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September 22 Information
Early doors
In this story
[1] in chapter 10, They was the people, the writer says
He gets up early doors, comes home as late as you like.
As a Brit, I don't recall hearing the term at all before it came to be used by sports people and commentators, probably in about the 1990s. Do we know in what part of the country the use of the phrase originated?
Ghmyrtle (
talk)
16:39, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
It didn't originate in my part of northern England, and I've hardly ever heard the expression used. The OED cites the first theatrical use in the Liverpool Mercury in 1877, but the first use in the modern sense by
Brian Clough quoted in The Observer in 1979. He moved around a lot, so this doesn't help with the region of origin, but the football popularisation of the expression seems likely.
Dbfirs20:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
This blog posting has a fairly comprehensive discussion of the phrase. "Drinking early doors" was a common-enough expression in Cheshire in the 70's.
Tevildo (
talk)
00:35, 24 September 2015 (UTC)reply
I looked further into the comments and what seems to be a reliable answer from hAnnah f. was, "This guy is a Czech and he was even in the TV news after publishing this video a couple of years ago. The original video is called “Šílený Ota” (“Crazy Ota” – Ota is a Czech name). Translation: 'Do you wanna see how the madman looks like? This is how he looks like!' runs into the wall"
In the "Šílený Ota" video
[2] I found similar answers: from vyjuk kul, "He says: 'A fool? You want see a fool? This is fool!", from osobnostx, "He says : Do you want to know how crazy man looks? I will show you......and jump", from MikeTheLama, "You want to know how does a freak look? This is how freak looks! *splash* thats the translate.", from Lawyer Dog, "'You want to see how to look like a fool!? Here's how to look like a fool!'", and from Denis Šebesta, "@Paool3107 They had a word fight about how does the real madman look. So he told something like: Do you wanna se how does the madman look! This is how he look! and then he ran :D"
Rainbow unicorn (
talk)
16:55, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Why did it happen? Question isn't addressed at
Phonological history of English,
English phonology, or even
Great Vowel Shift. I'm finding lots of stuff on Google, but it's a mix of stuff like
[3], academics' personal pages that may or may not be solid (in this example, is Dr. Wheeler a specialist in this, a linguist in another field, or a professor of engineering?) with stuff like
[4], personal websites and other completely untrustworthy stuff. I'd like to add at least a little to the Shift article, whether it be "It happened because of X", or "Different philologists suggest that it happened because of X, Y, or Z", or "Philologists doubt that the cause can be identified".
Nyttend (
talk)
21:32, 22 September 2015 (UTC)reply
There's probably never going to be a definitive answer to this, just as with other instances of historical language change. The thing is that any attempt at an actual explanation would hit the problem of the "butterfly effect" known from
chaos theory. It's a bit like with explaining weather phenomena: scientists can form pretty good models about why and how hurricanes develop over tropical oceans. But trying to "explain" why one particular hurricane arose exactly on the day it did and in the place it did (and not a week later and a hundred miles further east) will probably be futile. In linguistics, it is always easy to "explain" why a certain change could plausibly happen and what general mechanisms drove it forward, but explaining why it happened exactly at a certain place and time (and didn't affect the neighbouring dialect a few miles down the country, where the preconditions for it would have been just as favourable) is pretty much impossible. With vowel shifts of the GVS type, the general mechanism has to do with the physiological fact that whenever a speaker randomly happens to produce instances of a vowel that are slightly off the intended target, they are more likely to be noticed (and possibly reacted to, imitated, etc.) by hearers if they are a bit "higher" in the vowel space than if they are lower, which is the reason chain shifts – if and when they happen – usually go "upwards" (towards closer, more front vowels) than the other way. In this respect, the GVS was rather typical. But why did it happen at that time and place? In linguistics, the "butterflies" in the system are social evaluations – linguistic trends and fashions that arise because some social group suddenly finds some reason to regard some random idiosyncratic speech style associated with some other social group as cool, and starts to imitate it (and in so doing, usually overshoots the mark). What groups those might have been in 1450? No idea. Maybe something going on in the linguistic melting pot that was London at the time.
The best treatment of the issue I know is
William Labov's (monumental) Principles of Linguistic Change, which in its first volume includes a pretty thorough discussion of the systemic, language-internal factors that generally make vowel shifts work according to patterns similar to the GVS, and in its later volumes attempts to observe the actions of the "butterflies" close-up, in real time, looking at local communities and even individual speakers in the present-day US in order to find out how their social behaviours might be influencing the language now.
Fut.Perf.☼22:08, 22 September 2015 (UTC)reply
These sorts of things happen gradually, over time and space, such that vowels shifted in different places at different times, and accents came and went over time. You're not going to nail it down to a specific date, like on October 21, 1403 everyone suddenly instantly decided to change how they spoke. There are still vowel shifts going on in places today (see
New Zealand English, known for it's "fush and chups" vowel system, or the
High tider and
Old Virginia accents, which many contend are actually unshifted and how English was spoken back in the 1600s). There is not now, nor has there ever been, a universal, immutable, unchanging form of the English language. We only have snapshots of the language at specific times and places. --
Jayron3201:45, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
So will either of you give me scholarly sources that address this question? I don't want your opinions, even though they make sense: I come to the reference desk for references.
Nyttend (
talk)
13:10, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Try this one
[5] for starters: Smith, Jerermy (2015), "The historical evolution of English pronunciation", in Marnie Reed & John M. Levis (eds.), The Handbook of English Pronunciation, Malden: Wiley Blackwell, p.3–19.
Fut.Perf.☼13:37, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Thanks. Just noting, though, that the Wolfe volume is rather old (from the early 1970s), and as such bound to lack the methodological underpinnings of current historical linguistic theory (as informed by Labovian sociolinguistics), and thus probably outdated when it comes to questions of possible causation, although it may of course still be rich in valid philological data. Denham and Lobeck are a simple textbook-level introduction, but don't seem to offer anything about causation in the sense Nyttend was asking for. The fourth
[6] ref you gave is a mere student termpaper, so definitely not useable as a RS (though a look at its reference list might provide some pointers). Finally, the Lerer book
[7] is a curiously personal, highly nonconventional treatment and hardly within the mainstream of current historical linguistics; browsing through its section on the GVS I struggle to find any solid factual claims that could be used for this discussion.
Fut.Perf.☼16:40, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
About "There are still vowel shifts going on in places today (see
New Zealand English, known for it's "fush and chups" vowel system": Kiwis tell me that, when Australians say "fish and chips", it sounds sorta like "feesh and cheeps" to them.
C'mon, 'fess up, people who actually know stuff about linguistics: from the perspective of a layperson fascinated by phonology, it would appear the answer to the question "Great Vowel Shift - why did it happen?" is actually "why do any changes in languages happen? They just do."
Many changes are, in fact, arbitrary, such as
drift, and linguistic science isn't very predictive, in the sense that linguists cannot take any language and predict with any reliability what changes will happen to it over time. Linguistic laws (for example
Grimm's law) are descriptive rather than predictive. In some cases, there are good linguistic principles that can explain, a posteriori, why some changes have happened, for example as language users come into contact with one another, things like
Calques and
Loanwords occur reliably, and processes such as
creolization are fairly well understood, but again, linguists cannot predict what changes will occur with reliability. --
Jayron3204:34, 28 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the
current reference desk pages.
September 22 Information
Early doors
In this story
[1] in chapter 10, They was the people, the writer says
He gets up early doors, comes home as late as you like.
As a Brit, I don't recall hearing the term at all before it came to be used by sports people and commentators, probably in about the 1990s. Do we know in what part of the country the use of the phrase originated?
Ghmyrtle (
talk)
16:39, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
It didn't originate in my part of northern England, and I've hardly ever heard the expression used. The OED cites the first theatrical use in the Liverpool Mercury in 1877, but the first use in the modern sense by
Brian Clough quoted in The Observer in 1979. He moved around a lot, so this doesn't help with the region of origin, but the football popularisation of the expression seems likely.
Dbfirs20:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
This blog posting has a fairly comprehensive discussion of the phrase. "Drinking early doors" was a common-enough expression in Cheshire in the 70's.
Tevildo (
talk)
00:35, 24 September 2015 (UTC)reply
I looked further into the comments and what seems to be a reliable answer from hAnnah f. was, "This guy is a Czech and he was even in the TV news after publishing this video a couple of years ago. The original video is called “Šílený Ota” (“Crazy Ota” – Ota is a Czech name). Translation: 'Do you wanna see how the madman looks like? This is how he looks like!' runs into the wall"
In the "Šílený Ota" video
[2] I found similar answers: from vyjuk kul, "He says: 'A fool? You want see a fool? This is fool!", from osobnostx, "He says : Do you want to know how crazy man looks? I will show you......and jump", from MikeTheLama, "You want to know how does a freak look? This is how freak looks! *splash* thats the translate.", from Lawyer Dog, "'You want to see how to look like a fool!? Here's how to look like a fool!'", and from Denis Šebesta, "@Paool3107 They had a word fight about how does the real madman look. So he told something like: Do you wanna se how does the madman look! This is how he look! and then he ran :D"
Rainbow unicorn (
talk)
16:55, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Why did it happen? Question isn't addressed at
Phonological history of English,
English phonology, or even
Great Vowel Shift. I'm finding lots of stuff on Google, but it's a mix of stuff like
[3], academics' personal pages that may or may not be solid (in this example, is Dr. Wheeler a specialist in this, a linguist in another field, or a professor of engineering?) with stuff like
[4], personal websites and other completely untrustworthy stuff. I'd like to add at least a little to the Shift article, whether it be "It happened because of X", or "Different philologists suggest that it happened because of X, Y, or Z", or "Philologists doubt that the cause can be identified".
Nyttend (
talk)
21:32, 22 September 2015 (UTC)reply
There's probably never going to be a definitive answer to this, just as with other instances of historical language change. The thing is that any attempt at an actual explanation would hit the problem of the "butterfly effect" known from
chaos theory. It's a bit like with explaining weather phenomena: scientists can form pretty good models about why and how hurricanes develop over tropical oceans. But trying to "explain" why one particular hurricane arose exactly on the day it did and in the place it did (and not a week later and a hundred miles further east) will probably be futile. In linguistics, it is always easy to "explain" why a certain change could plausibly happen and what general mechanisms drove it forward, but explaining why it happened exactly at a certain place and time (and didn't affect the neighbouring dialect a few miles down the country, where the preconditions for it would have been just as favourable) is pretty much impossible. With vowel shifts of the GVS type, the general mechanism has to do with the physiological fact that whenever a speaker randomly happens to produce instances of a vowel that are slightly off the intended target, they are more likely to be noticed (and possibly reacted to, imitated, etc.) by hearers if they are a bit "higher" in the vowel space than if they are lower, which is the reason chain shifts – if and when they happen – usually go "upwards" (towards closer, more front vowels) than the other way. In this respect, the GVS was rather typical. But why did it happen at that time and place? In linguistics, the "butterflies" in the system are social evaluations – linguistic trends and fashions that arise because some social group suddenly finds some reason to regard some random idiosyncratic speech style associated with some other social group as cool, and starts to imitate it (and in so doing, usually overshoots the mark). What groups those might have been in 1450? No idea. Maybe something going on in the linguistic melting pot that was London at the time.
The best treatment of the issue I know is
William Labov's (monumental) Principles of Linguistic Change, which in its first volume includes a pretty thorough discussion of the systemic, language-internal factors that generally make vowel shifts work according to patterns similar to the GVS, and in its later volumes attempts to observe the actions of the "butterflies" close-up, in real time, looking at local communities and even individual speakers in the present-day US in order to find out how their social behaviours might be influencing the language now.
Fut.Perf.☼22:08, 22 September 2015 (UTC)reply
These sorts of things happen gradually, over time and space, such that vowels shifted in different places at different times, and accents came and went over time. You're not going to nail it down to a specific date, like on October 21, 1403 everyone suddenly instantly decided to change how they spoke. There are still vowel shifts going on in places today (see
New Zealand English, known for it's "fush and chups" vowel system, or the
High tider and
Old Virginia accents, which many contend are actually unshifted and how English was spoken back in the 1600s). There is not now, nor has there ever been, a universal, immutable, unchanging form of the English language. We only have snapshots of the language at specific times and places. --
Jayron3201:45, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
So will either of you give me scholarly sources that address this question? I don't want your opinions, even though they make sense: I come to the reference desk for references.
Nyttend (
talk)
13:10, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Try this one
[5] for starters: Smith, Jerermy (2015), "The historical evolution of English pronunciation", in Marnie Reed & John M. Levis (eds.), The Handbook of English Pronunciation, Malden: Wiley Blackwell, p.3–19.
Fut.Perf.☼13:37, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
Thanks. Just noting, though, that the Wolfe volume is rather old (from the early 1970s), and as such bound to lack the methodological underpinnings of current historical linguistic theory (as informed by Labovian sociolinguistics), and thus probably outdated when it comes to questions of possible causation, although it may of course still be rich in valid philological data. Denham and Lobeck are a simple textbook-level introduction, but don't seem to offer anything about causation in the sense Nyttend was asking for. The fourth
[6] ref you gave is a mere student termpaper, so definitely not useable as a RS (though a look at its reference list might provide some pointers). Finally, the Lerer book
[7] is a curiously personal, highly nonconventional treatment and hardly within the mainstream of current historical linguistics; browsing through its section on the GVS I struggle to find any solid factual claims that could be used for this discussion.
Fut.Perf.☼16:40, 23 September 2015 (UTC)reply
About "There are still vowel shifts going on in places today (see
New Zealand English, known for it's "fush and chups" vowel system": Kiwis tell me that, when Australians say "fish and chips", it sounds sorta like "feesh and cheeps" to them.
C'mon, 'fess up, people who actually know stuff about linguistics: from the perspective of a layperson fascinated by phonology, it would appear the answer to the question "Great Vowel Shift - why did it happen?" is actually "why do any changes in languages happen? They just do."
Many changes are, in fact, arbitrary, such as
drift, and linguistic science isn't very predictive, in the sense that linguists cannot take any language and predict with any reliability what changes will happen to it over time. Linguistic laws (for example
Grimm's law) are descriptive rather than predictive. In some cases, there are good linguistic principles that can explain, a posteriori, why some changes have happened, for example as language users come into contact with one another, things like
Calques and
Loanwords occur reliably, and processes such as
creolization are fairly well understood, but again, linguists cannot predict what changes will occur with reliability. --
Jayron3204:34, 28 September 2015 (UTC)reply