By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

By Hook or by Crook, I realized it was not going to be like that. In piecing together my journey, telling my ‘Voices’ story, and researching the answers to my notebook questions, I found still more linguistic side roads that I could not resist exploring. A surprising number of questions have more than one answer. This book includes them all. I suppose it might be called ‘stream-of-consciousness linguistics’.

      DAVID CRYSTAL

       Holyhead, 2006

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK

       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