Threading foul-ups?

I saw Billy Connoly live a decade or so ago. When the show finished we all realised our stomach muscles were aching from the laughter. Very funny guy.

Hi David, thanks! I get only about half of the sentences, though. Not so bad - could have been just picking words - but still not enough to appreciate the humor.

Sounds more like Kenny Dalglish than Alex Ferguson - a bit less incomprehensive, that is :-). Sometimes I get the feeling Alex Ferguson is not quite sure himself what he wants to say but then this may be just my English :D.

Do Englishmen really understand all that? Pretty amazing to me if they do :D .

Cheers,

Dimiter (no beer yet, my average intake is about 500ml/week and I think it will be tomorrow, perhaps watching some of the matches :-) ).

My interest in football is pretty minimal - and my interest in English football is non-existent (I'm a Scot living in Norway - why should absurdly overpaid yobs messing around with a ball in a foreign country interest me?). I remember Dalglish playing for Scotland many years ago

- no one listened much to him then (not even his teammates, though I think he was captain), so it didn't matter if he was intelligible. And while I have heard of Ferguson, I have never heard him speak.

But as for Billy Connolly - if you can understand half of what he says, you are doing better than most Englishmen. Even non-Glaswegian Scots find some of it hard going. Some of his humour, especially the early stuff, is quite topical to both the time (much of his best stuff is from the seventies) and the place (Glasgow).

few

ly

Ah, do you sound like Billy Connoly then? Or more like, say, David Tennant (he is quite intelligible when giving interviews with his Scottish accent)? Just curious.

Clearly no sane reason why, I just like watching it but I am pretty impartial (often I tend to celebrate either side scoring :D :D ). I guess that's a significant part of my entertainment consumption.

Well he was one of the best players I have watched, ever. And now he is back at Anfield (as a manager) and it looks like he will just resume their domination just from where he quit it in the early 90-s, I find that sort of thing entertaining, mind you. I guess not so many people here do, of course, sorry guys.

It is hard to judge it quantitatively since losing half of what he says (I think I am around that mark) is plenty lost to loose most if not all of the meaning. Certainly the humour... :-) But you answered my question, it is not just me who can't understand that tongue :-), thanks.

Dimiter

A while back I watched a brilliant series called "The Story of English" in which it was claimed that in some ways spoken US English is "older" than British English. Apparently, many words in US English mean the same thing that they did in 17th century England, but in modern British English the meaning has changed significantly. The presenter in the series provided a number of examples where it was said that William Shakespeare would recognize the American usage but not the British usage. The one example that I seem to recall is "lumber".

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That may be true - but I'm sure the same applies to words that are common in British English but not in American English. There is such a variation in dialects (both nation-wide and local dialects) that you will be able to find plenty of examples to "prove" or "disprove" theories like that. And the question is, of course, meaningless for spoken British unless you say /which/ British - the language spoken in the south-east of Scotland, for example, has changed far less over the last few hundred years than "BBC English" or any American dialects that I'm aware of.

No, I don't sound like Billy Connolly. He has a very pronounced (and somewhat exaggerated) Glasgow accent. I moved around several times when growing up, so I have a fairly general Scottish accent.

I don't know what David Tennant sounds like. I had to look up Wikipedia to find out who he is - I've probably seen him in a Harry Potter film, but I couldn't sensibly compare his accent.

I occasionally pay attention to football at the local level - our little town against the neighbour town, or at the international level. But club-level football is meaningless to me - there is no /identity/ involved. For example, a club might be called "Liverpool", and happen to be based in Liverpool, but it's owned by one bunch of foreigners, run by a different bunch, the team (if you can call it that - most professional footballers are a bunch of egomaniacs) consists of random individuals from different countries who are bought and sold like cards in a game of monopoly, and most of the supports would have a hard time trying to place Liverpool on a map. In the days when the Liverpool football team consistent of Liverpool players, was owned by Liverpool people, and supported by Liverpool fans - then club football mad sense.

Maybe I should bring my Billy Connolly CD's to the office, to try them out on my neighbours. I've tried them with a couple of Scottish bands, but they can't seem to understand the music:

a

Hah, you don't know "the Doctor" then. Neither did I until recently. It hit me over a cable channel with several episodes and then I watched all 4 or 5 seasons (my wife downloaded them all and we watched and enjoyed). My guess is you would like it, go for it. But if you begin to design a TARDIS as a result don't drag me into it :D . I may be in for a sonic screwdriver, though :D :D . Oh, and he speaks estuary English in that film, it is just the interviews where he speaks with his Scottish accent.

Dimiter

The supposed defenders of the language, the maintainers of the dictionaries, no longer seem to agree with that. Apparently any (confluence of) sound having an agreed upon meaning and used by a sufficient (but unspecified) number of people now is counted as a word.

The rate at which people are coining new words is rapidly increasing and most of the new words, IMO, are gratuitous. I don't mean acronyms (though I'm tired of them also), but new words. I have not heard a single new nontechnical term in the last 30 years for which there did not already exist a perfectly good word (sometimes several) that adequately covered the intended usage. [The worst have been the spate of idiotic new "verbs" ... I can't hear someone say "deplane" without picturing Hervé Villechaize. If you've never seen the television program "Fantasy Island" that won't make any sense ... but it will for those of you who have.]

The problem is that few people now have a vocabulary of any substantial size. I think people are making up new words out of ignorance, unaware that suitable words already exist.

George

It doesn't help that lumber has (at least) three completely different meanings: one pertaining to trees, one to useless items and one describing movement.

[I confess that I was unaware of the "useless items" meaning of "lumber" until I looked it up. Vocabulary again.]

George

Interesting word. I'd never heard it before now. One of the web sites I looked at suggested that it "comes from the dialectal form gawm 'sense', the English interpretation of gaumr. Gaumr was a word in Old Norse, ..." So "senseless" makes sense, if true.

Jon

For me, Doctor Who will always be Tom Baker. I just can't get the feel the "new" Doctors.

I think the problem is that the newer series are all about monsters and aliens, or people, and there's not enough "science" in the science fiction. I think the science fiction series in the seventies and eighties like Doctor Who and Star Trek played a big role in inspiring kids to grow up to be engineers - we wanted to make K9 robots and real sonic screwdrivers. I have a theory that this is why Norway has to import so many of its engineers - science fiction never really caught on here.

edia

This is how I see it, too. Although in my case it was the sci-fi writers - Azimov, Lem, etc., I grew up on books, not telly.

The first Doctor I was exposed to was Tennant so I had no problem accepting him. But it is entertainment and humour what the series is about, sci-fi is just the background. Not sure how I would accept it if I had grown up on another doctor, perhaps not. It is quality entertainment allright as it is, though. The season with Ecclestone as well (pre-Tennant). I have yet to make up my mind on the current one :D (Smith).

Dimiter

I started with Dr. Who on the telly, then moved onto books - I read every Dr. Who book in the local library before moving on to my mother's Asimov collection.

[snip]

I'd offer to help but I think the distance would be a wee bit of a problem! :>

I think the "language problem" is possibly more severe here (US). The sheer size of the country makes it far too easy for regional dialects to creep in, etc.

And, it's not just "accents" that one has to consider (I wonder if a Mainer and a Texan could understand *anything* the other had to say??). There are also vocabulary differences from region to region as well as other "cultural" ones (a New yorker would talk to a woman differently than a gent from West Virginia).

E.g., I grew up midway between New York City and Boston. They speak very different languages, have very different cultures, different words for items, etc. Despite being separated by as little as ~200 mi (and *my* hometown was different than both of the above).

If you do any significant traveling (or, better yet, relocation) here, you learn many of these differences. Often, "The Hard Way".

OK, now get back to work (or, failing *that*, get back to DRINKING!)

--don

P.S. Roof is now patched. Yay! 36C today :-/

My reply goes through our usual private channel, I already feel somewhat guilty of my previous OT postings :-). Not that I see any danger we become as noisy as SED, though, we seem to be a pretty civil bunch of people (my only regular newsgroup).

Dimiter

Much too generous, IMNSHO.

The average person today would have been considered a moron a mere 50 years ago.

My dog has a better vocabulary - and a longer attention span - than some of the secondary (high) school students that work in the stores. He can count and tell time better than some of them too. And theoretically I live in an area with good schools.

George

The same principle applies: a language changes or develops more in its centre than in the periphery. The less change, the more peripheral.

Lately, Usonians have started to feel central and have contributed more innovations. If the BBC petrifies its language, it has recognised being peripheral.

--
Fredrik Östman

My colleague from Liverpool paraphrased: Liverpool is a bad example here. The majority of LFC supporters are from Liverpool, they make up the songs and are on the terraces each week - away games and home. LFC has more home grown talent in the team than most clubs - first team players too. It's run by Kenny Dalglish who has been at Liverpool for years and won 9 league titles and 3 European cup trophies

- as player and manager. It is owned by foreigners who seem to believe in sports business - instead of other "investors" who load debt onto their club and spend ridiculous amounts of money.

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