Whalsay Easter Word?

[Kavi Ugl]

This could be a tricky one. I mind seeing in The Shetland Times a couple of years ago an article about a word that was still used in Whalsay that related to Easter and (rolling)Easter eggs. It began something like Paes.....

 

Can anybody remember what the word is and the story behind it?.

 

Thanks

[MuckleJoannie]

According to John Graham's dictionary

 

http://www.shetlanddialect.org.uk/john-j-grahams-shetland-dictionary.php?word=1762

 

paes eggs

 

n - eggs collected by children going from house to house on Paesday.

 

http://www.shetlanddialect.org.uk/john-j-grahams-shetland-dictionary.php?word=1764

 

Paesday

 

n - the Monday after Easter Day.

[thekid]

Remember seeing on tv, a village in the northwest of england where the vikings had settled using the same word..

[Kavi Ugl]

Ah!, cheers that sounds good. What got me wondering was seeing the same kind of word on the Faroese news: páskadag

 

http://www.portal.fo/?lg=81689

 

It obviously comes from the same root word but I'm not sure if the Shetland word is confined to Whalsay.

 

[Claudias]

^ ^ ^

 

Pasqua is the Italian (Latin?) for Easter.

[MJ]

hmm, from passover, pascha across europe

english and german use the pagan name of the festival Eostur

 

edited for spelling and to say Easter's my favourite festival, all 3months of it.

[DePooperit]

Ah!, cheers that sounds good. What got me wondering was seeing the same kind of word on the Faroese news: páskadag

 

http://www.portal.fo/?lg=81689

 

It obviously comes from the same root word but I'm not sure if the Shetland word is confined to Whalsay.

 

 

Not at all. In Burra, on Paesday (pronounced pays-dee) all us children got socks and went around the neighbourhood collecting eggs which we then stuffed into the sock. People who didn't have hens gave you thruppence. Then you went home with about the same amount of money/eggs that your parents had given to other kids.

 

A complete waste of time and energy - old folk without kids losing money, folk with too many kids gaining - add to that the chances of meeting bullies who would break all the eggs in your sock - or falling over a fence and breaking them yourself - and the fact that you didn't get not to go because your parents would lose out. It would have made more sense for your parents to give you ten bob and be done with it. A typical useless primitive ritual preserved from the middle ages on the fringes of society - good riddance to it. And I didn't like eggs anyway.

 

Probably the idea that it's a Whalsay word is because they're one degree more backward than Burra and hung on to the practice a year or two longer. Probably they've still got more dialect as well, for the same reason.

[DePooperit]

Multiple post deleted by incompetent poster.

[whalsa]

Probably the idea that it's a Whalsay word is because they're one degree more backward than Burra and hung on to the practice a year or two longer. Probably they've still got more dialect as well, for the same reason.

 

Would you care to elaborate on how exactly Whalsay is "one degree" more backward than Burra?

 

Also I think you will find that Whalsay and Burra dialects have always been fairly different due to different influences (Hanseatic traders etc). Furthermore I think it is a good thing that we have managed to hold on to so much of ours and would not call speaking your mother tongue backward at all.

[Kavi Ugl]

Probably the idea that it's a Whalsay word is because they're one degree more backward than Burra and hung on to the practice a year or two longer. Probably they've still got more dialect as well, for the same reason.

 

Would you care to elaborate on how exactly Whalsay is "one degree" more backward than Burra?

 

Also I think you will find that Whalsay and Burra dialects have always been fairly different due to different influences (Hanseatic traders etc). Furthermore I think it is a good thing that we have managed to hold on to so much of ours and would not call speaking your mother tongue backward at all.

 

Absolutely!. "One degree backward"??. What's that supposed to mean??.

 

As to the dialect, if the rest of Shetland had retained its dialect like Whalsay then Shetland would've been a linguistuic treasure store and all the more culturally rich for it.

 

Now it's just that horrendous half scots/half english chuechter warble that the bairns and teenagers speak.

[DePooperit]

Probably the idea that it's a Whalsay word is because they're one degree more backward than Burra and hung on to the practice a year or two longer. Probably they've still got more dialect as well, for the same reason.

 

Would you care to elaborate on how exactly Whalsay is "one degree" more backward than Burra?

 

Also I think you will find that Whalsay and Burra dialects have always been fairly different due to different influences (Hanseatic traders etc). Furthermore I think it is a good thing that we have managed to hold on to so much of ours and would not call speaking your mother tongue backward at all.

 

Certainly. Perhaps I made the mistake of assuming that anyone reading my post would have read the other posts I have made over the years, and would be aware of the connotation intended. (Of course, I don't actually know that Whalsay is one degree more 'backward' (ie, resistant to the ongoing forces of blanket globalisation) than Burra - you'll note that I said 'probably..')

 

I wouldn't call speaking my mother tongue or yours backward either. But I very much doubt whether we can take the official viewpoint that dialect (whatever that may be) is valuable as an indication of Shetland opinion in general. When I was actively interested in the subject, almost all the comments I heard were negative. 'It's deein oot an hit's laekly a guid thing', 'If you teach it dat'll kill it aff' and 'Is hit no bad for bairns' education' are the three that stick in my mind. We don't know what proportion of Shetland residents hold views like that, because, of course, it is no longer necessary for them to give voice to them. Anyone can see that the dialect is dying out, therefore anyone who is opposed to it, or indifferent to it, can simply wait around until nature takes its course - no need to sound off about it any more.

 

I have said before that Shetland is now effectively Lerwick, and Lerwick is effectively a town of the Central Belt of Scotland. Insofar as 'dialect' is 'valued' in such a context, the type of dialect that Kavi Ugl alludes to below will be just as 'valued' as the traditional varieties that I and presumably you speak.

 

Not that long ago, in a charity bookshop in Elgin, I bought a book entitled 'Scotspeak - A Guide to the Pronunciation of Modern Urban Scots' by Christine Robinson and Carol Ann Crawford, which had once belonged to a student at the Highland Theological College - part of the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI). Investigating (aka googling) further, I found that this book was the only set coursebook, apart from the Concise Scots Dictionary, in a course in Scottish cultural studies which I had helped to set up, and was supposed to emphasise the languages of the Highlands and Islands, including Orkney and Shetland. The book, originally written for actors, contained samples of speech from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, with notes emphasising important features such as glottal stops. Particularly interesting was the following:

 

'As anyone who has ever learned a foreign language knows, strong verbs, the ones that change their vowels to make past tense or past participle, are very difficult to learn. English and Scots have both been making themselves easier over the years....Thank goodness English is getting easier!

 

If we compare the Scots past tense and past participle of gi(v)e, which for many speakers are both 'gied,' with the English 'gave' and 'given', we can see that, in this instance, Scots is just a bit further down the road of simplification.

 

Occasionally Scots lags behind. For example, many Scots still use 'gotten' as the past participle of 'get.''

 

You see what is happening here. Not only does a course which was supposed to emphasise the tongues of the Northern Isles have as its set book a text on the urban dialects of Mainland Scotland, that book explicitely states that the more traditional varieties are 'lagging behind.' So forms like 'I done it', 'I seen it,', 'I've gave them' are progressive ('Further down the road of simplification') whereas traditional Shetland forms like 'I'm gotten', 'I'm pitten', etc, are 'lagging behind' - ie, backward.

 

It is one of the precepts of the postmodern dialect perception that one dialect is as good as another. In this case, this is revealed to be disingenious, in that the Central Belt pundits who provide the theoretical framework for dialect promotion in Shetland clearly believe that Central Belt Urban is more progressive than the 'lagging behind' varieties still lingering in the sticks. And this, I repeat, is from the set book in a course which was supposed to emphasise the tongues of the Northern Isles.

 

It's all very well - and indeed understandable, if you didn't get my connotation of sarcasm - for you to object to me describing Whalsay, or Burra, dialect as 'backward.' The fact is that neither your nor my views on what is or isn't 'backward' count for anything at all.

[klanky]

Northern English (and Scots) areas have 'pace eggs' at Easter. Same Norse roots methinks.