Question for our UK brethren

[Trebuchet]

I'm writing a phony interview for my Champions campaign newspaper, the Weekly Globe Enquirer, of the mayor of Tintagle where a recent supernatural incident occured.

 

What I need is British slang for "gadget" or "equipment." The only word I know in that vein is "kit," which I'm not certain is correct slang for military hardware.

 

And if anyone knows a good website or dictionary to get translations from our mother tongue to American and vice versa, I'd appreciate it. I'm still trying to figure out why we Yanks spell "grey" with an "a" and leave out the "u" in "harbour".

[Vondy]

Re: Question for our UK brethren

 

http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/index.htm

["V"]

Depending on who's being interviewed you could try the following expressions for equipment:

 

Gear would be an acceptable expression by someone of a practical but taciturn nature. Kit would be perfectly acceptable even from a military source.

 

If it's the Mayor of Tintagel who is using the expression then it depends on their background & personality of course- a typical Mayoral type is unlikely to use too much in the way of slang.

 

As for the spelling question... much as I hate to admit it but you Colonials (sorry) tend to spell things more sensibly. British spelling pretty much got fixed when printing became widespread (before then it was pretty much left to chance!) and so our spelling now reflects the way words were pronounced way back then. "Knife" was once pronounced as "ke-neefa" for example, "Yacht" was pronounced "yach -t"

 

Why should harbour have a "u" in it, when the "ou" sound is now pronounced as a short "o".

 

Please destroy this mail before any of my British Liberation colleagues see it... they'll think I've joined the Mel Gibson brigade.

 

You could also visit the hugely helpful http://www.holoweb.net/~zodiac/england.html

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by "V"

If it's the Mayor of Tintagel who is using the expression then it depends on their background & personality of course- a typical Mayoral type is unlikely to use too much in the way of slang.

 

As for the spelling question... much as I hate to admit it but you Colonials (sorry) tend to spell things more sensibly. British spelling pretty much got fixed when printing became widespread (before then it was pretty much left to chance!) and so our spelling now reflects the way words were pronounced way back then. "Knife" was once pronounced as "ke-neefa" for example, "Yacht" was pronounced "yach -t"

The Mayor is a former RAF officer, but he's still a politician. I suppose "kit" will do nicely. Many thanks.

 

IIRC, knife was "cnwf" in Old English (Don't ask me how to pronounce that! I need vowels.), from the Old Norse word "knífr", Anglo-Saxon was "cníf". Looks to me like the "k" sound is pretty old. How was the word pronounced in Elizabethan times when Shakespeare was writing? I can check my OED for origin, but none of these old languages were big on silent letters. So when did the "k" sound drop off the pronunciation?

[SirViss]

I 'm no Brit, but a term that I could see them using is "widget".

 

Just a suggestion...

["V"]

cnwf would have been pronounced "k'nuf" or "k'noof" if I recall my Old English course correctly (what a career-minded element of my English degree that was, it's been useful almost every day...).

 

Silent letters are pretty much a modern thing (modern being since the widespread use of printing!). Prior to printing establishing what people came to see as the "correct" spelling for words, people really just wrote words down however they happened to be pronouncing them at the time- and of course this varied by locale, by time and even the same individual would spell the same word in different ways. People weren't hung up on it back then. So if there is a silent letter in a word you can bet that at some point it was pronounced (by someone somewhere) with the letters sounded. There are bound to be exceptions (this is English after all!) but this is a good general rule.

 

As to when exactly the "k-" in knife became silent I'm not sure. I think it had gone by Spokeshafe's day, otherwise the rhythm of any line with "knife" would seem to be a couple of syllables out to our modern ears.