In the upcoming film ‘Mary Queen of Scots’, the titular role is played by the Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, who somewhat controversially portrays Mary as speaking English with a Scottish accent. At school, admittedly many years ago, I was taught she spoke with a pronounced French accent, which was another cause of division between her Catholic self and the bluff, exlusively male, Protestant Lords of the Convocation. It’s a fairly minor detail within the wider history, but I’m intrigued; did Mary speak English with a Scottish or French accent?



Born in Scotland to James V and his French second wife Mary of Guise, Mary inherited the Scottish throne just days after her birth. She was crowned 9 months later but Scotland was to be ruled by regents until she became an adult.

Following the Scottish Parliament’s rejection of the proposed marriage treaty by which she would have been formally engaged to Henry VIII’s son Edward (later Edward VI), the French king, Henry II, proposed to unite France and Scotland by marrying the young queen to his three-year-old son, the Dauphin Francis. With her marriage agreement in place, five-year-old Mary was sent to France to spend the next thirteen years at the French court. She was accompanied by her own court including two illegitimate half-brothers, and the 'four Marys', four girls her own age, all named Mary, who were the daughters of some of the noblest families in Scotland. In France she acquired all the skills expected of a future queen, learning horsemanship, music, and languages; French of course but also Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek. In 1556 (aged 14) she married the 12-year old Dauphin, Francis. She only returned to Scotland to exercise her role as its queen in 1561 (aged nearly 19) following Francis's sudden death.

So Mary lived and was educated in Scotland until aged five, then spent 13 years in France, firstly with her own Scottish household, then later as wife of the Dauphin, in his predominantly French household within the French royal court.

So to my mind it is likely as an adult she probably still spoke the Scots she’d learned as an infant and young child – the most formative years in language-learning - as well as the French, doubtless taught to her from childhood in Scotland as her first second language, and then polished to perfect courtly French, once she was living in France … in addition, of course, to the other languages.

But is there any evidence of her accent when speaking English to her Scottish subjects?

MM, I'd have to firtle around the older threads but I think this came up before.  I have a faint memory of someone (Temperance? though I apologise if I am taking her name in vain) said that Mary had been reported as having "a pretty Scots accent".  I'll have to have a search.  It may have been when there was some discussion the programme Reign - where everybody in the French court spoke with English accents, Mary had black hair, and there was a fictional Prince Bash.  I think there was a consensus that it was less true to history than the work of one Mrs PG.

This is probably the one ... a contemporary report of Mary’s accent in a report from an Irish lawyer, Nicholas White, who conversed with Mary on 26th February 1569. He wrote:
 
"... she hath withal an alluring grace, a prety Scottishe accente, and a searching wit, clouded with mydness."
 
This was eight years after her return to Scotland and a year into her exile and imprisonment.

Also it seems that while French was widely spoken at the Scottish court a couple of hundred years before – a natural situation considering the make-up of the power blocks in medieval, newly-Normanised Scotland - French seems to have waned by the time James I of Scotland became king (1406) and was little used thereafter. By Mary's father's time it was not used at all; all court business being conducted in Scots – which had also already completely marginalised Gaelic as a language of any serious political players.

MM wrote:

So to my mind it is likely as an adult she probably still spoke the Scots she’d learned as an infant and young child...

Yes, especially as Janet Stewart, Lady Fleming, called la Belle Écossaise (French for "the Beautiful Scotswoman"), the  illegitimate daughter of King James IV of Scotland, served in her household in France as governess to her half-niece Mary. Lady Fleming's daughter, Mary Fleming, was one of the young queen's "Four Marys". I bet they all chatted together in "Scots" when "off-duty".

Antonia Fraser tells of an encounter with John Knox where Mary, seeing her great adversary glowering at her, post-rant, suddenly burst out laughing at the horrible little man; she then declared, in what Fraser calls "her broad Scots, "Yon man gart me greit and grat never a tear himself. I will see if I can gar him greit." (Sort of half-Scots, half-English, but quite easily understood!)

Interestingly, I have read somewhere that Anne Boleyn spoke with a French accent: she had been educated at the court of Margaret of Austria in the Low Countries where French culture and language reigned supreme. Margaret assigned Anne a tutor named Symonnet to help her improve her French and La Boleyn then lived for several years at the French court itself. If you believe Retha Warnicke's birthdate for Anne being 1507 (although not many do), then Anne was only six when she left England and would surely have picked up a marked French accent.

Anne was known for her trendy French style and French ways - and being the accomplished poser she was, she probably put on the accent too!

Yes, I can well see Anne exaggerating all her French airs and graces for effect ... but by the same token I think Mary would have endeavoured to play down her foreign manners and make every effort to appear truely Scottish, including speaking in plain Scots.

I found this National Museums of Scotland site which includes an audio clip of one of Mary's letters being read using what they reckon to be a 16th century Scottish accent with influences from 16th century French. The letter was written by Mary in Carlisle to a supporter, the Laird of Smeaton, on 25 June 1568 (ie just after her escape to England and when she was being held in protective custody at Carlisle Castle while the English authorities decided what to do with her). At the time of course neither English nor Scots spelling had yet been standardized and so writers tended to spell according to their own pronunciation. I'm not an expert here (... where's Ferval when you need her input?) but some of the spelling and words seem to me to certainly indicate a fairly broad Scots accent.
 
Here's a transcript of the letter:

The Lard of Smytoun etc.

Rycht traist freind, we wryte to zow laitly anent our procedingis than, thanking zow ay off zour constance and fidelitye anent ws and our seruice quhilk ze sall not repent, wyth goddis grace not doubting bott ze will continew tharin wythout feir other of our ennemeis or tinsell off guiddisfor to the ane we sall putt ordour godwilling belyve and the other we sall refound and wpsett ze evin to the leist d.
The last imbassadour departit fray ws the xxii of this instant and gettis his answer fray the quein at his bypassing. Giff scho uill not assist ws we sall have bayth men & money of France incontenent . We luk also schortly for our answer becaus Middilmvre on quhayis returning fray the erle off Murray it was delayit passit by heir wp throucht the xxiij of this instant.
We have in the meintyme gottin be chance sum wrytingis off our ennemeis quhilkis discovris ony thingis especialy quhow sindry of the courte of Ingland and counsell promesis the erle of Murray all kyndnes aganis ws quhilkis wryt ingis quhowson the quein seis (for we have send thame to the lord Hereis to that effect) we ar assurit scho wilbe and offendit ze abill remove thame fray forder melling wyth our afairies. This referring our service to zour faythfullnes we committ zow to the protection off god almychttye.

At Carlislye the xxv of Junii 1568.
Marie R

Of course it is also worth bearing in mind that Elizabeth I would likely have spoken a version of English more resembling that of a West Country farmer's wife than modern Received Pronunciation.

Alackaday!  I had a phone call as I was about to go to my Spanish class and then it was too late to make it for a reasonable time really.  Thinking of Spanish, a former next-door-neighbour was married for a time to a Colombian (as in South America) lady and they had two [now grown-up children].  The boy I know was able to switch from English to Spanish easily, so maybe Mary (QoS) could go from a French sounding accent to a Scots sounding one at will.

Somebody told me once that "Quand je revois ma Normandie" was Mary Queen of Scots' lament.  I believed it at the time but now I think it might be a legend even if it was a nice legend.

"I come from a long line of Farquhars!!!!"

Perhaps the most poignant lament of this tragic queen was her farewell to her beloved France - the words she is recorded as uttering as she sailed away from her adopted country. She apparently watched desperately as the coast of France receded into the distance, murmuring over and over again "in a voice broken with tears": "Adieu France! Adieu France! Adieu donc, ma chère France...Je pense ne vous revoir jamais plus."

It was a melancholy and prophetic good-bye.


PS
That letter was fascinating - the "z" gives the hint of a French accent, I think.

I was intrigued by the 'z' too ... however I suspect Mary actually wrote it as ȝ that is the Middle Scots letter yoch (ȝoch), equivalent to the Middle English yogh (ȝogh), which both represented what would now be recognised as 'y' but was then a separate letter representing the consonant form of y as in yacht, as distinct from y as a vowel as in  dynasty. Note how in Mary's letter she uses 'z' or rather 'ȝ' only at the beginning of words, such as ze, zow and zour, and uses 'y' in the middle of words, such as in her writing delayit, meintyme and god almychttye. I've mostly encountered the letter ȝ in Middle English recipe books when you might get instructions like, Tak ye þe ȝolkes of iv eyryn & to þem add ... (take you the yolks of 4 eggs and to them add), again note the difference between the consonant ȝ and the vowel y (and in that example þ , the letter thorn, represents the modern 'th' sound as in them, or thus).

Wiki says: "In Middle Scots, the character yogh became confused with a cursive z and the early Scots printers often used z when yogh was not available in their fonts. "

This also account for the Scottish pronunciation of Scots names such as Menzies and Dalziel in which the z is acually a pronounced as a y.

I think it's a bit sloppy of the Museums of Scotland not to point this out.

Is there any connection between the above-referred letter and "thorn" which seemingly gave raise to the signs like "Ye Olde Englisshe Tea-Shoppe" - which are somewhat bogus as "thorn" does seem to have had a "th"-ish sound.  Not that I was around to check back then.  

Meles meles wrote:

I was intrigued by the 'z' too ... however I suspect Mary actually wrote it as ȝ that is the Middle Scots letter yoch (ȝoch), equivalent to the Middle English yogh (ȝogh), which both represented what would now be recognised as 'y' but was then a separate letter representing the consonant form of y as in yacht, as distinct from y as a vowel as in  dynasty. Note how in Mary's letter she uses 'z' or rather 'ȝ' only at the beginning of words, such as ze, zow and zour, and uses 'y' in the middle of words, such as in her writing delayit, meintyme and god almychttye. I've mostly encountered the letter ȝ in Middle English recipe books when you might get instructions like, Tak ye þe ȝolkes of iv eyryn & to þem add ... (take you the yolks of 4 eggs and to them add), again note the difference between the consonant ȝ and the vowel y (and in that example þ , the letter thorn, represents the modern 'th' sound as in them, or thus).

Wiki says: "In Middle Scots, the character yogh became confused with a cursive z and the early Scots printers often used z when yogh was not available in their fonts. Consequently some Lowland Scots have a z in place of a yogh."

This also account for the Scottish pronunciation of Scots names such as Menzies and Dalziel in which the z is acually a pronounced as a y.

I think it's a bit sloppy of the Museums of Scotland not to point this out.

Crikey - yes!

There was also the th sound represented by the old letter eth (uppercase: Ð , lowercase: ð ). This represented the th sound within words, and as I understand it evolved from a 'd' sound, thus the germanic moeder and broeder - became Old English moðer and boðer - and eventually the modern mother and brother.

The much derided wiki has several good articles about all this:

Wiki: the pronunciation of English th

Wiki: the letter thorn

Wiki: the letter eth

Wiki: the letter yogh

Wiki: the stock phrase 'ye olde'

MM,

I don't want to complicate your research, but as an inhabitant of France, you have to know about the "jzh"? (but you know the French pronunciation) of "George" and the "zh"? of "jambon" (I use to pronounce the name of the Flemish nationalist "Jan Jambon" as "zhean zhambong"   (and even he can perhaps laugh with it and perhaps his famliy calls him the same way, the Flemish way?)
Two questions:
I suppose as that long used to the French language you hear the difference?
Have you any equivalents in English?

Kind regards from Paul.

I'm not sure I understand you Paul ... in French a 'g' immediately before an 'e' or 'i' as in the French name Georges, or in généralement, arranger, rouge, rougir - is pronounced the same as the 'j' in jambon, jardin, jeune, joli or justice - ie sounding like "zhay" or "jhay". However a 'g' immediately before a 'o', 'u' , 'a' , or a consonant, is pronounced as a hard g sound, ie for example in garage, dégoûtant, gorge, guêpe, or grange. (But yes the French pronunciation of the 'G' in Georges is slightly different to the English pronunciation of it in George, or again to the German pronunciation of Georg ... but in each case the pronunciation conforms to the language in which it is being said). Is that what you meant?

Are there any equivalents in English? Ah well, English is notorious for its unregulated pronunciation and quirky spelling, the classic example being 'ough', which is pronounced differently in rough, cough, plough, bought, through, thorough, etc... I'm struggling to find an example of a fixed rule because I keep coming up with exceptions. For example the usual pronunciation of the 'th' when it precceds a vowel, eg in, the, thus, though, mother, weather, breathe, bathe - is slightly different to that when it preceeds a consonant or where it ends a word, as in threw, through, bathtub, worthless, breath, or truth. However I then realised that thought, thorough and lethal, don't follow that ... so at best it's a guideline only.

Meles meles wrote:

I'm not sure I understand you Paul, a 'g' immediately before an 'e' or 'i' as in the French name Georges, or in généralement, arranger, rouge, rougir - is pronounced the same as the 'j' in jambon, jardin, jeune, joli or justice - ie sounding like "zhay" or "jhay". However a 'g' immediately before a 'o', 'u' , 'a' , or a consonant, is pronounced as a hard g sound, ie for example in garage, dégoûtant, gorge, guêpe, or grange. (Yes the French pronunciation of the 'G' in Georges is slightly different to the English pronunciation of it in George, or again to the German pronunciation of Georg ... but in each case the pronunciation obeys the rules of the language in which it is being said). Is that what you meant?

Are they any equivalents in English? Ah well, English is notorious for its unregulated pronunciation and quirky spelling, the classic example being 'ough', which is pronounced differently in rough, plough, thought, through, thorough, etc...

I'm struggling to find an example of a fixed rule because I keep thinking of exceptions. For example the usual pronunciation of the 'th' when it precceds a vowel eg in, the, thus, though, mother, weather, breathe - is different to that when it preceeds a consonant or where it ends a word, as in threw, through, bathtub, worthless, breath, or truth. However I then that thought of 'thought' itself, and thorough and lethal, which don't follow that ... so at best it's a guidleine only.

Meles meles,

you seem to be right and I wasn't aware of it. Perhaps because you hear always the right French, the French French...
http://blogs.lfiduras.com/lettres-duras/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/09/littreref_36.pdf
Perhaps because of our Flemish dialect pronunciation...? A slight difference in the "g" of Georges and the "j" of "jambon"...?
The "g" a bit more "jhai" and the "j" a bit more "zhai"...after all those years (après tant d'années) ...

And now with my new knowledge I will check every fellow Flemishman ...

And thank you very much to have worried to explain your notoriuos unregulated English...

Kind regards from your northern friend Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

I was intrigued by the 'z' too ... however I suspect Mary actually wrote it as ȝ that is the Middle Scots letter yoch (ȝoch), equivalent to the Middle English yogh (ȝogh), which both represented what would now be recognised as 'y' but was then a separate letter representing the consonant form of y as in yacht, as distinct from y as a vowel as in  dynasty.

Yes here we are, the Scottish Museums site doesn't make it easy to see the original handwriting but I managed to get a screen grab from the video. In Mary's handwriting they are clearly the letter ȝ and so she is actually saying,

Rycht traist freind, we wryte to yow laitly anent our procedingis than, thanking yow ay off your constance and fidelitye anent ws and our seruice quhilk ye sall not repent, wyth goddis grace not doubting bott ye will continew tharin wythout feir...



Incidentally I think all Mary's letters to Elizabeth were written, not in English or Scots, but in French. Elizabeth however wrote to Mary in English, in a nice clear hand, much easier to read than Mary's scrawl (though she could have done with using shorter sentences) ... and Elizabeth clearly uses 'y' rather than 'ȝ' , for example here where she wrote,

"If any ever did try this old saying, 'that a king's word was more than another man's oath,' I most humbly beseech your M[ajesty] to verify it to me, ...."

Oh, excellent research MM - so interesting. Thank you.


Yes, Mary did write to Elizabeth in French:


http://www.marie-stuart.co.uk/letters.htm

... Well you know me, if it's a question about 16th century manners, domestic arrangements, food, cookery, seating plans, or what a typical soldier at Flodden might have carried in his pack and whether he could realistically expect to get a ride on a baggage waggon ... then I get the strange urge to ferret into it all to get a real feel for what was going on and how everything worked.

I admit I'm probably thought a bit odd.

No, I am of a similar kidney - nothing like a bit of ferreting. Must admit I've got a bit lazy these days and have not been ferreting as much, but it's interesting when someone else uncovers things! I go more for a good psychobabble ferret if I am honest - what Diarmaid MacCulloch rather snootily dismisses (in my Cromwell biography) as "psychobiography". I wonder if Sir Geoffrey Elton's opinion of historical biography, as remembered by MacCulloch - see quote below - would apply to our thoughts about Mary Queen of Scots, too?

Elton was not an admirer of the biographical genre which he regarded as frivolous. He chose to channel his admiration of his hero into meticulous accounts of administrative, governmental and constitutional change...

I wonder if the great Elton would dismiss our general fascination today with the lives of the great characters of history - not just psychology, but the things you mention - as being merely "frivolous"? Probably - yet for me this is what makes history such an engrossing subject; and there have been some great biographers: Plutarch? Cavendish? Boswell?

Perhaps there is room for the "frivolous" amongst the lovers of history?

Going back to Saoirse Ronan's portrayal of Mary in the film trailer, I thought they had quite well caught the look of Clouet's portrait, at least for the younger Mary,
 


But in one feature Ronan will be unlikely to exactly mimic Mary - her stature. Mary was reported as being nearly six feet tall - presumably the result of genes and good diet. This is tall for a woman today but she must have towered a full head higher than most of her stocky Scottish subjects. It was rather unfortunate, then, that her first husband, Francis II of France, was abnormally short (was he another one that suffered from scoliosis or was it from smallpox in childhood? I'm not sure). He also, poor man, stuttered.

I had made a comment and then tried to edit it slightly before posted and pressed the wrong button.  I'll cut Ms Ronan some slack over her height if she turns in a good performance.  Vanessa Redgrave is generally regarded as a good actress.  She's tall so I suppose in that respect she was a good fit for Mary in the 1970s film.

Temperance wrote:

Anne was known for her trendy French style and French ways - and being the accomplished poser she was, she probably put on the accent too!

Agreed. Some people can be very chameleon-like when it comes to accents. We all do it to a greater or lesser extent. I’ve lost count of the number of times I been acquainted with someone with an RP accent who then, when in the company of family or childhood friends, will suddenly slip into broad Sheffield or Cardiff or wherever.

But what an informative thread this is. I had never come across the Middle Scots letter ȝoch. I was aware of the unusual pronunciations of Menzies and Dalziel etc (as mentioned earlier) but had no idea how this had come about. Another minus against the names of Messrs Johnson and Boswell - or rather against those who have subsequently misused their dictionary and thus denied generations of Scottish and English writers of so many useful letters, diphthongs and other spelling alternatives.

In a similar vein, Viz, ... and in relation to the distinction between y and Ȝ , and ultimately the loss of the latter as a distinct letter ... Dr Johnson also nearly managed to do away with the distinction between u and v. 

In his famous dictionary (1755) words that we would now think of as beginning with either a 'u' or a 'v'  were all run together ... and so his dictionary lists unyoked immediately before vocabulary, and then a few pages further on has voyage immediately before up, upward and upwards etc. This was of course because he thought English should be like Latin, in which there was no written distinction between the vowel sound of u/v as in Clavdivs, and the consonant sound, as in veni, vedi, vici. Johnson of course wasn't alone in this as many of his literary contemporaries also didn't make any u/v distinction either. For example, the 18th century antiquarian, the Rev William Gilpin, in his guide to the natural beauties of the Derbyshire Peak district, talks about "diuerse caues and cauerns", by which he means, diverse caves and caverns, and then in his description of Eldon Hole (a natural pothole) says he thought it was "unusual .. [and] ... beliued to be uery deep".

By the way, the equivalent of the Old English letters eth ( ð ) and thorn ( þ ) still exist in current use in the Icelandic alphabet.

Wasn't sure whether to post this here or on the accuracy in films thread; but as we have mentioned the recent film starring Saorise Ronan above, perhaps comment here - although not actually about Mary's accent - is appropriate?

I saw the Ronan film earlier this week - at the cinema - and was terribly disappointed. It must be me, because everyone else seems to think it is an excellent movie (Mark Kermode in the Guardian gives it fours stars) but I feel Ronan, although an excellent and intelligent actor, did not capture Mary's character at all. The evidence suggests that Mary was most definitely physically brave and strong, but emotionally weak and vulnerable - a veritable "woman who loves too much". She was the sort of woman who can charm most men, but who is also often a victim of exploitation and manipulation, and not just at the hands of men. Mary was warm, foolishly impulsive, and she had a generous heart; that heart was her undoing: she made the mistake - unwise in anyone, but fatal in a ruler - of believing that those swhom she encountered would prove - in the end - to be as fair, as tolerant, as magnanimous - as loving - she  herself was - or tried to be. She always trusted the wrong people: the vicious narcissist, Darnley; Bothwell, who probably never loved any woman; and Elizabeth, the "dear sister" who hated and feared her. Elizabeth understood a few things about "dear sisters" that Mary did not.

The Ronan movie has its own agenda: the whole women take power against the monstrous regiment of men thing. All well and good, but lousy history. Mary was no defiant  "me too" feminist - neither was Elizabeth.

I also watched  this week the 2013 film starring Camille Rutherford (see trailer below): I got it from Morrison's DVD bargain bin. Our local supermarket was flogging DVDs of this film for £5 - rather a sneaky move, as many people will have bought it mistaking it for the Ronan offering. But it proved to be a brilliant film, based on the Stefan Zweig biography. Weird and surreal and inaccurate in parts(!), but it had me entranced. And the music at the end - Dylan's "Changing of the Guards" sung by someone I've never heard of was a remarkably apt choice. Tony Currran was a superb Knox - captured the man's fearsome, icy intelligence and his misogynist contempt for Mary in a way that David Tennant in the more recent film (surprisingly) did not. Tennant came across as a tiresome bearded ranter, full of hate speech for the rabble, but perhaps little else. Curran's Knox was simply terrifying; but how to deal with such a man? What would Elizabeth have done, I wonder?











PS Sorry if this is "off topic", MM. Should add that the 2013 film is in English and French (subtitled) which works really well!

I didn't know of that film before, Temperance (i.e. the 2013 one).  I had to look up Camille Rutherford but I see she was in Versailles though I haven't watched season 3 of that series.  She's not red-headed but I suppose that is not the worst thing in the world.  If I get a chance to see this film maybe I will give it a whirl.

It's a very strange film, LiR - most definitely not everyone's idea of how history should be presented, but it still gets my vote - although it shouldn't! I thought Rutherford was excellent.

Look out for the puppets - a clever way of presenting Elizabeth and Mary, I thought . Catherine de Medici, Mary's fearsome mother-in-law, another woman who hated her "sister" rulers, apparently used her dwarfs to similar effect.

I knew that in a crime novel I read by Shirley McKay (set not too long after the death of Mary, Queen of Scots) there had been mention of the letter 'yogh' in the notes to the stories.  https://hewcullanmysteries.com/lammas/  If anyone does follows the link I suggest doing a 'find' on the page for yogh as it is mentioned quite a way down the page - and the notes don't spoil the stories if anyone decides to read them at any time in the future.

Well, now I know why in the Dalziel and Pascoe series (saw some of the TV series, haven't read the book) Dalziel was pronounced Dyell - though MM has explained the now vanished 'yogh' clearly upthread.  I watched one YouTube video where the maker of the video put forward a sugestion that 'yogh' may have disappeared because it was similar to the figure 3.

Online archive of, until recently, forgotten documents from the time.

Mary, Queen of Scots Documents

fiddle about to create Zooms for close up reading.

Thank you, Trike!

Vous êtes un oeuf bon!

I mean un bon oeuf - think Mary, Queen of Scots, whose French was better than mine, would have said that (not that she knew many good eggs).

New Zealanders have a way of wanting to pronounce words as they are spelt, though usually keeping to the British way with ordinary words, but not necessarily with names. Blenheim is pronounced Blennim as in Britain but we had a girl whose surname was Dalziel and despite the Southland and Otago area being populated originally (apart from Maori) by the Scots, she and we always pronounced it as Dalzeel. I feel we also pronounce Marlborough differently to how it is pronounced in England. We have a long 'a' and usually pronounce the second part as 'bruh' though there is a slight impression of giving it three syllables. 

It is my impression that children under the age of about 6 pick up their adopted country's accent; I remember being very surprised when I heard a child born in NZ using his parents' South African accent, even though he wasn't home-schooled.

Caro, we had a discussion a few months ago on the board about the disappeared letter 'yogh' which looked a bit like one of those zeds that has a curly tail.  MM provided most of the information.  Apparently 'yogh' although it might have looked a bit like a zed or a figure 3 had a 'y' sound (I'm very much over simplifying on this point).  I was always puzzled (may have said this somewhere else on the board) when the TV show Dalziel and Pascoe pronounced the D character's name "Deeyel").  My former next-door neighbour (in the now empty house) was for a time married to a lady from Columbia, South America and his son (even though they lived in South America) quickly picked up English in the local Staffordshire dialect when coming to visit grandpa.  (His late grandpa also lived in the same house).  The son (the children grew up in South American mainly after the parents split up) now lives in Shrewsbury though I haven't heard anything of him for some time - his grandpa and Dad are dead now) and is completely bilingual.  I'm not so sure about the daughter who I think lives in the States.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Caro, we had a discussion a few months ago on the board about the disappeared letter 'yogh' which looked a bit like one of those zeds that has a curly tail.  MM provided most of the information.  Apparently 'yogh' although it might have looked a bit like a zed or a figure 3 had a 'y' sound (I'm very much over simplifying on this point).  I was always puzzled (may have said this somewhere else on the board) when the TV show Dalziel and Pascoe pronounced the D character's name "Deeyel").  My former next-door neighbour (in the now empty house) was for a time married to a lady from Columbia, South America and his son (even though they lived in South America) quickly picked up English in the local Staffordshire dialect when coming to visit grandpa.  (His late grandpa also lived in the same house).  The son (the children grew up in South American mainly after the parents split up) now lives in Shrewsbury though I haven't heard anything of him for some time - his grandpa and Dad are dead now) and is completely bilingual.  I'm not so sure about the daughter who I think lives in the States.

Lir,

 one of the agents I worked with ( a long time ago) was also named Dalzeil but when asked the pronunciation he also said Deeyel

I think this is a different video about 'yogh' than the one I linked on the other thread (I hope it is anyway).