QUIMPER-VANNES

This article: Villagers dash hopes of a helpful hyphen to tackle Welsh tongue-twisters  suggests the introduction of hyphens to make Welsh place names easier to pronounce.  It makes sense, because the hyphens separate place name elements and clearly identify where the word stress has to be placed.  But I think it's the letters that fox most people. For example:  w for 'oo'; dd for 'th'; f for 'v'; u  for 'y'; y for 'u' (as in 'cup'); and ll for a voiceless 'l'. Many of the organizations who support the change, such as the Ordnance Survey, are already using the hyphens. Most of these names have direct equivalents in place names in Brittany.  In case you don't know, here is what a few of the Welsh place names mentioned in the article mean (without hyphens!): Cnwchcoch: Redhill... 'red' ( coch ), 'hill(ock)/mound' ( cnwch ) Brynteg: Fairhill... 'fair' ( teg ), 'hill' ( ...

The church of Whitchurch-Canonicorum in Dorset is dedicated to Saint-Candida (a.k.a Saint-Wite). Below the east window there is an altar tomb with  three openings which allowed devotees to reach inside the shrine in the hope of a miraculous cure for whatever ailed them.  On the top of this there used to be a 14th century coffin built into a slab of local marble. When the local vicar opened it in 1848 he found a stone box. Inside the stone box he discovered a Saint's relics.  When the coffin was examined again in 1899 another vicar found teeth, a lot of  bones resembling those of small, forty year old woman and an inscription: Here lie the relics of Saint Wite What was even more extrordinary about this find was that all relics such as these had been destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. The only other collection of saint's remains still extant were those of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps this shrine looked mo...

Were one million or more Britons wiped out by the English in a Dark Ages holocaust? The place name evidence is unequivocal : there is a very noticeable absence of Brythonic place names in England, especially in the south and the east. In addition, the English lexicon has very few words borrowed from Brythonic languages.  In the   foundation story of the English nation, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded and settled England from the 5th  century onwards, following in the footsteps of Hengist and Horsa who originally brought their mercenary armies to serve Vortigern, the British chief.  A few centuries later and there is a total cultural transformation. Everyone speaks English and everyone claims to be descended from the original immigrants.  And what’s more, the modern genetic evidence supports this.  DNA research has highlighted strong resemblances between Y chromosome haplotypes in Central England and Friesland, an establ...

Q: “What are you doing?”                  *Q1:  “What do you do?” A: “I am making tea”              *Q2:  “I make tea”. The English present continuous (using am/is/are + the “ing” form of a verb to indicate that the action is temporary, unfinished or ongoing) is less of an anomaly than ‘do’ [see  We do use ‘do’ a lot in English, don’t we? Why do we do this?   below ]  . It exists in a few other European languages (Icelandic, Dutch and Italian) although it is used less regularly and in different ways. In most of the other European languages the imperfective/continuous aspect is used only for past tenses and there would be no difference between the Q/*Q1 and A/*A1 forms above. In South Asian languages (like Hindi or Tamil) the use of the present continuous is universal. HINDI ham  likh  r...

*Q: Play you tennis?      Q1: Do you play tennis *A: No, I play not.           A1: No I don’t    The use of ‘ do’ as a periphrastic auxiliary verb –the dummy ‘do’ - in English is somewhat peculiar. We don’t find it where we think we should: in related Germanic languages, for example, such as Dutch, Swedish or German. It cannot be found in Romance languages such as Latin, French and Spanish either.  Most of our neighbours use languages which would prefer forms like *Q and *A above; neither of which are acceptable in modern English which prefers the Q1/A1 forms with an auxiliary ‘do’ . Written evidence of the use of ‘ do’ in unstressed affirmative statements dates back to at least the 13 th century and appear in many examples in Shakespeare three centuries later: ‘The lady  doth protest too much, methinks’ (Hamlet). ‘…whose horrid image doth unfix my hair.’ (Macbeth). ...