ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

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  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Firstly, Tony argues that our accent doesn’t come from where people may think. The accepted wisdom is that Scouse is a combination of the Lancashire and Irish accents, driven by mass immigration to the city from the Emerald Isle during the Irish famine.

    That theory was notably promoted by docker, councillor and ECHO columnist Frank Shaw in the first half of the 20th century. However, Tony’s argument is different. He told the ECHO: "Liverpool was an immigrant city in the 19th century. In the 1861 census, half the population were immigrants which was an amazing thing.

    “There wasn’t anywhere else like it in Britain - not even London. All of these people mixed together and linguists say that new dialects come from language contract - all of these different people mixing, speaking different languages and different dialects. My argument is that’s where Scouse came from.”

    Bit of an odd argument as most of those immigrants were from Ireland, so it’s not wrong to say it’s largely a collision of Irish and Lancashire accents but it is also more nuanced than that, which is what separates Scousers from Mancs (which is also a mix of Lancashire and Irish but with more of a Pennines influence). So there is some influence from Scandinavia (that’s where the dish scouse comes from after all), as well as all the others but Irish is clearly the root of a lot of the distinctive features in Scouse, like the pronunciation of “th”.

    I also saw a documentary that suggested dialects based around docks tended to be pitched higher and spoken faster - you can see this by comparing Scouse to Cockney.

    So there’s a lot going on but to say Shaw was “wrong” seems odd.








  • Worth also noting that:

    • We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don’t have to upgrade any time soon).
    • Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent “warchest” which should see us through most temporary problems.

    One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.

    If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).