Danskcolin: Thursday January 11th 2024

09:00 It's Thursday, and something is looming large in my shiny-new online "Calendar". Tomorrow it's the monthly meeting of what-I-call "Lynda's" local U3A "Making of English" group. A misleading name these days, because Lynda actually resigned from the group last year, and we other members have so far been deftly playing the tactical game of "not volunteering to be the new group leader", and "waiting for somebody else to take up the reins".

What a madness it all is !!!!

flashback to our U3A group in happier times: Lynda

addressing the group on zoom, some time before her shock resignation

Come back Lynda, all is forgiven haha!!!!

And in case you're wondering, there's no suggestion that Lynda resigned from the group because of any financial irregularities - no money is involved in the group's acitiviies, so that particular possible motive is a non-starter for the local U3A's flourishing "rumour mill" !!!

And unlike Harold Wilson, who resigned as UK Prime Minister in 1976, possibly due to his own perception of his mental decline, there has been no sign of mental decline in Lynda. Quite the opposite - her resignation seems to have given her a new lease of life, which is weird. I wonder why that happened haha!!!!

Lynda (centre in sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt) has had a

new lease of life since resigning from our group:

she's pictured here "with her little ukulele in her hand",

and having fun with a bunch of other "old codgers".

And there's no suggestion either of a sponsorship deal going sour, either, in case you're wondering about that! We tried to get Nike, the sports gear conglomerate to sponsor our discussions, but Lynda got cold feet after one of us happened to see this story in the US press (Onion News).

Nike were in any case becoming lukewarm, and less than enthusiastic, on the proposed sponsorship deal from the outset, claiming that our group's activities were "too sedentary", and unlikely to promote the kind of "raunchily sporty" image that Nike liked to be associated with.

Well, their loss - that's all I can say here!

So anyway, with the question of our "Making of English" group's long-term leadership kicked firmly in the long grass for now, tomorrow Friday's group meeting has been designated as one of Joe's periodic "Joe's Question Time" affairs: that kind of "malarkey" anyway! Joe has put one of his periodic lists of questions to the group, all about the history of the English language and other world languages - things that he personally is puzzled about.

The following are a couple of Joe's "I wonder...!" questions. And if you've got any info, let me know by email - deadline Friday 14:30 GMT, so you'd better "get your skates on" !!!!

1. One question Joe wants us to consider tomorrow is all about "top down" changes in language. Joe claims that one of Spain's kings of the past spoke with a lisp, and that's why the letters 'z' and 'c' are pronounced as a 'th'. Is that true? And has that kind of malarkey ever happened in English, Joe wonders?

Today I discuss this point with Lois, who, although she hasn't studied the history of the English language in any detail, comes up with her usual set of stimulating sidelights. And surprisingly, she proves to know a lot about royal speech impediments

Who knew, except Lois, that James I (reigned 1603-1625) was said to have had a tongue "way too big for his mouth", for example.

I do a bit of research into this and find out that this accusation of "having a large tongue" may well have been just James's new English subjects being rude and sarcastic about James's thick Scottish accent. His English subjects all had "thick English accents" presumably! But perhaps we should be told!!!

By the way, I don't seem to be able to find a picture on the internet of James poking his tongue out, even though he presumably had strong motivation to do that when talking to the English! If you've got a picture of James's tongue, could you forward it to me please, again by Friday 14:30 GMT if at all possible. Thanks in advance !!!!

the above pic is the nearest I could get - the famous

"Tongue King" of Basle, Switzerland - it's a "doozy" though isn't it!

More interesting to me personally than Joe's point about "top down" changes in language is the question of why some invasions or incursions - e.g. the Viking Norsemen settling in Normandy - resulted in the invaders adopting the natives' language i.e. French in this case; while other incursions - e.g. the Anglo-Saxons invading England - resulted in the natives adopting the invaders' language.

It's not always straightforward to determine what was going on when two languages clashed, particularly during more ancient times, when the written records are so much fewer, or even non-existent. It's often a complex issue.

The Celtic languages were all but wiped out by the English, but Welsh and Gaelic etc clung on in the more remote areas.

The Indo-European language family all but wiped out the earlier languages of Europe and South Asia, when the invaders started arriving from the Russian Steppes 6,000 or more years ago - in Europe only Basque survives from the earlier period, and again that was spoken in some remote mountainous region of Spain and France, so maybe its very remoteness was its salvation. Other relics from the pre-Indo-European period, like Etruscan for example, died out a millennium or more ago.

the Indo-European language family

spreads through Europe and Asia

Another of Joe's "I wonder...!" questions is about French and Spanish. It's notable that the Spanish and Portuguese, for example, didn't like words starting with the letter "s-", followed by another consonant. They got round this by putting an extra 'e-' on the front, which made it easier for them to pronounce.

For example, the Latin word for "to study" - studere - becomes "estudiar" or "estudar".

And do you remember Manuel, the Spanish waiter in the 1970's sitcom "Fawlty Towers, who had to tell somebody that his boss, Basil Fawlty, was from Swanage in Dorset. Manuel totally "bottles out" at this challenge, saying simply that Mr Fawlty was from "Es-swanage".

Tremendous fun!!!

flashback to August 2019: Lois and I visit Swanage, Dorset

I don't think that we do this "adding 'e's onto the front" of such words in English, do we. The nearest I can come to it is those words like "to ax", a dialect form of 'to ask', and even "wops", a dialect form of 'wasp'. These must have come about because people discovered it was less effort to put the 's' after the 'k' or after the 'p' than to put it before. Your suggestions welcome haha!

Some consonant clusters, we certainly don't like. We don't say the 'n' in words like "damn", "condemn", "column", and some people pronounce "film" as "fillum", don't they, or "picture" as "pitture", although these pronunciations tends to be looked down on - it's not clear why. We don't bother with the letter L before M in words like 'calm', but we say it in words like 'elm', 'Stockholm' etc.

There are lots of other frequently mangled words in English, as Lois points out. She says she overhears "Ibuprofen" pronounced as "I-boo-fren" when she's waiting in the queue at the pharmacy.

Finally, Joe is mystified by our British place-names. It's well-known that when the English arrived here from Denmark and North Germany, they allegedly "couldn't be bothered to rename all the rivers", and so they mostly kept the Welsh names. About 7 or so of our rivers are called "Avon" or "Afon" in the Welsh spelling, which is just the Welsh word for a river, so you can see how unfocussed the English were over the issue - my goodness!

It may have been because the English were just exhausted after having to name all the new towns and villages they were establishing, or maybe they just weren't interested in nature study - not everybody is.

The English kept a lot of the old Welsh hill names as well. The town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where Lois and I have lived since October 2022, was named after the Malvern Hills, and 'Malvern' just means "bare hill" in Welsh.

flashback to April 2023: Lois and I go for a walk round the new-build

estate where we moved recently - in the background

are the Malvern Hills - the so-called "Bare Hills"

Sometimes the English put the suffix "hill" on the end of the Welsh name, to make clear what it was. There's a village now called Brill, which is in Oxfordshire. Lois and I used to go there on picnics, when we were "courting", because it's really quiet there on the hill - you would not BELIEVE! The original Welsh name was just "bre" meaning a hill, but the English stuck a "-hill" on the end just to clarify. So at first it was Bre-hill, and this later this got shortened to just "Brill".

What a crazy language we speak!!!!!

Do you know the famous poem about Brill, by that prolific poet, Mr A Non?

That says it all about Brill, really, doesn't it. Brrrrrrr !!!!!

20:00 After a punishing (haha!) afternoon of hot shower followed by a nap in bed, we "wind down" on the couch with an old episode of the 1980's political sitcom "Yes, Prime Minister".

Jim has only just been made Prime Minister by his party, very much as a compromise candidate, because he doesn't normally do much. And the civil servants like him because they can make him do what they want - oh dear, not a good start, is it!

In this scene tonight, Jim is telling his Private Secretary Bernard about his trip to Washington for talks with the US President: