Based on the history of who was sailing the high seas, it's a good bet pirates sounded a lot more multicultural than Ol’ Long John Silver would have us believe. We also discuss when you need a comma before "because" to avoid confusion. Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Grammar Pop iOS game. Peeve Wars card game. Grammar Girl books. HOST: Mignon Fogarty VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://pinterest.com/realgrammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Based on the history of who was sailing the high seas, it's a good bet pirates sounded a lot more multicultural than Ol’ Long John Silver would have us believe. We also discuss when you need a comma before "because" to avoid confusion.
Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course.
Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Grammar Pop iOS game.
Peeve Wars card game.
Grammar Girl books.
HOST: Mignon Fogarty
VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl
http://twitter.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://pinterest.com/realgrammargirl
http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl
https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.
Today, we'll honor Talk Like a Pirate Day with a segment about pirate language—arrg—and then we'll talk about when you need a comma before the word "because," and about the Devonshire.
How to Really Talk Like a Pirate
by Valerie Fridland
Most of us only think of “Ahoy There, Matey!” and “Me Hearties!” once a year on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, a day when landlubbers can joke about walking the plank and being scalawags with abandon. But for linguists, the allure of pirate language and what it reveals about language and social life on the high seas is a year-round fascination.
Although the average person’s idea of how pirates spoke is generally limited to a random "arr" and "yar," true pirate talk likely began in earnest in the late 1700s and early 1800s, a period known as the golden age of piracy.
Privateering and pirate ships were crewed by sailors from around the world, but the majority spoke a hybridized version of English known as Maritime Pidgin English. This variety was a contact English, or lingua franca, strongly influenced by European traders’ contact with West African languages and the multicultural diversity found on board slaving and trading ships.
In the 17th century, certain coastal ports became known as "pirate nests," offering safe harbor to those who felt marauding and pillaging made for a better living than more legal nautical gigs. According to historian Mark Hanna, author of "Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire,"one well-known pirate nest was in what is referred to as the "West Country" in Southwestern England, an area that includes counties such as Devon, Bristol, Dorset, and Cornwall.
This area had a long maritime history and also happened to be where many British sailors hailed from, including a fair number who turned to piracy. For instance, West County native Sir Francis Drake—a decorated sailor with a side hustle as a pirate and an illegal slave trader—is a perfect example of how little difference there could often be. The famous pirate Blackbeard was also rumored to have been born in Bristol. As a result, some romanticizing about pirate life and language developed within this region based on its pirate proclivities.
So, when West Country native Robert Newton was tapped by Disney to play Long John Silver in the screen adaptation of "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson, he played up iconic features of the West Country accent in portraying the character. Features like “arr,” which in West Country lingo means "yes," and the merger of the sounds "ay" (e.g. as in "tie") and "oy" (e.g. as in "toy") so that "toy him up" involves ropes rather than Lego bricks, made for a pirate accent to remember.
Newton’s interpretation, rather than any real knowledge of what pirates actually sounded like, appears to have most influenced our notions of pirate talk and is probably why we think of pirates sounding like we do. But if it makes you feel better, most of the terms we associate with pirates—things like “Shiver me timbers” and “Me Hearties”—are indeed 18th century nautical terms, though back in that time they were used by anyone who happened to make a life or a living on a coast, not just pirates.
Avast, me hearties (that’s faux pirate for "Head’s up, friends")*, Avast me hearties, there were pirates from many different language backgrounds, and they most likely spoke differently from the popular conception we have today. In fact, other features we think of as "pirate" hint at this more diverse linguistic history. For example, the invariant "be" form we recognize from pirate speak, with "be" replacing "is" as in “He be a scalawag,” is a feature we find in Irish English. It turns out a good many Irishmen also made up the ranks of sailors and buccaneers, maybe bringing with them their somewhat unusual use of "be."
We also hear this "be" in a number of Caribbean Englishes and in African-American varieties of English. This suggests that the invariant "be" might have been frequent in the Maritime English that served as a lingua franca for linguistically diverse immigrants and slaves, influencing Caribbean and early African-influenced American language varieties via the many slaves, traders, and pirates who came to Caribbean and American ports.
And the Caribbean Islands weren't just ports of call; they were also spots where smart pirates tended to winter or retire. Two famous pirates, Sam Lord and Stede Bonnet, called Barbados home, and Blackbeard was also a frequent visitor. Maybe not surprising given its popularity as a port for British and Irish immigrants and pirates, phonetician John Wells suggests the Barbadian accent is reminiscent of pirate talk in his book "Accents of English."
As the saying goes, dead men tell no tales, nor do they help us much with figuring out what real pirates might have sounded like, especially since there weren’t a lot of pirate recordings made back in the day. But, based on the history of who was sailing the high seas, it's a good bet they sounded a lot more multicultural than Ol’ Long John Silver would have us believe.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of a forthcoming book on all the speech habits we love to hate. She is also a language expert for Psychology Today where she writes a monthly blog, Language in the Wild. You can find her at valeriefridland.com or on Twitter at @FridlandValerie.
If you need a gift for a language lover or a teacher, check out my card game, Peeve Wars. It's a quick game with cute peevy characters such as "I seen" and "literally," and the goal is to amass an army of peeves and annoy your opponents to death. Supply chain experts are saying we should do our Christmas shopping now, I'm sorry to say, so head over to The Game Crafter today, that's a U.S.-based print-on-demand company, and order Peeve Wars in time for Christmas. Google Peeve Wars, and for me, the top result is the store, and you can also find a video of me explaining how to play. That's Peeve Wars for wordy family fun.
Comma Before 'Because'
by Mignon Fogarty
A reader named JC asked when he needs a comma before the word "because." He wondered about this exchange:
The short answer is no.
It’s unusual to put a comma before "because." You only do it when you need the comma to prevent confusion because your sentence could have two meanings.
The Chicago Manual of Style has an excellent entry on this topic in its Q&A section online. It gives this example:
He didn’t run because he was afraid.
Without a comma, you don’t know whether the writer means that the reason the man didn’t run was that he was afraid or whether the writer means there was some different reason the man ran.
If you put a comma before "because" ("He didn’t run, because he was afraid"), it’s clear that the part after the comma is extra information: the reason the man didn’t run—because he was afraid.
If you leave out the comma, you should probably add clarifying information to the end of the sentence. For example, you could write,
He didn’t run because he was afraid; he ran because the fire made his hiding place too hot.
You can imagine other sentences in which "because" may be ambiguous:
She didn’t want to cook because it was her birthday. (Does she want to have a break from cooking on her birthday, or does she want to cook for some other reason? She didn't want to cook because it was her birthday; she wanted to cook because she likes her own cooking better than restaurant food.)
Often a sentence that needs a comma before "because" will start with a negative statement, like both our previous examples—"He didn’t run" and "She didn’t want to cook"—but sometimes a positive sentence needs a comma too. Consider this example:
I heard Marylou got fired because Bob was gossiping in my dad’s store.
Did Marylou get fired because of Bob’s gossiping or did the writer hear about the firing from Bob’s gossiping? It’s not clear without a comma. If you put a comma before "because," it’s clear that the writer heard about it from Bob. If you mean that gossiping was the cause of the firing, it’s best to reword the sentence to something like "I heard Marylou got fired because she couldn’t stop Bob from gossiping in my dad’s store."
But these are the unusual sentences that need a comma before "because." More often, you’ll have a simple sentence like JC’s: "I liked swimming and hiking because they were fun." It’s unambiguous without the comma, so you don’t need one.
Finally, I have a funny familect story.
"Hi, Grammar Girl. I love your podcast, and I wanted to share a familect story which combines regional differences and speech with an inside family joke. When we needed to replace our bathroom toilet, we went to the store and saw various style and for some strange reason they had named the toilets for British cities. So my husband pointed to one, and said I think we should buy this model, so whenever we need to use it, we can announce "I need to go to the Devonshire." So we bought that model and installed it in our back hall bathroom, and he and I started calling that bathroom the Devonshire because it just rolled off the tongue better than the back hall bathroom. So even our three-year-old twins started calling it the Devonshire, and one thing relevant to the story is that we live in South Carolina, and we had a babysitter who moved here from Pennsylvania Dutch country. She was flummoxed when she heard us refer to grocery shopping carts as buggies because in her mind, a buggy is a horse strong carriage used by the Amish. She was also mystified as to why we called winter hats toboggans because she use that word to refer to a sled, and she thought it was bizarre that we called a pulled pork meal barbecue because she was accustomed to barbecue referring to an outdoor cook out or the actual grill that you cook with outside. So after year of babysitting our children, she mentioned our back hall bathroom, and she said that in Pennsylvania that was referred to as a half bath, and she wondered why Southerners called the half bath a Devonshire. My husband and I began laughing hysterically, and we eventually stopped laughing long enough to explain the origin of the name and tell her that as far as we know we are the only family on earth who called the half bath a Devonshire. And even though we moved to another house, we still call our back hall bathroom the Devonshire. I hope this gives you a chuckle and thank you so much for your informative and entertaining podcast."
Thanks so much, that definitely gave me a chuckle.
If you want to call with the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, you can leave a voicemail at 83-321-4-GIRL, and I might play it on the show.
I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. You can find articles that go with each podcast segment at my website, QuickAndDirtyTips.com.
Thanks to my audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and my editor, Adam Cecil. Our operations and editorial manager is Michelle Margulis, and our assistant manager is Emily Miller. Our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin.
That’s all. Thanks for listening.
*Note: This is a parody use of "avast." The historical meaning is "halt or stop."