Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 September 22

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September 22

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.

What is the origin of this phrase? 92.25.66.15 (talk) 15:25, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

See, for example, the "Etymology of title" section of Early Doors. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:29, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Here's the direct link. StuRat (talk) 16:11, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

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)

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. Dbfirs 20:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

This article associates the phrase with Ron Atkinson, which rings some bells with me. Ghmyrtle (talk) 20:56, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

At the end of the day, Jimmy, that's a Big Phrase from Big Ron. But John Ayto seems to know what he's talking about.... "such a clever player" Martinevans123 (talk) 21:18, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

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)

What are they saying in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofV_iFBw2YE — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.103.12.173 (talk) 19:06, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Not sure. I don't think it's intelligible English. It could be some other language, but I don't recognize it at all. --Jayron32 01:49, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Somebody in the comment section said it was Romanian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.103.12.173 (talk) 02:16, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

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)

Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.103.12.173 (talk) 03:03, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Great Vowel Shift

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)

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)

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. --Jayron32 01:45, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

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)

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)

Patricia M. Wolfe Linguistic Change and the Great Vowel Shift in English]. Seth Lerer Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language bot probably provide some general background. Kristin Denham & Anne Lobeck Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction is viewable online in preview form. In discussing the Great Vowel Shift, they state "During the Middle English period..." was when it happened, noting "It was a gradual process that began [in the 14th century] and continued through the [early 17th century]" Recent research, it should be noted, has called into question whether the concept known as the "Great Vowel Shift" is even a valid linguistic concept, see This paper for example. I hope those all lead you in good directions in your research. --Jayron32 14:40, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

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)

Kamil Kazmierski Vowel-Shifting in the English Language: An Evolutionary Account seems to look at a variety of historical perspectives and research into the causes of the Great Vowel Shift. Just one quote I found. It's a recent book, and from perusing it, while it doesn't itself seem to settle on a definitive cause, it does discuss many of the different perspectives many authors have on the cause. --Jayron32 16:48, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

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."

PS: Go All Blacks!--Shirt58 (talk) 09:54, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

I'll chup in with an amen to that. Go All Blacks! Akld guy (talk) 11:06, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

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. --Jayron32 04:34, 28 September 2015 (UTC)