What do the British call a television?

What do the British call a television?

The British native languages – especially Celtic.

Among the British languages we have Teledu in Welsh and in Breton the endearing term Skinwel, although despite Britannic it isn’t spoken in the UK. I couldn’t find the Cornish term, but another commentator has it. Nor Manx, although presumably they have them. Irish Gaelic is Teilifís, Scots Gaelic is telebhisean, and the Lowland Scots article in Wikipedia says “Televeesion” although I am not such if that’s official usage, and as far as the Old English word they use, I think we can be pretty sure that’s an anachronism.  As Abe Lincoln famously said, “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. In that vein the Pictish term for TV is VOD as this enables you to “pict” what you like, when you like.

An early form of television from Chaucer’s time, needing a huge machine underneath to get it working and even then the screen was only in blue.  Legend has it that in the UK, in order to get that effect in “The Wizard of Oz”, they had to carry out your old black and white minstrel television and bring in a Sony Trinitron actually during the film.

British dialects of English

If you are thinking about British versions of English and the regional or slang terms, I can’t think of any regionalisms. “Telly” is an informal way of talking about television as a service or the actual set, and further slang words for the set exist such as “the box” or “the gogglebox”. The term “tube”, hwever, was not widely used in British English slang and is more of an Americanism which I am not sure many of us would have understood prior to YouTube popularising it.

Community languages

Immigrant communities in the UK exist and the Poles have telewizja, while the words in Indian languages are mainly recognisable as something sounding like the original Standard English word (ie Greek roots put together in such a way that Oedipus could have forgiven his father) but written in their own alphabets and there are quite a few of them.

You can probably get by in the British Isles just using “television”, this weird partly Greek partly Latin word which was put together in the UK by an inventor whose command of physics was clearly many metres per second better than his command of philology.

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Warsaw’s Cross … Very!

Original YT playout date: 14 August 2010
Duration: 45:28

Here we see what is going on in Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the actions of the right wing group Solidarni 2010 and their demand to have the Smolensk disaster investigated as well as the victims properly remembered.

We see some of the atmosphere as activists engage with people on the streets and enter into discussion with someone who claimed that he was making private comments when as you will see he was de facto, whether he realised in or not, addressing a crowd of about 12-15 people. He asked for his comments not to be viewed as public statements, but that’s fine, because we can keep them just in my group of viewers which probably won’t get over a thousand views a year anyway, which is still pretty private by media standards.
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The Unexpected Marathon (PV#31)

Original YT playout date: 6 June 2010
Duration: 37:15

There’s me going to the zoo forgetting entirely the fact that it’s marathon time, as it was never my original intent to be in Prague at a weekend.
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Sophie’s Class visit the European Bison

20 December 2021

Original YT playout date: 29 May 2010
Duration: 49:29

This is a first ever on my channel – Sophie had a school trip to see European bison, deer, wolves, lynxes, wild boar and wild horses that there are in the Bialowiezska forest, which is the border between Poland and Belarus. It is the only place that the wisent, or European bison survives in its wild state, although some of them are in enclosures so that the public can look at them.

Sophie asked to take my old video camera with her and this is what she did, with no help from anybody. Even the postproduction I simply sat and took her instructions on the font for the titles, the colours, the choice of background music. could we have a film-maker in the making?
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Train out to Děčin (PV 25)

Original YT playout date: 3 May 2010
Duration: 22:41

Taking the train out to Děčin. Featuring “Ailelu” by Aoife.
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