PAUL BARCLAY:
Sit back and listen to our conversation on language with Professor David Crystal. David is the author of many books and he joined us for this discussion from his office in Wales.
DAVID CRYSTAL:
It's a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
PAUL BARCLAY:
David, for this book you travelled mostly throughout Wales, taking the reader on a journey. What were you looking for, specifically?
DAVID CRYSTAL:
Well, it all started a couple of years ago, Paul, when the BBC had this great project called the Voices project, which was a celebration — the first time the BBC had ever done this — a celebration of all the accents and dialects of the British Isles. And every local radio station in Britain was involved. Now, I was employed to go around Wales, in particular, as you mentioned. They looked after me very well. They gave me a Porsche to do it in. And I travelled around the country looking out for the way English was spoken in Wales and for the distinctiveness of the accents there. But I didn't stay in Wales. I went into England and up through Stratford and in through Birmingham and all sorts of interesting accent places there. Every now and then, of course, as the mind wanders, as in travel books generally, I go off into other parts of the world and try and explore accent and dialect differences there. So it's a real potpourri of linguistics, if you like. You're right. It's a linguistic travelogue.
PAUL BARCLAY:
Sounds like a terrific travelogue indeed. And what were some of the best examples you found of words that have grown with time and usage into another word altogether?
DAVID CRYSTAL:
Well, I suppose the title of the book is the most interesting one. I called it By Hook Or By Crook because of the unexpected things that happened. I'll tell you what I mean. I start the story off in a sheep auction in North Wales, which is where we were recording the speech of an auctioneer. Auctioneers have wonderful speech patterns and we thought, 'Well, this is going to be a good place to be.' And I was wandering around this place, surrounded by about 1,000 sheep all going on in Welsh, as far as I could tell. And I saw on the other side of the yard a shepherd standing there with a crook in his hand. And I thought, 'Now, that looks like a perfect example to interview about Welsh accents'. He looked Welsh. He had an old, craggy face. So I went up to him and I put on my best Welsh accent. Not the one I'm using to you now, which is sort of an international variant. And I said, 'Hello. You look as if you've been a long time with your crook'. And he looked at me and said… (Scottish accent) 'Aye, you're right there, laddie'. And I thought, 'Hello. What's going on here?' And this Scottish guy was standing in this Welsh town. I said, 'How long have you been here in Wales?' He says, 'I've been here 40 years.' I said, 'Why have you kept your accent?' He said, 'I don't know. It's just the way it is.' And then we started talking about his crook. And he explained about crooks and how their shape is and all the technicalities of crooks. And then he said to me, 'I don't suppose you'd know where the phrase "by hook or by crook" comes from?' And I said, no, I didn't, actually. And then I went home and looked it up. And that's exactly the point. When you start looking up the history of a phrase like this you find all kinds of interesting meanings in it and histories in it. I found three or four different origins for 'by hook or by crook'. The commonest one is that it was a medieval countryside practise. The king owned the trees in those days, you know? You weren't allowed, if you were a peasant, to cut down wood from a tree. But you were allowed to pull the wood down if you could reach the lowest branches of the tree using a stick with a hook on the end — "by hook" — or your shepherd's crook — "by crook". And so you get your wood by hook or by crook. And, of course, 500 years later we find 'crook' in Australia. I remember when I was last there and I wasn't so well and somebody said, 'You're looking a bit crook.' And 'crook' there is a derivation because the crook has a curve in it and therefore it's not normal. And 'crook' in Australian English, of course, means you're not normal, you're not well.
PAUL BARCLAY:
Just going back to the beginning of that terrific story, is there something about the Scottish accent and the way it just sticks around? I had a friend a number of years ago who'd been in Australia for many years from Scotland. And he always got ribbed by his Scottish friends when they came out to Australia. They said, 'Oh, your accent has virtually disappeared.' But to people like us we could scarcely understand what he was saying, the accent was so thick. What is it about the Scottish accent that is so persistent?
DAVID CRYSTAL:
Well, I think it's all a matter of personality as much as anything else. Some people are good 'accommodators', as we say in linguistics, which is they're very ready to pick up the accent of the person they're listening to. Everybody is an 'accommodator' to some extent, some better than others. It is all a matter of identity or the age, of course, which you picked up your accent in the first place and how far you feel you want to retain a connection with the fatherland or motherland and how far you want to become one with the new group of people you're with. Accents, of course, have different resonances and different histories for that reason. The Scottish accent has always had a very strong place in British society, more so than the Welsh accent, for example. And the reason for that is very clear. When you go back 400 years. Who came on the throne of England in 1603 when Queen Elizabeth died but King James of Scotland. And for a while the entire accents of the London elite were Scottish accents. And people commented on this and said, 'The Scots are taking over,' and so on. I think that kind of history means that some accents have got a sort of folk presence. People are more reluctant to leave them behind, perhaps.