On Jul 9, 10:11 am, Paul Burke <p...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> FCS wrote:
> > Maybe I haven't lived enough places. But it does
> > seem that plenty of cities have pub's named The
> > Town Crier, but very few towns do.
>
> Leaving the apocatastrophe aside, I find from a quick Google search that
> there are pubs of that name in the towns of Weston-super-Mud, South
> Woodham Ferrers, Monmouth, Chelmsford, Bexhill on Sea, and Exmouth.
> That's before I ran out of patience. What brought that comment on?
A memory which occasionally needs to be reminded
of things. I'm glad I did bung it up here, albeit
attracted a variety of mutterings and accusations
I could interpret as a ci***locution of "**** off"
Town Criers are a long-standing tradition and I'm
working on the basis that Canterbury and Winchester
were counted as "cities" by Chaucer's time and the
word is credited as OFr (via L) rather than simply
of Latin from the Roman Era, yet the word town is
of Germanic origin.
Now I've the chance to sit down with a dictionary
open I see: "town" has a subsidiary definition which
does include cities in that it applies to the centre
(and this usage is consistent with people's usages
in smaller cities I've lived in); that "crier" is
listed on its own as a functional role, albeit only
pertaining to the culture of a court of justice in
contem****ary usage.
As people say of mutations in Welsh, once you are
a speaker of the language the mutations come as
second nature because they are easier to say.
With this in mind I had been thinking along the lines
of it being due both to the stress pattern of the
rhythm of the consonants and the contrast in vowel
sounds with the tongue low in the mouth for town, and
higher for crier.
But having clarified my understanding of the range
of traditional and historical meanings of "town" to
include the commercial and administratiive centres
of cities, the areas around which town criers would
walk to orate the news I now suggest that familiarity
alone may be why it seems (to me as a first-language
Anglophone) somehow easier to say than "city crier",
although the nearest equivalents we do have, being
the street-vendors of newspapers, tend to drop the
"ti" syllable in "city" when advertising vocally
(In My eXperience)
> Paul Burke
That's all really. It interests me. It is language
use in a cultural context that so far as I know is
distinctly British if not exclusively English. Even
if you lot think I'm sad ****ing windbag waste-of-
bandwidth (streamed any movies recently?) I asked
out of interest.
G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
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