Back in 2016, Frank Jacobs wrote about a culturally important phenomenon I had not been aware of:
The general synopsis at midday: High west Sole 1028 expected east Sole 1019 by midday tomorrow. Low southern Portugal 1010 losing its identity. The area forecasts for the next 24 hours. Viking, North Utsire: Northwesterly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 at first. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.
The Shipping Forecast is quite possibly the most British thing ever. It’s quirkier than cricket, defiantly old-fashioned and ceremonial, and as reassuringly regular as Big Ben (1). Produced by the UK’s Meteorological Office, it’s broadcast four times a day by BBC Radio Four. […]
Listing the weather conditions in 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles, the Shipping Forecast is read out at 5.20 am, 12.01 pm, 5.54 pm and 00.48 am. The first and last broadcasts of the day also include reports from additional weather stations and inshore waters forecasts. The last one also includes an outlook for next-day weather across the UK itself. […]
Much of the Forecast’s charm derives from the – literally – outlandish names of the sea areas listed in the bulletin. The names derive from sandbanks (e.g. Dogger, Bailey), estuaries (Forth, Thames, Shannon), islands or islets (Wight, Rockall, Utsire), towns (Dover), or other geographic features (e.g. Malin Head, Ireland’s northernmost point). […]
One is named FitzRoy, after the captain of HMS Beagle, Britain’s first professional weatherman and the founder of the Met Office. The southernmost region, Trafalgar is only mentioned standard in the last forecast of the day. The regions are always listed in the same order, starting north with Viking, between Scotland and Norway, and then proceeding in a roughly clockwise direction:
Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland. […]
The gap between Radio Four’s last programme of the day and the final Shipping Forecast, at 48 minutes past midnight, is plugged with as much as necessary of ‘Sailing By’, an orchestral piece by Ronald Binge, otherwise famous for his arrangements for Mantovani. The repetitive waltz helps sailors find the right frequency. For the many landlubbers tuning in to the last Shipping Forecast of the day, the cozy number signals that it’s almost time to turn in for the night. […]
The Shipping Forecast has made a huge mark on music, literature and the wider culture. It inspired songs by Jethro Tull, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Wire, Blur, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, British Sea Power, Beck and the Prodigy, among others, and it was used in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
Nobel-prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney wrote a sonnet called ‘The Shipping Forecast’, and British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy mentions “the radio’s prayer” in one of her poems. The programme is used in books, films, tv series, and has been parodied countless times (once as ‘The Shopping Forecast’, listing UK supermarkets instead of sea regions).
You can hear “Sailing By” here (and I recommend the nostalgic comments) and read the Heaney sonnet here. Alas, there’s no point clicking on the audio link at the start of the article, because it’s just a robotic voice making its way through the text; you can hear actual Shipping Forecast recordings at the Wikipedia article (which also, of course, goes into detail about the history of the broadcast and the origin of the names; Utsire, being Norwegian, is pronounced /ʊtˈsiːrə/, not — as the robot has it — /juːtˈsaɪər/ [though the actual Norwegian pronunciation is [ˈʊ̀tsɪɾɑ]; see comments below]). Thanks, Trevor!
Utsire, being Norwegian, is pronounced /ʊtˈsiːrə/, not — as the robot has it — /juːtˈsaɪər/
I shall certainly write to the editor of the Times about it.
The BBC World Service had (maybe still has, for all I know) a regular financial news section finishing with a commodity prices report with a similarly formulaic and hypnotic effect. I stll remember the London Metal Exchange Copper Index, and the reports of tea prices, which went in decreasing order of quality, always ending up for some reason with “Low Medium.” I presume that, of tea beyond that point, We Do Not Speak.
I don’t know how detailed the maritime forecasts may have been in coastal areas, but at least in the old days in more rural parts of the US it was common for local radio stations to give daily updates (maybe several times per day) on the latest prices for corn and hog bellies and butter etc., presumably with a similar formulaic rhythm with only the numbers varying. Consult, e.g., the classic 1954 academic study “What Does the Iowa Farmer Want from Radio Market News?” The difference, of course, is that the US is a very large place while the UK is not, so radio practices were uniform and nationalized in the latter but varied considerably in the former. (Obviously there was plenty of network-or-syndicated national programming in the US, but things likely to appeal to a niche audience would only be broadcast where that niche would be likely to be located.)
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1427&context=researchbulletin
Norway has its equally classic Værvarsel for fiskebankene. It had mythical places like Bjørnøya, Rockall and Kapp Kanin. There was a major row sometime around 1990 when the justified and ancient names were reordered and some even replaced by new terms like Utsira sør to conform to international usage.
Germany has a similar Seewetterbericht, which I haven’t heard in ages – I mostly listen to radio in the car these days, and I am seldom on the road at the strange times when it’s on. I don’t remember much of the area names (Deutsche Bucht is one I remember), but what struck me as strange when listening to it as a boy was that they pronounce Ost with a long [o:] – which is what one would expect etymologically, but the normal standard pronunciation is with a short [ɔ].
On the British comedy series As Time Goes By, one of the principal oddities of the country house housekeeper, Mrs. Bale, was her tendency to quote from the Shipping Forecast, although the show did not (so far as I can recall) make any jokes about the funny place names in the forecast. She mostly stuck to passing on information about the skies and wind speeds is readily recognizable regions, like the Irish Sea or the Dover Straits.
I heard another British cultural reference to the Shipping Forecast on an episode of Weekend Radio* around 2005. Robert Conrad played an a capella choral version of the Shipping Forecast, which was just a baroque-style performance where the text was simply an example of the Shipping Forecast. After playing it on the air, Conrad emphasized that the recording was “Not available, not available, not available.” It was apparently an old physical vinyl record he had, which had never been transferred to a more modern format.
* Speaking of Weekend Radio, it seems like Richard Howland-Bolton hasn’t commented hereabouts for quite a while. That’s too bad.
One of my Christmas presents was The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book. I haven’t actually done much of the puzzling yet, but it does give you bits of information about each region.
When I worked on North Sea oil rigs I vaguely kept track of which regions I had been in – six or seven by the time I left I think. Getting Rockall was satisfying.
@hans
I suppose you know that standard Dutch oost is with long o. For me it sounds more like a particular kind of English long o with an a or schwa onset, but the handbooks give o: for oost, boot etc.
I’ve heard that non broadcast of the shipping forecast is one of the criteria UK nuclear submarine captains are supposed to use to assess whether the UK government has been destroyed and they should open the Sealed Orders in the safe.
For awhile I needed an early alarm, so I set the radio to turn on for the shipping forecast at 5.20. I could probably have slept in a bit longer, but it was a much more pleasant way to wake up.
I believe Carol Ann Duffy’s poem is also a sonnet:
Prayer
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
Carol Ann Duffy
The Times Saturday Review, 1992
В Петропавловске на Камчатке полночь. I especially like that it is the beginning of he sixths pip that marks the exact time, but I just learned that it is the same for Greenwich time signal and more or less everywhere.
In Israel, too, before the hourly news programs. The six beeps give people time to stop talking and start listening.
This pastiche (written by Les Barker, and read by Brian Perkins, a now-retired BBC Radio 4 newsreader and Shipping-Forecast-reader) is more delightful the more familiar one is with the original format, but I would like to think that even a slight familiarity with the original would bring rewards: https://youtu.be/G9QumF93PpY
Department of the Even More Obscure`; there’s a thing called the Inshore Waters Forecast, which I think is still broadcast on BBC local radio, and which used to open up Radio 3 broadcasting in the days when there was no 24-hour programming. It uses different placenames and gives information for smaller vessels, working its way round the entire coast.
A recurring motif in the eponymous movie is that Daniel Blake punctuates his day listening to the Shipping Forecast/”Sailing By”.
For Danish: 243kHz at 0545, 0845, 1145 and 1745 (UTC+1 or +2 as applicable). The names (and definitions) of the areas seem to be a matter of international convention — but even though WP claims that Heligoland (Helgoland) changed to German Bight (Tyske Bugt) in 1956, I’m pretty sure I heard the former on the radio in the mid-sixties (and the latter later) — back when FM program 1 and LW were the same.
(And I’m pretty sure that it was [ˈud̥sɪʁɑ] with no pretense to Norvegicity. I had no idea where it was).
Always reminds me of the comedy series Black Books. Episode “The Big Lock Out” is one the funniest. There are heaps of references to the shipping forecast.
“it’s just a robotic voice”
With Google Maps’ driving directions I find its US accent better than its UK accent when it comes to guessing how to say Irish placenames. They are wrong, of course, but the actual spelling can more easily be inferred.
@Paddy: yes, I know. I have no idea whether the long “o” used for Ost in the Seewetterbericht is a retention of the etymologically correct vowel in Standard German or whether it’s a specific nautical usage influenced maybe from Low German (after all, the German coasts are traditionally Low German speaking areas). One reason why they use it is certainly that it increases the aural difference between Ost and West; OTOH, the fact that they never lengthen the “e” in West shows that this was a pre-existing pronunciation variety and not just some arbitrary lengthening.
Sjöväderrapporten in Swedish, with similarly iconic placenames. Although I find the names of light houses that used to be listed in radio weather observations, even more iconic.
This pastiche (written by Les Barker, and read by Brian Perkins, a now-retired BBC Radio 4 newsreader and Shipping-Forecast-reader) is more delightful the more familiar one is with the original format, but I would like to think that even a slight familiarity with the original would bring rewards
It does indeed; I enjoyed that a lot!
I fear that I’ve probably written my last paper, but if there is another I shall try to slip in a reference to Dodds, J. Parry and Marvin, K. R. (1954) “What does the Iowa farmer want from radio market news?,” Research Bulletin (Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station): Vol. 32 : No. 413 , Article 1. There must be some way to relate it to the definition of life.
As for Rockall, it was in the news when I were a lad — not when it was annexed in 1955 to celebrate the first anniversary of Dodd’s and Marvin’s classic study, because I was too young then, but maybe in 1972, when it became part of Scotland.
The Met’s change of Finisterre to Fitzroy in 2002 was a minor cultural event.
Utsire, being Norwegian, is pronounced /ʊtˈsiːrə/, not — as the robot has it — /juːtˈsaɪər/
The Norwegian place is technically Utsira (with an A). Wikipedia claims that the Norwegian pronunciation is [ˈʊ̀tsɪɾɑ], and that it used to be spelled “Utsire” between 1875 and 1924.
(I immediately recognized the name because last year I spent a long time working out the largest cities/towns/settlements in each 5×5 degree square of latitude and longitude that had any. Utsira, population 198, turned out to be the largest town between 55 and 60 degrees north and 0 and 5 degrees east, on the account of being the only piece of land in that square.)
but maybe in 1972, when it became part of Scotland.
It is even, I believe, part of Harris – possibly because St Kilda is.
Wikipedia claims that the Norwegian pronunciation is [ˈʊ̀tsɪɾɑ]
Interesting; I wonder why the Shipping Forecast reader uses penultimate stress?
J1M: The Norwegian place is technically Utsira (with an A). Wikipedia claims that the Norwegian pronunciation is [ˈʊ̀tsɪɾɑ], and that it used to be spelled “Utsire” between 1875 and 1924.
And rightly so. The first element is ut- “out”, keeping it distinct from a couple of topos nymmed Sira on the mainland. The element Sira could be related to ‘sea’, ‘see’ or ‘sieve’, or it might even be Ante-IE.
Hat: I wonder why the Shipping Forecast reader uses penultimate stress?
Part of the mantra-like quality of Værvarsel for fiskebankene is (used to be?) that some words are conventionally pronounced with very odd stress. This was to make them more distinctive in a garbled reception on a boat radio.
You can get the current Shipping Forecast on the Radio 4 website.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl7j
I’m guessing the latter, because the spelling isn’t unambiguous: -/oːst/- occurs in Ostern “easter”, Kloster “monastery”, Trost “solace”, Drosten “Germany’s answer to Dr. Fauci”, Prost “drink this booze now and be happy about it” and probably others, probably in the majority of words with -ost-. Also, there are Österreich “Austria” and österlich “of Easter” with /øːst/-.
Similar Low German substrate phenomena are common. LG appears to have merged */ɪr/ and */ɛr/ as [eːɐ̯]; as a result, every stressed -er- seems to be pronounced that way in northern Germany, and some of these (erst, Wert) are now heard e.g. from Austrian radio newsreaders, which still weirds me out.
(…and that in turn may be a hypercorrectivism for the fact that */er/ and stressed */ɛr/ have merged as [ɛɐ̯] in the Bavarian dialects.)
I remember the Shipping Forecast from my early childhood. I don’t hear it so often these days because the 1754 broadcast (when I’m most likely to be listening) is long wave only on weekdays.
Among the coastal weather stations, in recent years I have visited both (the island of) Tiree and the Butt of Lewis (no longer listed, but mentioned in the Brian Perkins spoof.
The “long”, closed vowel in erst and Wert is Standard German (the pronuouncing dictionaries – Duden, De Gruyter and a 1912 copy of Siebs’s Bühnenaussprache – agree on this). Duden points out that the open vowel in these words is a regionalism. The general lengthening/closing of vowels before r is at least in Standard German a much more regionally restricted affair; I associate it with speakers from the Northern parts of Northrhine-Westphalia (Niederrhein, Ruhrgebiet, Westfalen), but not with the Northern (originally Low German speaking) part of Germany altogether.
I have never heard Drosten pronounced with a long o, its always the short vowel; compare the well-known name Droste-Hülshoff, which has always a short vowel. A long vowel here sounds even weirder to me than the long e in the pronunciation of Mecklenburg which suddenly appeared in the 1990s.
Few people are aware of the etymological connection between Osten and Österreich, so it is not surprising that the vowel was not analogically shortened (just as in the very similar and possibly etymologically connected word Ostern)
I would go to bed to the sound of the « Météo Marine » a long time ago. This thread reminded me of it, but I discovered to my dismay that it disappeared along with France Inter’s AM broadcast on Christmas Day 2016.
I just noticed: the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch characterizes the pronunciation of Ost with a long/closed o as “verdeutlichend (bes. Funkverkehr)”; this would only make sense if there was a similarly sounding word occurring in the same contexts as ost.
All pronunciations of Standard German are regional. The exception is the Bühnenaussprache, which is just about exclusively used on highbrow theater stages and consists half of northern regionalisms, half of entirely artificial features that were invented to improve its acoustic properties; almost none of those have made it into any kind of common usage.
Thanks, I was wondering about that for a long time! I didn’t think of it in this context, though.
I’ve never heard it at all (sheltered lockdown life without TV or radio!), but my sister was shocked to hear it with a long o and asked me how that was possible.
Edited to add: no phonetic/phonological transcription in the German Wikipedia article for Christian Drosten, which is a point for /ɔ/; [ɔ] explicitly in the English and French ones; no transcription in the Dutch one, which is another point for /ɔ/.
The story I know is that /eː/ is original, and /ɛ/ is a spelling-pronunciation used by people who don’t know that the c is a lie (i.e. a 16th-century flourish that wasn’t meant to indicate any particular pronunciation). The German Wikipedia article insists on [eː] for the standard and says the local dialect has [ɛː], which would definitely be represented as [eː] in the standard*. However, it also supplies the 10th/11th-century form Mikilinborg (“big fortified place”), and I have no idea how that would ever develop into either [ɛː] or [eː] or for that matter [ɛ].
* …at the very least by speakers who don’t have a separate /æː/.
Definitely.
I presume the first e in Breker is long?
Never mind, I found an Aussprachewörterbuch in Google Books that answered my question in the affirmative.
The World Meteorological Organization has a volume with maps of the shipping forecast areas for many member countries.
It seems France and the UK are the primary delineators for the NE Atlantic respectively south and north of 48°27’N. The two countries use the same areas north of that, though in La Manche their names differ. South of the divide France has finer divisions than the UK’s crude Biscay/FitzRoy.
Further west to the mid-ocean, the UK just has four squares named Northwest/…/…/Southeast, whereas France has a larger more romantically named grid starting Flemish/Faraday/Romeo, Milne/Altair/Charcot, Ridge/Azores/Josephine, …
It has to be; lack of c has to be intentional, and then the lengthening of stressed open syllables kicks in.
lack of c has to be intentional
Names get spelled in all sorts of weird ways; I assume nothing.
The general lengthening/closing of vowels before r
Wrt to closing, Swedish (and Norwegian) does the opposite:
/ɛː/, /ɛ/ (in stressed syllables), /øː/ (with a few exceptions) and /œ/ are lowered to [æː], [æ], [œ̞ː] and [œ̞], respectively, when preceding /r/.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Vowels
Even that is more limited in German than in English. Cases like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondeley are not possible on this side of the Channel.
No, of course not, but cf. your remarks on Drosten et al. above.
Cases like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondeley are not possible on this side of the Channel.
On this side of the Maginot line, you must mean (in order to give French names their due).
Cases like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondeley are not possible on this side of the Channel.
It would be more correct to say that Standard German banishes such cases to the dialects; e.g. Mühlheim on the Ruhr is Mölm in the local dialect (I only know that because I overheard some locals talking on a train about 30 years ago). The Standard pronunciation is as it’s spelled.
Duden Aussprachewörterbuch characterizes the pronunciation of Ost with a long/closed o as “verdeutlichend (bes. Funkverkehr)”; this would only make sense if there was a similarly sounding word occurring in the same contexts as ost.
My assumption (as pointed out upthread) is that it’s to create a bigger aural distance to West.
However, it also supplies the 10th/11th-century form Mikilinborg (“big fortified place”), and I have no idea how that would ever develop into either [ɛː] or [eː] or for that matter [ɛ].
Low German varieties frequently have /e/ for WGmc /i/ and /o/ for WGmc /u/. Then you take lengthening in open syllables and you’re there.
not possible on this side of the Channel.
Because you don’t shorten long placenames, or because you write down what I suppose must be the pronunciation spelling when you do?
There’s a charming little pastiche/parody of the Shipping Forecast by Stephen Fry here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8_uiiuf-yA
(This is from “Saturday Night Fry”, a six-episode radio comedy series done by Fry, Hugh Laurie, Jim Broadbent, and Emma Thompson back in the 1980s. Quite a lot of clever linguistic humor in it.)
Because you don’t shorten long placenames, or because you write down what I suppose must be the pronunciation spelling when you do?
I think it’s mostly the latter – German orthography was finally fixed only at the end of the 19th century, and while there are remnants of historical spellings in place and personal names like the decorative “ck” discussed above or “e/i” to indicate lengthening (discussed elsewhere here at LH), there’s much less of this than in English, because spelling and local pronunciation could co-evolve far into the 19th century. Additionally, German orthography, unlike English, has as an objective that you know how a word is pronounced when you read it, and that seems to have carried over into how the spelling of place names was standardised. But when the local pronounciation doesn’t match the way the place name is spelled, the spelling pronunciation wins out in Standard German (because the local pronunciation is “dialect”).
Yes.
This goes so far that only locals tend to know place names in the local dialects. Vienna is, quite regularly, /vɛɐ̯n/ in Viennese dialect; the exact same form would be just as regular in my dialect from 180 km farther west, but no, we stick with the standard form even when speaking dialect.
Also, somewhere there’s a character Mompfred aus Monnem, i.e. Manfred aus Mannheim.
I find its US accent better than its UK accent
Naturally, since AmE is una lingua tedesca in bocca irlandese.