Numatic George

[netibiza]

Has anyone got one? and if so can you please tell me how the shampooing bit works, I have managed to soak all carpets and not a drop has been sucked up. My main confusion is do I have to switch between showering water, and sucking up in the same operation? I too scared to try it in case it blows up! Easy instructions please and thank you.

[Robinia]

who ate all the easter eggs?

[jno]

I confess...

[Robinia]

morning tout....

well I never thought I'd say this but for that contribution jno you need a good >thwack< with the W'sW......and does Her Maj know you're wearing her best dressing gown?

what day is it?

[netibiza]

Happy Easter everyone - am off for another damned lunch and (no doubt) a bottle of headache.. It's very quiet in here lately. Love the piccys - poor George is cupboard bound at the moment as there's no room for him. Am having to use my LG vacumn cleaner instead and it's not the same,. Ate my choccy egg on Friday, so will have to pinch some of Mr N's.

[Robinia]

tut....s'pose that means I'll have to keep the music down again.
I've got an LG Intello washer....should be called LG Thicko.......

[shaneystar2]

Happy Easter

Hope you are all OK ..I have my brother and sister in law here for the weekend from Suffolk ....we are all going out to lunch later . Have a good weekend everyone ..see you all anon.

[DaSwede]

What day it is, Robinia...? I'll tell you what day it is. It's Reckoning Day for The Derby Laundry for what they did to my jammies.

Thought I'd tell you all a bit about my own personal regional accent. If you're not interested in that sort of thing, just skip this entire composition, that's okay.

I originally come from Sk�ne, the southernmost part of Sweden. The accent is called sk�nska. Opinion polls show and have always shown that most Swedes find it quaint at best; by many it's held in contempt and perceived as plebeian. The first time I saw Gone With the Wind the translator had chosen to set the Swedish subtitles in sk�nska to convey the idiom of the Dixieland slaves - hysterically funny, I thought, but what an absurd injustice to both sides!

(continued below)

[DaSwede]

(continued) When television introduced sk�nska-speaking presenters there was a public outcry surpassed only by the one that was still echoing from the first days of women presenters...

I have fond feelings for my accent and have never attempted to put a damper on it. It's boisterous and tender at the same time, with great potential of being gentle. So when people sometimes 'compliment' me that my accent is "not so coarse", that line isn't really a success with me. They aren't referring to vocabulary alone, it's articulation issues as well.

So downtrodden has this accent been that up till a few decades ago no one had really thought to sing in sk�nska (except as an amusing variety turn.) But once a few people made a break for it, there was no denying how brutally singable it really is.

The song as such is a tribute to Swedish football player Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Vinny and Jude will know. (You there, Jude?)

[DaSwede]

Gotta go, got a date with Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison! See y'all soon!

[jno]

so where does the 'standard' version of Swedish come from, Kit? The capital? I believe the version of English that prevailed back in the Middle Ages - not just the accent but the whole dialect , and the one that has developed into modern English (and American) - was from the Cambridge region rather than the London version, though nobody quite knows why.

[Robinia]

wakey wakey...it's washday! bit cooler but bright & breezy here

oops, sorry about the pj's Kit....it'll be that mrs scrubbit overdoing the Robin starch....you'd better have
her weekday ones
I daren't show you her weekend wear....ooooh....

Funnily enough I've been meaning to ask if you had an accent.....
you all sound like this man to me......hehe

<dons colander & legs it> > > > > > >

[jno]

holy moses, the sun is still shining, that's four days now... the temperature not unadjacent to 20 degrees...

http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/144609.html

... I'm not fooled, though, it'll be snow tomorrow

[Robinia]

nooo, I think the snow will wait for the next holiday jno...Whitsun, or whatever we call it now.
My garden will look like that pic soon....I was only just thinking that this year there's been none of that lovely mild, wet, woodyness that I love about spring.

[netibiza]

Good day - pouring with rain and freezing cold here. Have finally sorted daughter's mobile phone, and Mr N has bought her lots of clothes, and even I got a new pair of trainers - hers cost 85� and mine cost 7.50� (think I'm doing something wrong). Ache all over and got absolutely drenched, ate in MacDonald's which I hate with a vengeance, but I had a happy meal (Huh?) and got a sweet little toy dog. Home again, just had hot bath and now off to collect Mr N's van from the garage.

Hope you all enjoy your Bank Holiday . it's a normal day over here, well, as normal as they can be!!!

[VINNY100_2]

Good afternoon mange touts...
tis a lovely day ere...Ive cleaned 4 carpets and 2 sofas..(in my own pad)cleaned all the windows....and going to paint the shed in the garden this arfty.....bloomin heck..should have gone to work instead.....Ive got an old metal coal bunker down the garden....full of old rubbish....I climbed inside and a bloody big rat climbed up me leg...if there was an olympic sport for jumping out of coal bunkers,I would have won the gold...hehe..! catch you later dudes....(:O)
Hiya kip...yes i think arsenal tried to sign him a few years back...good footballer...did he play for malmo?

[netibiza]

for Vinny

[DaSwede]

Good evening, possums.

Yes he played for Malm� FF, Vinny, grew up in the projects and has become something of a hero for many of the immigrants there. Me I just like the song...

The Swedish Chef... yes, as a matter of fact Robinia I can actually understand why Swedish would sound like that to one who is not as it were distracted by the word meanings. I love him!

Is there a difference between 'regional accent' and 'dialect'? If so, I should probably have used the word dialect to describe sk�nska / Scanian (you can read more about for instance the Danish connection here, if you're interested.)

To answer your question jno (here comes another essay, okay to skip it!) it's not easy to define what Standard Swedish is, even. If you ask the man on the street, they'd probably exemplify by naming an actor or a radio or teve news presenter or, further back, by referring to the clergy. According to an article in Wikipedia we started to strive for a written standard as far back as the 14th century. Later on, in the 16th century, the books that needed to be translated in connection with the Protestant Reformation were translated by a learned class in, yes, the surroundings of Stockholm's lake M�laren, and so, it was their vocabulary and use of grammar that would become the norm. We also wanted to separate ourselves from the Danish, and the variety of Swedish that was used in this area served that purpose well.

(continued below)

[DaSwede]

(continued) But when it comes to spoken standard Swedish, that's trickier. Again, the clergy has been influential in spreading the correctly pronounced word and the concept of that lingered on. Radio and teve have been pretty strict (not so much anymore), and up until the last few decades of the 20th century our schools were officially still supposed to apply 'pronunciation hygiene.' I don't believe anyone has really applied anything in this country for the past thirty years or so... but earlier on, things could be tough for children who moved from one part of the country to another. They were often sent to the speech therapist for correction. I suspect Sweden was very much more influenced by Germany at that time than we'd care to remember - I mean, 'pronunciation hygiene' - say no more, say no more. (My mother once told me that one of her sisters had a picture of Adolf pinned to the wall in the girls' room, "because he built roads and everything." Yeah he did, didn't he.)

To sum this up, I think that spoken Standard Swedish today probably means spoken Swedish with as few regional giveaways as possible, or, to put it kinder, spoken in a way that may be understood by as many people as possible. We are an extremely elongated country and there are great regional differences, so it is, I must admit, practical to have some kind of norm for media and actors at least. What gets to me is when people pretend not to understand even when they do, twisting their faces up as if to say "Well maybe just maybe if I concentrate ever so hard I just might be able to understand what you're saying."

[DaSwede]

Gotta go, another hot date tonight, this time with Robbie Coltrane, as in Cracker. He's sooo good, don't you think...? Bye for now.

[jno]

thanks for that, Kit. I hadn't thought about the influence clergy might have on a language. I think accent is just the way you pronounce words; dialect may include vocabulary as well, so that's the distinction I had in mind. In Britain the 'standard' has been 'BBC English' for many years but this is changing too; you don't hear many strong regional accents on 'official' radio/TV programmes but in drama it's very common. One particular example is 'estuary English' - the accent of people around the Thames estuary, mostly working class. It's particularly notable for the use of the glottal stop - in other words, pronounced glo'al stop, not saying the letter T between two vowels. This is now quite common, especially among young people, in places far from the Thames. Sounds horrible, imho, and I always used to urge my young son to say his Ts otherwise he would have trouble staying in the middle class. Fortunately he obeyed me, which is rather unusual, but I figured if he had to turn to crime because of a lower-class accent he wouldn't be able to support me in my old age!