Why has the -er ending to words become -ah?

[Rhythm Thief]

Oh, and I should say that I love local dialects. I used to deliver building stuff round Cradley Heath in the Black Country and I could barely understand the speech of some of the older locals. But it would be nothing without the context: hearing the same dialect, artificially preserved in a museum, would merely make me squirm with embarrassment.

 

[Haitch]

Interesting, what's your positon on whales or mountain gorillas?

 

[brockers]

On examination, you have to do the Gordon Brown jaw-drop thing in order to get the full '-ah' effect. Is he the unbeknownst* trendsetter?


*Do i get extra points for using 'unbeknownst' on a forum? (If only this was scrabble.)

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Interesting, what's your positon on whales or mountain gorillas?

Worth conserving for their own sake, especially as they serve a useful purpose and have an intrinsic value within their own habitats. Whether they're worth conserving when the last one is in a glorified swimming pool or a cage in a zoo is open to question, but I'm all in favour of any attempts to preserve their habitat so they can continue to exist in it. But - and this is stretching the point I was originally making, but never mind - like folk music or dialects, there doesn't seem to me to be much point preserving them outside their natural environment. A sea shanty which sounds great sung by a load of sailors pulling on ropes on the deck of an East Indiaman rounding Cape Horn (or whatever) just sounds a bit shoot sung by an accountant wearing a big jumper in the upstairs room of the Sock and Donkey in Clapham. Likewise dialects: that Cradley Heathen I mentioned earlier spoke in that dialect because he'd been immersed in it from birth, not because he'd joined a society and learned it artificially.

 

[Ghost Donkey]

Oh, and I should say that I love local dialects. I used to deliver building stuff round Cradley Heath in the Black Country and I could barely understand the speech of some of the older locals.

I struggled when I lived on the side of a chip shop in Tipton when I was a student. I remember somebody telling me the time was "five and twenty to." My Southern house mates suffered more and couldn't understand the people in the chip shop, unless they were offering us free chips at the end of the night. I had the same with some Geordies and a bloke from Liverpool until I got used to them.

 

[Andy in Sig]

But if you artificially preserve anything beyond its natural lifespan, you just end up with a load of people meeting in draughty village halls talking about whatever it is they've preserved. Or, in the case of dialects, saying something in it on local radio late at night. What's the point in preserving something if that's what its fate is? I sometimes think folk music has gone the same way: you've got a whole load of people who think that something is worth preserving just because it's old, and all you've really got ultimately is a load of songs about club hauling or inconstant lovers that mean bugger - all in this day and age. If languages and music (and other things) evolve, then let's allow them to do so without regrets.

I'm not on about preserving but rather keeping alive. Consider Friesian (which admittedly is more in the direction of a language than a dialect): it manages to thrive and develop by importing new words as the times demand. I would not suggest, for instance, that new words be somehow modified to fit a dialect.

 

[Haitch]

A sea shanty ... sounds a bit shoot sung by an accountant

Interesting you should mention sea shanties. There's a town near here (Woudenberg, middle of the country, miles from the sea) that organises an annual shanty festival. The local gentry squeeze into stripy jumpers and bell bottoms to entertain the good burgers with songs (mainly in English) of piracy and derring-do on the high seas.

There's a Rab C Nesbitt sketch with two women in an antiques shop buying prints of 'charming' working class Glaswegians. They can't get out quickly enough when Rab enters the shop. Authenticity seems to grow in stature the more removed we are from it.

Let's hope those mountain gorillas make it.