The Bluestocking Women's Pub: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs

[AngleofRepose]

Croeso/Welcome to the Bluestocking Women's Pub, with our lovely gerbil staff, the icy Mojito foot-bath for those of you fed up with the heat, a Quilting/Craft Nook, lots of yummy food and drink with zero calories, gluten, or allergens, the Gerbil World Cup, and a brand new magic pool that becomes a babbling brook whenever you want it to!

Come on in! All women welcome! (Men welcome at The Staunch Ally pub down the road aways)

(security provided by the capybaras, lovely folk, but try not to get in their way)

(oh, and don't mention triangles, please. Gubbins gets very overexcited)

(did we mention the Gerbil World Cup?)

Yes, it was lovely! Thanks @MyrtleLion (and Griselda)

Yes, thank you @MyrtleLion!

That's really interesting, Damson
EE pronounced nearer to AY has stayed in Hiberno-English, as in the patient saying to the podiatrist 'Me fate is in your hands'😄
or harvesting the 'sugar bate', as they will be doing around chez Edith in the near future
Not that they harvest sugar bate any more in Ireland - it used to be a big industry, with four or five sugar refineries around the country and a whole rail infrastructure to carry the 'bate' there from the areas that grew it.
As far as I can gather, it depended on subsidies, and when the subsidies were withdrawn, the industry was, controversially, left to wither.

Marie EE pronounced nearer to AY has stayed in Hiberno-English, as in the patient saying to the podiatrist 'Me fate is in your hands'

😂

Quite a lot of East Anglian farmers don't only harvest bate, they harvest wate as well.

It's a long a in East Anglian accents.
Yew busy in yer gaarden then, girl?
Garden has a rising inflection on the first syllable, and the second syllable is chopped almost to nothing, and 'then' serves as a verbal question mark.
And 'girl' means any female over the age of about 18/20. 'Yew a'roight, girl?' is a general greeting from a man to a woman.

It's impossible to take offence, since 'boys' is often used of adult men. 'Ye-ah, yew leave that with me, Oi'll git the boys on it s'arternoon.' The boys being Tom, aged 25, and Darren, aged 59.

And thanks to Myrtle - it was a lot of fun.

I loved all that, Edith - accents and dialect are so fascinating!

It took me a second or so to get 'wate' - we may share the AY sound, but we've kept the old 'wh' sound ..I think it's called 'aspirated'? =breath is expelled, so 'whales' doesn't sound like 'Wales' the way we say it.
Wheat would be 'whate' .

Because that sound doesn't occur in Irish Gaelic, native speakers of Irish sometimes pronounce wh as f whe speaking English- so 'fwat are you saying?' or 'fwy is the bus late'.

I think 'boy' is used like that here too, for any male of any age!

If there's -o after it -'boy-o', it takes on a bit of an edge, either good as in 'Hup, ye boy-o!' shouted at a match, or bad as in 'Careful now, yer man is a bit of a boy-o' 😄

@MarieDeGournay I need to listen for the aspiration. Given that there are still people around who say road almost as two syllables, I wouldn't be surprised to find it.

'Town' is definitely two syllables. As in, 'Oi'm jist goin' dowun the towun.'

It's all being flattened out by Estuary English and whatever the modern version of RP is, which makes me sad.

Hello all. I think I've almost finished sewing. And shopping.

OTOH the to-do list isn't getting any shorter, because as soon as I tick some items off, more appear at the bottom of it.

So a large iced coffee, please, with just a smidgin of Baileys in it.

Aww!

🥰

Thank you! It’s been a lot of fun xx

💙

Further north than my home region, in Northumberland, another one-syllable word pronounced as two is film, which becomes fillum. Elm becomes ellum, though sadly we don’t have ellum trees around much any more.

It always surprises me how often there are threads on MN, often in Pedants’ Corner, complaining of various regional variations. I find it hard to believe that anyone isn’t aware of whichever of rhotic and non-rhotic accent isn’t their own in this day and age when there is exposure to many forms of the spoken word on tv and radio, for instance.
There’s one at the moment which started from ‘new’ being pronounced as ‘Noo’. I haven’t read it all but I do like that there are people who can talk about the history of yod-dropping, and write using the phonetic symbols. I really ought to try to learn them (was anyone taught them at school?) - maybe there’s a good website?

'four or five' . . .

tsk, how did you ever pass Inter cert geography with that attitude? Carlow, Mallow, Thurles and Tuam.

When my mother was child farm-labourer, thinning beet was one of the hated tasks, but producers got part paid in sacks of sugar so my grandmother was able to make blackberry jam all through the war, and when the child farm-labourers went back to boarding school in September they could take jars of it in their tuck boxes.

You’re reminding me of the Singing Postman with “ Hev Yew Gotta Loight Boy“?

The article says he was born in Bury (the Lancashire one) and was raised in Sheringham, Norfolk, from the age of 11. I am surprised in that case that his accent is all Norfolk and no Bury, but perhaps he put it on when he was working.

I do like Sheringham. It reminds me of seaside towns on the ‘60s, where I grew up. This is not a bad thing. It’s also easy to reach by train, changing at Norwich, and inexpensive. It’s a gentle hour from Norwich, and adds less than £4 to the ticket from home (only £2.30 more with a railcard).

The article says he was born in Bury (the Lancashire one) and was raised in Sheringham, Norfolk, from the age of 11. I am surprised in that case that his accent is all Norfolk and no Bury, but perhaps he put it on when he was working.

Two of my nephews spent their very early years in Scotland and moved to Lancashire during primary school when my sister's marriage broke up and she came back to where she grew up. It took them very little time to lose their Scottish accents completely and develop a strong Lancashire one. We think they were teased at school and this was protective colouring. Later my sister moved back to Scotland when they were in their early teens, where the reverse process happened very quickly and they stayed on and made their lives there. Children are very adaptable.

Well well well, that's interesting, Chickadeeinme and Edith - Irish people get teased rotten for saying fill-um, but obvs not by people from Northumberland or East Anglia, who also do it
Dublliners 'go into tow-win' i.e. the city centre.
And ell-um trees...

In HIberno-English it's the influence of Irish Gaelic, where there is a 'dislike' for two consonants together, and there's often a vowel put in in the spoken word.
In Irish it is called 'the helping vowel' and in English it's called the 'epenthetic schwa', if the words 'epenthetic schwa' can be said to be 'English'😁

Deano - of course, silly me - there were four sugar factories. For my punishment I'll stand in the corner and recite all 32 counties by province from memory - I still can

Thank you for the epic, Myrtle!

⚽Yay Tunnel! 💥

The award for Griselda was a particularly nice touch. 😀
I think I noticed some "regional accent" discussion, so I'll have to read and catch up this evening.

I think 11 may be sufficiently different from most primary school ages. I read somewhere some time ago that 8 is a critical age: if you learn a completely new language before that, perhaps because you are moved to a new country, you can sound like a native speaker. If you move when you are older then you’ll always have some sort of accent.

I’m about to assemble food but will look for sources on this later.

When I was 8 I moved from somewhere where I probably had a strong Yorkshire accent to somewhere where people spoke with a weak Lancashire accent.
From the age of 21 I’ve lived somewhere in the Midlands/South. I’ve gradually lost most of the North from my accent but it comes back when I’m talking to Yorkshire/Lancashire/Derbyshire people.

recite all 32 counties by province from memory

I do that when I can't sleep but also do a tour of Ireland through adjacent counties that brings me back to where I started, and sometimes an all-Ireland 32 trip from county to county from Dublin to Belfast. That is slightly province to province, if I'm allowed to count Longford, Louth, Meath and Westmeath as 'Mide'.

Would pronouncing "poem" as "po - yum," with two very distinct syllables, be for similar reasons? I remember being very confused by my teachers in primary school (in Glasgow) saying it like that.

Hello all, I've been without Internet access since Friday, but it's all fixed now, so I'm back!
Anyone miss me?

I worry that youngsters in the north, though they may not be losing the accent, are losing the old turns of speech. I still hold that Norn Iron English is just about the most vivid English.

RP: Cheese makes my husband sick

NI: See me? See my man? See cheese? It makes him throw rings round him

Of course

I thought you were away having a lovely holiday somewhere. Welcome back.

Hello @FuzzyPuffling! The new hub turned up then?