h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No that I'm at home, I can reach for a copy of Ken Campell's 'Pigspurt' and treat you to some more Doddery from the Marshall Islands:

Im fulgud dei! Im fulgud dei blong yumitufala pushem lilfala salwata wanae insaed postofis letahol blong praeafala pasta talim - 'ski aelan twinki twink plantifala ia!'

(What a fine day! What a fine day for sticking a cucumber in the vicar's letterbox and saying 'The Martians have arrived!')



I'm not sure how I could explain the tattifilarious Ken Dodd to any non-UK readers, and there's little decent on the web - but try this: http://www.chucklebutty.co.uk/doddbio.html. He holds the record the the longest comedy performance and also achieved notoriety following a trial for tax evasion. He was clearly guilty, but the jury acquited him out of sheer love.

Favourite quote:
'I told the Inland Revenue that I didn't owe them a penny because I live by the seashore!'

Also - my favourite pub joke:
ME: 'Did you hear Ken Dodd died?
OTHER PERSON: 'Did 'e?!'
ME: No...Doddy!

And now for something completely different, kinda.

Is 'Si', from the same root as the word 'yes'?

>> 'ski aelan twinki twink plantifala ia!' <<


'The Martians have landed.'
I really like the 'twinki twink plantifala' bit.




~jwf~

Here's an appropriate quote from Francis Bacon, that came with yesterday's "A Word A Day" http://wordsmith.org/awad/

"Words, when written, crystallize history; their very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past." -Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)

This uncannily prefigures Dan Dennett's description of consciousness itself (in "Consciousness Explained") -- which he characterises thus: a choice, from several possible 'scripts' describing what's going on, becomes your personal history, and hence your identity.

He calls it the 'multiple drafts' theory, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with it but it makes good sense. I think a lot of critics would rather not try and define consciousness at all; they call the book "Consciousness Explained Away", unkindly.

Si and Yes. Interesting. Initially I'd have thought it comes from 'Oui' - which is *one* of the French words for Yes. Note that the French also say 'Ouai', which is similar in sound and style to 'Yes'. I shall have to do some digging. Some initial observations:

'Si' means 'Yes' in both Spanish and Italian.

In French, Si also means Yes, when it's used to contradict a negative:
'Tu ne sors pas, n'est-ce pas?' 'Si, je sors'
('You're not going out, are you?' 'Yes, I am'
This avoids the potential ambiguity in English. Does Yes mean 'That's correct. I'm not going out.'? In French, one could simply say 'Si'. The 'Je sors' that I've added is redundant.

Now - all three languages originated from Latin. Clasical Latin, however, had many words for yes and no, depending whether one is confirming or contradicting a positive or negative statement, and on what the questioner expects answer to be. Eg:
'Are you Edward?'
and
'You're Edward, aren't you?'
and
'Surely you're not Edward?'
would be answered differently by me (had I been a Roman, that is).

In my own ideolect, I use 'Aye' in some circunstances and 'Yes' in others. I'm trying to bottom out why. I *think* I use Yes when an emphatic response is required.

One further observation: 'Yes' is an interesting word in English. Think of how many different uses you can think of for it.

I often use 'aye' and 'yes' interchangably.

My theory is that I only use 'aye' when my tartan DNA forgets that I've lived most of my life in Englandshire.

Yes comes from the Old English word "gese", pronounced "yessuh". That doesn't really tell us much, but it is unlikely to be related to "oui" or "si".

The French "si" is nice; it could be translated to "no, *yes*".

A nice answer to a yes/no question was supposedly given to a BBC reprter interviewing Samuel Beckett:

"Do you regard yourself as a British writer?"
"Au contraire"

I say 'supposedly' because it must be apocryphal: he never gave interviews.

France used to be divided into two regions. In the North, they used the word "oui" for yes while in the south they used "oc". The two regions were called "langue d'oui" and "langue d'oc", that is, the language of oui and the language of oc.

There was a quite clear dividing line across the country, with no "grey area" in between. There were other differences in dialect which followed almost exactly the same division line.

Nowadays, the use of "oc" has disappeared and the name "Langue d'oc" is confined to a small strip on the Mediterranean.

Oh, and by the way...to parse the pidgin joke

'ski aelan twinki twink plantifala ia!'

Sky island + twinki twink (= star) = Mars

(Plural)fellows

here

Apparently the Marshall Islands don't have cucumbers, so:
'lilfala salwata wanae ' = little fellow, saltwater, one eye.

>What a fine day! What a fine day for sticking a cucumber in the vicar's letterbox and saying 'The Martians have arrived!'

Wouldn't Freud have loved that. I can hear him doing a Frankie Howerd "Oooh! Come in his mailbox have we?".

Well no I can't quite hear him but I'd like to.

Actually, Doddy has a keen interest in the theory of comedy and has been known to quote Freud in interviews.

The Oui/Oc division reminds me of something that Seamus Heaney once said when asked to describe his style of poetry. He explained that linguists talk about the 'Och line' - an imaginary diagonal that runs through the British Isles. To the north and west of this, people say 'Och'. To the south and east, people say something like 'Oh dearie me'. 'My poetry,' he said, 'expresses the essential Och-ness of life.'

Here in Dublin, we're definitely to the southeast of that line.

There's also a line that divides Ireland, north of which gorse is called "whins" and south of which it is called "furze".

In Dublin we say "gorse", proving that Dublin is not in Ireland.

In New Zealand, the word is gorse (for which I must assume is the same plant..)

Gorse is a spiky plant with yellow flowers in the summer which smell of vanilla and coconut.

I've heard both gorse and whin in the north. Mostly gorse, the one person who I remember calling it whin was from Monaghan, but gorse is probably more common. As for furze, I've read it in books but never heard anyone say it.

Mrs G is studying Modern Greek at the moment. Her grammar book has a wonderful example sentence which illustrates the difference between two different types of past tense. It also illustrates a difference between Greece and Ireland.

"As the bus was leaving Athens, a basket of cucumbers fell from the roof."