New Zealand has the North Island and the South Island. They use "West Island" when talking about Australia.
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I mean it doesn't.
It just refers to a rough and ready reckoning system - probably from the cloth trade or the building trade to "guesstimate" how long stuff needs to be cut to.Comment
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And it predates the Victorian era, too.Comment
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Yes. I always assumed that "Beyond The Pale" referred to the Pale of Settlement for Jews, and something which is beyond that was from so far away that it was utterly inconceivable.Originally posted by Levin View Post
Which, if I'd ever given it a moment's thought, would also probably be a pretty offensive origin to the phrase - as something even the Jews wouldn't do...Comment
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Regardless, it's one phrase I've kept my cotton-pickin' hands off of, lest I inadvertently cause offense.Originally posted by Guy Profumo View PostComment
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Originally posted by Guy Profumo View Post
Those sorts of rubbish etymologies would always crop up as gospel in shitty TEFL textbooks. The old Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden as the origin of Golf was especially annoying. It’s from “gowf” ya ignorant fuds. Once written down students would take this shite as gospel (also, Great Wall of China being the only man made object visible from space).
Do such risible factoids clutter up all Pearson etc schools publishing, or do they have a special class of fatuous idiot do the TEFL stuff?Comment
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Why is it called Britain anyway? The Britons were an Iron Age culture of P-Celtic speakers, who basically got squashed by the romans and the saxons and the Gaelic scots, and squeezed out and clung on in wales and cornwall, cumbria and of course Britanny. In Irish Wales is An bhreatain Beag, or Little britain, and Brittany is An Bhreatain Mor or Great britain. England is Sassana, or Saxony, and Scotland is Albain, or Albion. we've clearly decided to ignore the normans, having essentially absorbed them completely.
whatever these Islands are, they're not the British Isles. The One thing all the other groups that have lived on these islands have in common is that they have beaten the tar out of the britons.Comment
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The One in ireland is even older, but since it just means beyond the big fence, or behaviour outside of the civilized norms, it's pretty clear that it could be truly ancient.Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View PostLast edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 18-01-2018, 18:47.Comment
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Britain/British has been around since Roman times at least, though I think an earlier Greek traveller may have come up with Britain (I believe the locals called themselves something like “Prettani “/“Pretton”).Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostLast edited by Lang Spoon; 18-01-2018, 18:58.Comment
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Yes, didn't it mean something like "the tattooed ones" in origin? And the Romans mangled/absorbed it into their name for the island as 'Britannia' – then went about invading/subjugating/wiping out/interbreeding-with-and-merging-into the natives using much the same template as every other invading force before and since. The name also sort of survives in that of what we now know as the Brythonic Celtic tongues (basically the Welsh/Cornish/Breton branch as opposed to the Irish/Scottish/Manx Gaelic branch).
As Berba points out, though, given the lack of surviving Pretani/Brythonic/Britons after all the Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman invasions and whatnot, it's probably fair to say naming these the Fuck-Over-The-British Isles or similar would be more factually accurate.Comment
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The people of the designs, aye. P-Celtic had a hard time right enough. The once dominant north of the Forth and Clyde Picts Gaelicized and no one speaking not even the plebs spraffing in Pictish by the 11th century. From north of Glasgow down to Cumbria Strathclyde was subsumed into Scotland/Alba by the 1000’s (though they would only keep Cumbria for maybe a hundred years). Though Welsh is probably the most really spoken and used by more than a few thousand people each day surviving Insular “Celtic” language. At least as a first language.Last edited by Lang Spoon; 18-01-2018, 21:22.Comment
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Apparently (according to the OED) Britain became important as a term after the Act of Union with use of the terms North Britain for Scotland and South Britain for England- and occasionally the (ironic use of West Britain for IrelandComment
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I’m sure there’s a few frothy letters to the Scotsman editor Proud Unionist of Morningside types who still give their address on the post as North Britain like they are fucking David Hume or something.Last edited by Lang Spoon; 18-01-2018, 21:20.Comment
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I think really it has to be the Norman isles. They were the ones holding the parcel when the invasion music stopped.Originally posted by Various Artist View PostComment
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Haha, that's a fantastic description. Quite aside from their bloodlines, their Norman French is certainly the last major addition to the language melting pot, plus there's things like the castles, systems of governance, etc.
Thing was, though, I think even they ceased to consider themselves 'Norman' pretty swiftly – it only took 70 years or thereabouts before the Angevins/Plantagenets were on the throne, whose heritage was more convoluted than purely Norman, and after that things only got more complicated.Comment
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that's just what Normans were programmed to do. Turn up, take over, make everyone forget you're norman. The Normans who took over the southern half of italy and sicily became a Norman, muslim, orthodox hybrid kingdom, with a lot of jews, because that's how the central med Rolled back then.Originally posted by Various Artist View PostComment
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I'd love to be able to suggest using Albion, as wikipedia tells us;
"The Common Brittonic name for the island, Hellenised as Albíōn (Ἀλβίων) and Latinised as Albiōn (genitive Albionis), derives from the Proto-Celtic nasal stem *Albi̯iū (oblique *Albiion-) and survived in Old Irish as Albu (genitive Albann). The name originally referred to Britain as a whole, but was later restricted to Caledonia (giving the modern Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba). The root *albiio- is also found in Gaulish and Galatian albio- ("world") and Welsh elfydd (elbid, "earth, world, land, country, district"). It may be related to other European and Mediterranean toponyms such as Alpes, Albania and Liban. It has two possible etymologies: either *albho-, a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "white" (perhaps in reference to the white southern shores of the island, though Celtic linguist Xavier Delamarre argued that it originally meant "the world above, the visible world", in opposition to "the world below", i.e., the underworld), or *alb-, Proto-Indo-European for "hill"."
But it's somehow become just middle england hasn't it?Comment
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Outside of Teuchters, but aye, mostly.Comment
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Those would be in Spain or somewhere similar, according to the most recent historic reasarch. Their ideas (art and objects) came to Bratain and Ireland, but there is apparently little to nothing to suggest the people calling themselves that ever got to Northern Europe.Originally posted by imp View PostComment
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Heraldic Pale. One of the most common 'ordinaries' (design divisions) in heraldry. A vertical central panel.
The word pale originally referred to a picket (a piece of wood much taller than it is wide such as is used to build a picket fence) and it is from the resemblance to this that the heraldic pale derives its name. (Wiki)Comment
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Scotland means “land of the Irish,” of course, and Ireland means “land of the Irate” cause they were always mad about being invaded. It’s true.Comment
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I thought they were originally from Central Europe, specifically PannoniaComment
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