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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Thomas P. Jameson III does a “Laoshu” on Japanese…

Here we see Thomas P. Jameson III doing a Laoshu on Japanese.

Original YT playout date: 14 August 2010
Duration: 21:11

In the style of the late great Moses McCormick, the Texan cowboy reviews a stack of Japanese learning

Laoshu
The Wikipedia image of Laoshu (Moses McCormick) in his prime, with signature baseball cap.

materials.

Moses died while still young but he was a beloved member of the expat community who helped many of us out. He helped me personally on multiple occasions. Laoshu also supported my channel giving me mentions from time to time in his own videos. Moses will be greatly missed. Of course, he was still going strong at the time I made the above.

May he “level up” in peace.

Don’t miss the Texan Scots.

This is also one of my personal favorite videos from my collection.
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Normally, it takes about 2 years to become fluent in a language. How can a polyglot speak 15-20 languages? That’s 40 years of learning.

Gluttons for punishment, or for self-realisation?

You talk about 40 years of learning as if it were some huge punishment, but the thing about a polyglot is that he or she has that as a hobby. Not many folk get paid for it. It relaxes them and fascinates them to learn languages and so they do it. The fact that some spend 40 years indulging this love is really no more remarkable than someone who spent 40 years over a lovely big garden.

More of less or less of more?

Yes, some people do have bookshelves a bit like this…

Whether it really is forty years or more or less depends on intensity of learning, committed time in an average week, choice of methods, choice of materials, how efficient the learner is at getting a lot of mileage from a vocabulary of only, say 2,000 words, and if the learner has chosen a lot of similar languages and all of them are similar to his native tongue, or if a person has chosen languages with little common grammar and few common lexemes, and even a very different phonology and alphabet to his or her own.

By the numbers

The minimum time to get to 20 lots of 2000 words (40,000 words) with a reasonable cover of 20 not totally dissimilar grammars is something like 4,000 hours, although it could be with more efficiency done in closer to 3,200 hours. Let’s go with the 4,000 and allow the learner a thousand hours of learning time a year. What’s the result? Just four years. You’re not getting massive fluency but a solid base in 20 similar languages. On the other hand another person might work leisurely and start at about the age of 14 when the bug often hits and suddenly at age 90 die of natural causes on a tricky piece of Javanese polite form. That’s 76 years of learning. Let’s take the average of 76 years and 4 years and we get your 40 years, so it’s a perfectly reasonable estimate, but you see how the mileage can vary.

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Metodologia Gold List #2 – Jak To Dziala w Praktyce

Original YT playout date: 18 April 2010
Duration: 1:35:00

Second part of Gold list method in Polish. The first part has been up for sometime, when Kuba came for a lesson, but it cut off before I got on to the practical part, of how to actually maintain a gold list book, or set of books. Dziękuję pani Krystynie za możliwość uzupełnienia wyjaśnienia metodologii po polsku. Jeżeli ktoś nie widział pierwszej części – teoretycznej części wyjaśnienia, to radze najpierw patrzeć na to. Widać łącze do niego i po prawej stronie, i tez zrobiłem to wideo jako “odpowiedź” tamtemu.
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Drive, Drove, driven, drivel – or “Road trip meets linguistic meandering”

Original YT playout date: 2 April 2010
Duration: 29:10

Driving from the Amber Hotel through Olesnice towards Namyslow I start to talk about why Polish language has more exotic elements in it, more aspects usually more associated with oriental languages, than Russian has. This is really developing a thesis of mine that Poland has an oriental culture.

Learners of Slavic languages will love this one, as will those of you who use my videos to go to sleep, as some have told me…
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