TILTING AT WINDMILLS: OF ANDALUZ, GEORDIE AND ESTUARY ENGLISH

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

OF ANDALUZ, GEORDIE AND ESTUARY ENGLISH

When I arrived in Spain with my BBC language course safely installed in my brain I was horrified to find that the staff in my local shop seemed to be speaking a different tongue altogether.

My first thought was the BBC had palmed me off with Mexican Spanish but of course they hadn’t it was good Castilian. The problem was I was in Andalucía where they slash the ends of their words – you can add to the confusion the numerous village accents and slang.

So the news that a 37-year-old man who was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and now lives in London has landed a job as a Geordie dialect translator did bring a smile to my face.

Geordie is the patois spoken in England’s North East and as baffling as Andaluz to anybody from outside those regions. King’s College graduate Paul Davy will now decipher Geordie for clients of a London translation company.

By coincidence on the same day as I heard about our Geordie Boy (Alan Price – Jarrow Song - 1974) there was a letter in the Daily Telegraph about a range of Christmas Cards for the Essex town of Colchester with the greeting in Welsh! They were not selling very well!

Today the lingua franca in Essex is Estuary English although if you delve in to the small rural villages you will find accents and phrases that would be a foreign tongue to Dagenham man and woman.

As we say in Newcastle: Ye knaa what ah mean leik.

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TILTING AT WINDMILLS

Sancho Panza is much less learned but a good deal saner than his master.

"At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that are on that plain.

"Fortune," said Don Quixote to his squire, as soon as he had seen them, "is arranging matters for us better than we could have hoped. Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes. For this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.

"Those you see there," answered his master, "with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long."

"Look, your worship,'' said Sancho. "What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turned by the wind make the millstone go."

"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that you are not used to this business of adventures. Those are giants, and if you are afraid, away with you out of here and betake yourself to prayer, while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat."”