Re: Flag of England

Dan Jones wrote:

> Tha cossen knaow wh' oi'm goawin on 'baowt? On' wha' ur tha talkin abaowt
> wi' the vaowls akemmin? Moi vaowls ur jus' as roit a' any Englishmon? Iss
> jus' as well th'art in oislan', owther Oi'd be comin' ter speak funny at
> tha.
Better a regional accent any day than RP, "the silliest and dwabliest of
all the English dialects" (another phoneticist named Jones, I believe).

> Actually, well I'm at it, I've just remembered something about the West
> Midlands dialect, "that" used as a relative pronoun (eg. "the book THAT Sue
> gave me") is often pronounced "at" or "as", maybe a loan from Old Norse "at"
> (as in "veit ek AT ek hakk")
This is the normal relative pronoun in Scots as well:  the well-known Burns
song "Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled" is totally ungrammatical and should be
"Scots at hae wi Wallace bled".

I suspect that the English cognate is not "that" at all but "what":
"Scots what have bled with Wallace" would be fairly ordinary non-standard
English.

--

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