Definite Article
When people do impressions of a Yorkshire accent they tend to do this kind of thing:
After Ah’ve fed t’ferrets ‘appen Ah’ll tek t’whippet for a walk and then let t’pigeons aht.
Which - for the benefit of Southerners and others - means:
Subsequent to the feeding of the ferrets my dog and I will have a stroll around the park before releasing the pigeons from their dwelling-place
And indeed that t’ sound can be heard in quite a bit of speech round here – the definite article is abbreviated to t’ but is still there.
Today I was working in East Yorkshire and I met a lady for whom the definite article had disappeared completely, leaving no trace of its existence, not a t’ sound, not a pause, nothing. She had only a slight Northern accent and was a young, educated woman in a senior nursing position and hence there was a – to me – slightly surprising contrast between the content of what she was saying and the way in which she was saying it.
“So we must make sure patient is kept comfortable and relative has a chair to sit on by side of bed. Then they can have a good talk in side room with no concerns that they will be interrupted by doctor or cleaner.”
She was a delightful, caring woman and I found myself fascinated both by what she was saying and also by waiting for the next missing “the”. I found myself wondering – how would she write? Would she put the definite articles in? Yes, of course she would, because we all make differences between how we speak and how we write.
I would more usually expect to find that kind of speech in older people who learned it years ago before dialects and accents were evened out by mass communication and the media. To hear it in someone young and confident was, to me, very pleasing. Although the world has got so much smaller, I think it’s great that some local idiosyncrasies still remain.
After Ah’ve fed t’ferrets ‘appen Ah’ll tek t’whippet for a walk and then let t’pigeons aht.
Which - for the benefit of Southerners and others - means:
Subsequent to the feeding of the ferrets my dog and I will have a stroll around the park before releasing the pigeons from their dwelling-place
And indeed that t’ sound can be heard in quite a bit of speech round here – the definite article is abbreviated to t’ but is still there.
Today I was working in East Yorkshire and I met a lady for whom the definite article had disappeared completely, leaving no trace of its existence, not a t’ sound, not a pause, nothing. She had only a slight Northern accent and was a young, educated woman in a senior nursing position and hence there was a – to me – slightly surprising contrast between the content of what she was saying and the way in which she was saying it.
“So we must make sure patient is kept comfortable and relative has a chair to sit on by side of bed. Then they can have a good talk in side room with no concerns that they will be interrupted by doctor or cleaner.”
She was a delightful, caring woman and I found myself fascinated both by what she was saying and also by waiting for the next missing “the”. I found myself wondering – how would she write? Would she put the definite articles in? Yes, of course she would, because we all make differences between how we speak and how we write.
I would more usually expect to find that kind of speech in older people who learned it years ago before dialects and accents were evened out by mass communication and the media. To hear it in someone young and confident was, to me, very pleasing. Although the world has got so much smaller, I think it’s great that some local idiosyncrasies still remain.
posted by Daphne at 11:19 pm
2 Comments:
I remember years ago when politicians stopped saying: "the government will do better" and started saying: "goverment will do better", and it still jars today.
Then there's the shipping forecast, bastion of everything Anglo-Saxon, with all the glorious names and mysterious figures. But they stopped saying:"moderate icing in the north" and now forsake the definite article with a difficult:"moderate icing in north.
Difficult, I feel, because without the definite article north stops becoming a general direction and tends towards being a fixed place, like a country: "moderate icing in Iceland." Because we don't say "moderate icing in the Iceland."
All very confusing but I'm sure young people will grow up accepting these things, and themselves become suitably frustrated by other linguistic inexactitudes.
'appen
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