arrive in June. And Virgin Media finally sorted out a reasonably priced deal.

There is a legend in Belfast - I wish I could find a photo of it - of barricades that went up in a loyalist area in the 70s, with a sign saying These one's stay up til the one's on the Fall's come down.

I'll just assume that sign was written by a greengrocer.

Also, I once had a line manager who would send around emails to the team addressing us as you's.

I had complaints from parents that one of my teachers couldn't spell...because she'd taught Violet Jacob's "Hallowe'en".

"That's not how you spell it!"

I had to give the parents a mini-lesson on the evolution of spelling.

Terrible! Everyone knows that it has to be youse.

I recall that our Latin teacher used to differentiate between singular and plural you in translation by resorting to Fife English. This was done with a knowing grin.

He was then dismayed when a member of the class used the Fife form in a prelim. When I pointed out that the said pupil had English as a second language and had merely written exactly what he'd heard in class, the teacher's response was "Don't be daft!"

He stopped doing it, however.

In the southern USA the term is youall.

Usually spelled y’all.

Unreasonably bugs me when I see that written without an apostrophe.

Unreasonable, because apostrophes aren't my strongest point. I feel I'm also a bit too liberal with commas.

Happy birthday to the Walrus, @MyrtleLion.

'Youse' is 'Ye' in rural Ireland and 'Yiz' in Dublinese.

And I've even heard 'ye' having a possessive form:
'Have ye had yeer tea?'

Happy birthday to Mr Walrus, and it's lovely to know that our Myrtle is enjoying the day too, including taming Virgin Media🍾

Telyn, the female osprey, arrived back at her nest on the Dyfi River the other day. Her usual mate, Idris, hasn't shown up yet. She's been carrying on with another male. 🍿

A man claiming his place in a long tradition of eccentric academics. 😁There were a fair few of those about when I was a student at Oxford in the mid-60s. Not at my women-only college I hasten to add. Women had had to fight so hard to be admitted and granted degrees and were still only 20%of the student and teaching bodies in my time. We all felt we had to prove we deserved our place. All changed nowadays thankfully.

Round these parts it's 'ye'.

Sorry Marie, I didn't notice you'd already made that point!