By Hook Or By Crook

A Journey in Search of English

David Crystal

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780007284061
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

1

By Hook or by Crook

GAERWEN

‘It’s a Welsh accent, ye see.’

I looked again at the sheep, and then at the farmer. Was he having me on? His face was old, lined, and very serious. The price of sheep was down today, and he had six ewes at auction. He was not in a joking mood.

All I had wanted to do was start a conversation. I was in Gaerwen sheep market, in the east of Anglesey in North Wales, on a Wednesday morning in June 2005, looking for regional accents. Gaer – wen. That’s ‘fort white’ in Welsh, though there’s no trace of any fort now. The Romans passed through once, so maybe it was one of theirs.

I was travelling all around the country, as part of the BBC ‘Voices’ project, and this was one of the days in the north. The programme researcher had been tasked to find some local people who would interview well. She had found one, in the form of Simon, the Gaerwen auctioneer, and we had arranged to meet him before the day’s auction started. And thus I found myself in the stockyard, surrounded by 1,500 noisy sheep.

The producer wanted ‘actuality’. She gave me a digital tape recorder and suggested I wander round and find interesting people to talk to with typical local voices. That suited me fine. I know what an Anglesey accent sounds like. I was brought up in the county as a child, and live there again now. But it’s one thing knowing an accent, and quite another seeing it in the faces around you. From a phonetic point of view, all faces look the same.

I spotted a good prospect. A tall, craggy man, aged I thought about seventy, who was shepherding some sheep into a pen with his staff. He was one of the oldest farmers there – a classic local accent if ever I saw one. I switched on the tape recorder, and squelched my way towards him, suddenly aware why everyone else in the yard was wearing boots.

He pushed the last ewe into the pen and lugged the gate shut behind it. What should I talk about? I decided to ask him about his staff, which was puzzling me. It was a long, thin pole, and it didn’t have a curved end. I don’t know much about sheep, but I do know that shepherds’ sticks are supposed to have crooks. That’s their name. A shepherd’s crook. Why wasn’t his curved?

He looked at me and my tape recorder and my splattered trousers without any evident emotion.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Nice day.’

‘Ay,’ he replied, ‘it’s a brave morning.’ In a broad Scots voice.

I temporarily lost the power of speech. My crook question fled. I was definitely in Gaerwen, not in Glasgow. If my tape recorder could have spoken, it would have said, in the manner of Hal, the onboard computer in 2001, ‘I don’t think you want to be doing this, Dave.’ Certainly my producer wouldn’t want me collaborating with non- Welsh accents. We were short of time as it was. I looked around. She was nowhere to be seen, so I reckoned I could get away with a few moments of surreptitious conversation.

I just had to find out what was going on. I switched my machine off and took the ram, as it were, by the horns.

‘I’m here making a programme about Welsh accents, but I don’t think I’m asking the right person!’

He laughed. ‘Yee’re right theere, laddie.’

Laddie! I couldn’t remember the last time I was called laddie. Have I ever been called laddie? Still, at age sixty-five, if someone offers you a youth credit, you accept it gladly.

‘So where are you from?’ I asked him.

‘Llanfairpwll,’ he said.

Now, in case you are wondering, Llanfairpwll is not in Scotland. It is a small village in the east of Anglesey. Lots of sheep-farming over that way. A very Welsh area. Its name has archetypal status, as in its full form it is the longest name in the British Isles, with fifty-eight letters. Not in the world – a place in New Zealand is longer.

Place-names like that don’t come up naturally. The historical name of the village was already quite long – Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll – but that was because of the way names work in Wales. I know two men near where I live, Dick Jones who drives a taxi, and Dick Jones who works on the ferry-boats. One is called Dick Jones Taxi and the other Dick Jones Ferry, or Dick Taxi and Dick Ferry for short. It’s the same with place-names. There are lots of places called Llanfair. Llan in Welsh means ‘church’; fair is a form of Mair, ‘Mary’. Together the words mean ‘Mary’s Church’. To distinguish them, something gets added on. The Anglesey Mary’s Church was located by a hollow (pwll). In fact, by a hollow near a white hazel (pwll – gwyn – gyll). So that’s what they called it.

That’s how it was for centuries. Then in the 1800s, the railway was built between Chester and Holyhead, and Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll was on the route. A local committee was formed to think of ways of encouraging the trains, travellers, and tourists to stop there. A cobbler from the nearby town of Menai Bridge came up with the fifty-eight-letter name:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch

The town council adopted it. It was one of the most successful travel marketing ploys ever.

When you live in Anglesey, learning the name by heart is a child rite of linguistic passage. You can then spend the rest of your life correcting English-speakers who say it all wrong apart from the last three syllables. But it isn’t so hard if you remember that w and y are vowels in Welsh, f is pronounced like an English v, and the double-l is exactly like an English l, but without any buzzing of the vocal cords. Try it. Say l, and notice where your tongue is – hard against the ridge behind your top teeth. Keep it there, and just push the air past the sides of your tongue. That’s the Welsh double-l. Then you can go for the name, splitting it up into its meaningful bits:

Llan

fair

pwll

gwyn gyll

Church (of) Mary (in the) hollow (of the) white hazel

goger y

chwyrn drobwll

llan

tysilio

gogo goch

near the rapid whirlpool (and) church of (St) Tysilio (by the) red cave.

Locals never use the long name. Life is too short. They even avoid the official shorter version. Instead they abbreviate it, and say either Llanfairpwll or Llanfair P.G.

The full name is actually used as a valid domain name on the Internet. A domain name can have up to sixty-seven characters. They have to be 0 to 9, a to z, or the hyphen. The dot and what follows it count in the total – so, for instance, if your domain name ends in .com, that would be four characters, leaving you with sixty-three. In fact, someone has already registered Llanfair’s full name with an additional five letters in it, making up the sixty-three. The extra five letters are uchaf, which means ‘higher’ in Welsh. It would be like saying ‘Upper Llanfair…’– like Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds.

Actually, technically, the full Llanfair name has only fifty-one letters, as the double-l counts as a single letter in Welsh. But Internet software usually assumes that all languages work like English.

You can’t beat the ingenuity of the people of Llanfairpwll, though you can try. Years later, another Welsh town, further south, in Cardiganshire, decided to do the same thing, and thought up a sixty-six-letter name. It never caught on. A country can only get away with this kind of creative name-building once.

There’s a joke told about an American tourist who bought a postcard in Llanfairpwll, and stopped for a coffee at the nearby Little Chef. She studied the full name on the card intently, then asked the waitress, ‘Can you tell me how to pronounce the place we’re in?’ And the waitress said, slowly and distinctly: ‘Lit – tle Chef.’

English doesn’t go in for long place-names. Indeed, the language as a whole doesn’t go in for long words. I know there are competitions to find ‘the longest word in English’, and the winners always earn a place in the Guinness Book of Records. But that makes the point, really. Long words are the exceptions, so they fascinate us. Even quite young kids play with them. I learned to say antidisestablishmentarianism when I was nine. I still don’t know what it means. There’s no special interest in long words in Greenland Eskimo, where most of the words are lengthy.

Nobody knows what the longest word in English really is, anyway. That would be a scientific term – probably one of the terms in chemistry for some unbelievably complex molecule. No scientist would ever say it, of course. So when people hold competitions, there is usually a rider – the ‘longest word in an English dictionary’. Which is also a cheat. Dictionaries don’t always agree. If it’s the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it would be the forty-five-letter

pneumonoultramictoscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

sometimes spelled with a k instead of its last c. It is a lung disease caused by breathing in particles of siliceous volcanic dust. It is another cheat. It was coined in 1935 by Everett Smith, the president of the US National Puzzlers’ League, purely for the purpose of making sure he had found the longest word.

You can look for the longest word for ever, and not reach agreement about it. Does supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins count? Or is that excluded because it is a nonsense word? I don’t know.

Llanfairpwll may be recognized as having the longest place-name in the UK, but it isn’t the longest one in English. There are lakes in the USA, named in American Indian languages, which are much longer. And there is the eighty-five-letter monster in New Zealand, coming from Maori. But there’s nothing to match it in the UK. The nearest is the eighteen-letter Blakehopeburnhaugh, a hamlet in the Redesdale Forest in Northumberland. The name is a combination of four words of Old English origin – ‘black’ + ‘valley’ + ‘stream’ + ‘area of flat riverside land’. I think it’s the longest. I haven’t found anywhere longer with Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to Celtic) origins – yet.

If you go there – as a linguist would, just to see – you might notice a sign to Cottonshopeburnfoot, half a mile up the valley, and think to yourself, wait a minute, that’s got nineteen letters. But spaces and hyphens aren’t usually allowed to count, when you’re searching for long place-names. It has to be a single word. And on the Ordnance Survey map this place is written Cottonshopeburn Foot.

You could cheat, of course, and let hyphens in. Then you will find Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset, Winchester-on-the-Severn in Maryland, and a host of others. I don’t know what the longest hyphenated place-name is in England. Someone will probably write and tell me. I’d like to know. It would be another piece fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of facts that make up the English language.

The valley of Redesdale is an interesting place. It has for centuries been an important route from England into Scotland. Today it contains the A68, winding its way towards Jedburgh and Edinburgh. Spectacular scenery, well worth a leisurely drive. The road crosses the border six miles to the north-west of Carter Bar.

Carter Bar was the scene of one of the last battles fought between the English and the Scots – the so-called Redeswire Fray. A fray is a ‘fight’. It’s a shortened version of the word affray. Neither word is used much now, except in legal contexts. But it may be getting a new lease of life. It is the name of a UK rock band as well as of a fantasy comic- book by Joss Whedon, the creator of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The fight was in 1575. The Warden of the English Marches had an argument with the Keeper of Liddesdale, and it escalated into a violent confrontation. Several men were killed. The English had the worst of it. The irony is that the meeting took place on a day of truce, and both men had been employed to keep the peace on their own side of the border.

I knew my Scottish farmer was local when he said ‘Llanfairpwll’. Only locals say that. Moreover, he said the Welsh ‘double-l’ very accurately. He had obviously lived here long enough to master it. But that didn’t make sense. How could he have lived here so long and yet kept his Scottish accent so strong?

‘How long have you been in Anglesey, then?’ I asked him.

‘I came here in ’65.’

I did a swift calculation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface 
• Chapter One: By Hook Or By Crook
• Chapter Two: Making A Beeline
• Chapter Three: We Want Information
• Chapter Four: Where Are You From?
• Chapter Five: Good Evening, Each
• Chapter Six: Book-Browser Syndrome
• Chapter Seven: Now Godiva Was A Lady
• Chapter Eight: The Robot’s Not Working
• Chapter Nine: Who Was Leonard Slye?
• Chapter Ten: Shall We Shog?
• Chapter Eleven: A Rash Of Dermatologists
• Chapter Twelve: A Wheelbarrow Called Wilberforce
• Chapter Thirteen: How Do You Like Your Eggs?
• Chapter Fourteen: My Husband Is Without
• Chapter Fifteen: I’m Jack
• On The Way
• Index Of Places: Index Of People And Characters: Index Of Topics
• Index Of People And Characters
• Index Of Topics
• Copyright
• About the Publisher