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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

@ColinWright, can you help out with following text from the article? Just don't want to miss out on the inner meaning of the message from father to son. Many thanks!

> "I'm sorry. Tha wain't say nowt to thi mam nar, will tha? This is just between us men."

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"You won't say anything to your mom now, will you?"

Tha = thee, the familiar form of "you". "Only thee-thou's them as thee-thou's you": family and close friends only. This is dying out. I recall my Yorkshire grandmother using it, but only intermittently.

wain't = won't nar = now

These are both on the other side of a vowel shift.

Nowt = nothing. This is a bit of dialect that's still alive, partly due to its use in the TV advertising slogan "Bread wi' Nowt Taken Out".

TV and the class system have long worked against UK regional accents and dialect.

I live in Leeds now, but grew up in Nottingham (70 miles south, also coal-mining country) and we said "owt" and "nowt" - but pronounced like "oat", not "out".

Also your stereotypical Yorkshire would shorten "the" to "t'" (going down t'pit) - we would drop it completely "guin' dahn pit".

Sometimes I reckon Yorkshire folks think I'm taking the piss the way I say things.

I was at Uni with a bloke from Burnley, and he used to say "obbat" and "nobbat" (for "owt" and "nowt" respectively), although I've never heard them since.

Just a quick note, I thought this was all the same thing, as it was on the same line, but now I see the split

"wain't = won't nar = now"

wain't = won't

nar = now

I only got it after reading your comment. Thanks.

The idea that the old thou/you distinction is finally dying out for good at the start of the 21st century genuinely upsets me.

nowt = naught

The main one to get is "tha" and "thi" which are various pronunciations of "thee." Archaiac pronouns, "thee," "thou" etc are still used in various english regional dialects.

When I was a kid in the south west I used to hear people say "About she-high" or "about yay (yea?) high" when gesturing to approximate the size of an object.

"About yay high" is a pretty common expression in New England, especially the more isolated parts

I certainly heard it, and I grew up in a large Midwestern city...

"ye" for you is fairly common in some Scots dialects e.g.

"far ye gan?" - "Where are you going?"

I've put a more complete translation of the non-standard English bits here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9678231

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