There's Note Wrong With 'ow I Speak, Duck!
Here's one for those of you who are interested in how differently we speak in my part of the world -- it's not exactly the Queen's English.
I was IMing with a customer / reader (from the the south of England, whereas I'm in the middle-to-Northern bit) the other day when the following was said:
Customer: might be coming back to you for an implementation cost at some point, if you think you can do this...
Me: i can do owt!
Me: owt = Northern for anything
Customer: ahh, the opposite of nowt!
Me: yeah, never thought of it like that!
Customer: a southern perspective :)
Actually it would be more accurate if I'd said "I can do oat". You have to go a little bit further north before oat becomes owt (said like "out"). Similarly "nowt" is more usually "note" in this part and is used to mean "nothing".
Examples of use:
- Boy to teacher: "I dint do oat", meaning "I did not do anything".
- Same boy to same teacher might also say "There's note wrong wi' 'im" meaning "there's nothing wrong with" the boy crying on the floor.
What struck me was how glaringly obvious it now seems that owt and nowt are the opposites of each other in the same way as or and nor are. Stick an n on the front to negate it. I can't believe I never noticed that.
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Here's another one --- I was just inside dealing with Felix who wanted a treaty for being a big boy and pooing on his potty (we went down this road and now there's no going back). He was trying (read crying) to get two treaties but I said to him "Felix it's either one or none" at which point I realised there's another glaringly obvious time when prepending an n makes something an opposite. Other example = Neither - either.
Anybody think of any others?
A nice introduction into english dialect are some of the books of Irvine Welsh. For me as a german it was really hard at first to guess the meaning of many words.
But after having read the first half of a book I learned to even think in scottish dialect :-)
At least, it was really fun to read these books...
You managed to read Irvine Welsh Mark? I'm impressed. Took me ages to get used to reading it, ken?
Ever and Never?
(For some reason, I recognise that chat transcript...)
For a couple of good insights, have a look at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-19163,00.html
Maybe you should learn Lotus Otes.
Seems to me that it must actually be derived from "aught" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/aught) and "naught" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/naught).
@Richard... I was thinking the same thing.
@Jake: "Took me ages to get used to reading it, ken?" In this context, "ken" means "you know?", right? At least that expression should be easy for German readers... "kennen" in German is "to know" (or recognize or be familiar with people or places - as opposed to "wissen", which also means "to know", but is applied more to pure remembrance of facts... it's a distinction we don't make in English). I'm thinking "ken" must be a pretty straightforward evolution of this.
Did you actually mean "treat"?