I’m a sucker for the technical vocabulary of traditional fields, the more obsolescent the better (cf. retting flax), so of course I enjoyed Rukmini Callimachi’s NY Times piece (archived) on the beleaguered master thatchers of olde England and the roofs they thatch:
For the most ardent traditionalists, the only true thatch is “long straw” — typically cereal straw, like wheat, which is threshed to remove the grain — believed by historians to be England’s original roof. Then there’s water reed, the more durable alternative that is increasingly imported from abroad.
For master thatcher Stephen Letch, the difference is unmistakable. The problem is that for almost everyone else it’s undetectable — which is one reason long-straw roofs are going extinct. “There’s 20 or 30 long-straw thatchers left in all of England,” said Mr. Letch, 66, who has spent much of his life trying to preserve this dying art. “We’re the last and we know we’re the last — and we know that once we’re gone, those skills will be lost.” […]
Long before Britain was stitched together by a railway, roofs were made from whatever grew nearby, like heather in the northern highlands and reed near bogs and waterways. Overwhelmingly, though, most areas of the country used straw, a byproduct of the wheat grown to make bread, according to historians. It’s a lightweight material that keeps homes well insulated in the summer heat and the winter cold, but it is also flammable, attracts insects and the spiders that feed on them, and requires costly maintenance.
According to one assessment, 90 percent of thatched roofs in England and Wales were made of straw before 1800, with the remaining share split between water reed and grasses, like heather. Now that percentage has been inverted, as more and more houses are re-thatched with the more durable reed. But it’s not sourced from the local river — much of it is shipped from Eastern Europe and China.
“We do get asked the question: Well, what is the value of it?” Mr. Letch said of the long straw. “Tradition,” he answered, before dropping his voice: “But you can’t see the tradition because it all looks the same.” […]
It’s not hard to see why water reed has won out. It lasts longer — up to 70 years, versus 40 years for long straw, according to Julia Shelley, editor of The Thatcher’s Standard, the publication of the National Society of Master Thatchers. And it’s much easier to source and to install.
“You can pick up the phone and say, ‘I need 2,000 bunches of reeds,’ and they’ll turn up next week,” said the master thatcher Bodkin Willows, 38, while it can take up to a year to source the wheat for a long-straw roof.
The reed arrives from overseas in bundles that can go straight onto a roof. Long straw, by contrast, requires a preparation so elaborate that it has its own archaic vocabulary: Straw must be “gabled,” soaked in water and sorted, before being arranged in “yealms,” and pinned into place with “broaches” or “spars” made from hazel sticks that have been sharpened into staples.
Yealm is normatively spelled yelm; the OED (entry from 1921) defines it as “In Old English, a handful, bundle, sheaf, as of reaped corn; in modern dialect use, a bundle of straw laid straight for thatching (see yelm v.): = helm n.³ 1.” and says it is “Of uncertain origin.” As for broach, the OED (entry from 1888) has a great many senses (“A pointed rod of wood or iron; a lance, spear, bodkin, pricker, skewer, awl, stout pin”; “A spit for spitting herring; a similar instrument used in Candle-making for suspending the wicks for dipping”; “A shuttle used in weaving tapestry,” etc.), but the one we want is I.5. “A piece of tough pliant wood, pointed at each end, used by thatchers for fixing their work”; the word is from French broche (“The same word as brooch n., the senses having been differentiated in spelling”).
I feel for the beleaguered thatchers, of course, but I’m afraid they’re not going to have much success trying to persuade people to undergo more trouble and expense for something that no one but an expert can tell from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Thatch. At any rate, the photos in the article are splendid — do take a look.
Huh. It never occurred to me to ask which “grass” exactly it is that Kusaasi thatch their houses with. I imagine it matters quite a bit.
Mɔɔdi pilig ka yu’ada bɛ.
grass.LINKER strip.off and rafters exist
“The thatch has come off but the roof-beams are still there” (i.e. while there’s life there’s hope.)
This reminds me of Alex Kerr‘s Lost Japan, where he describes the restoration of his 18th century farmhouse in Shikoku, which included its re-thatching by some of the few remaining tradesmen with that knowledge. As I recall, it involved several different grasses, collected at specific times of the year, each with its own part in the structure.
70 years. My shingles won’t last that long. So all that Three Little Pigs stuff was just propaganda to destroy the independent straw home craftsmen?
Is anyone else wondering whether Bodkin Willows is a birth name?
Hey, speaking of plant fiber as a construction material, and given the cosmopolitan tendencies of Hatters, maybe someone here could help me out with a phrase in a poem I’m translating. It’s a “rifugio di stuoia”—literally, “hut made of woven matting”—on Adam’s Peak in what is now Sri Lanka, in 1912. I’ve found some descriptions of cadjan huts, if that’s what we’re talking about, which are made of woven palm leaves. But since it’s a cloud forest, i.e., a slightly unusual environment, I’m unsure about whether it would be accurate to use the words “leaves” (what if it’s bamboo instead?) and/or “thatch.” I’m inclined to avoid the latter in any case; it would work well metrically but may be too closely associated with British cottages and bundles of grass.
I know things have changed more than a little over the last century or so, but might anyone familiar with the region have a clearer idea?
@biscia
https://mihipedia.lk/2013/10/11/a-mountain-retreat-fishing-hut-in-maskeliya/
This really looks like basic thatch (cover the roof with dense straw matting and replace/repair when wind or rain or marauding birds/animals/insects wreck it, maybe ten times a year). Here the roof seems to be wooden slats and there is no internal fireplace.
Wheat has been improved, and heads out from a shorter stalk than was formerly the case. I assume someone has to grow antiquarian wheat to get long straw, and such sources must be rare in the British Isles.
@Biscia: This image shows what I would think of as a stereotypical (modern) cadjan house. The walls are made of woven bamboo matting, and the roof is of palm leaves over wood or bamboo slats. I don’t know anything about Ceylon construction specifically, and the Wikipedia picture is evidently from Burma; however, I think it looks typical of what might be seen in Siam or elsewhere in southeast Asia.
As to the word thatch, I think of palm roofs as being a form of that, but obviously quite distinct from the prototypical kind of thatching envisioned by European or American readers. If I saw the roof in the image described as “palm thatching” though, I wouldn’t bat an eye.
“hut made of woven matting sri lanka early twentieth century”
That was the google images query. It yielded some 1920s photos with captions naming coconut leaves as matting material.
Fascinating article, but I wish they had used photos to more clearly show the difference between long straw and water reed. One photo caption shows “the sharp, angular look of this thatch, a sign that it’s made from water reed,” but what do we contrast it with? Which photos illustrate “the fluid texture of the dried thatch blanketing the house — a soft, seamless look, as though a thick golden liquid had oozed over the cottage and its eaves,” the difference that master thatcher Stephen Letch finds unmistakable?
A picture of a thatchers’ brawl would be fun, too.
Judging by the photo at the top of the piece, I’m concerned at the acrobatics involved for 66-year-olds. Not so much dying art as defenestrating artists.
Fascinating article, but I wish they had used photos to more clearly show the difference between long straw and water reed.
Yes, that frustrated me as well.
I’m surprised J.W.B. hasn’t checked in on the 70’s rock reference. The man on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s album may have been a thatcher, but no one knew that till recently, and he isn’t carrying thatch, so the image didn’t help promote thatch as an icon of Olde English nostalgia.
From the photo in the Times, English long straw thatch is laid with bundles lower down the roof overlaying higher ones. I wonder why. Maybe it’s more resistant to wind damage. I might have that that would allow more water seepage.
I was just going to blame Thatcherism for the decline of this set of antique artisanal skills.
Zeppelin were not pro-thatch, in that the famous rustic Welsh farmstead/cottage where they would hang out and free their minds from uptight urban existence (Bron-Yr-Aur) has a boringly-up-to-date shingled roof even if it lacks running water. OTOH there are claims that the cottage where the original lineup of Traffic hung out in ’67 (thereby pioneering the rural/rustic approach to British-rockstar creativity) had a thatched roof, but I can’t immediately find a photo on the internet to confirm that. That was in Aston Tirrold, Berks., not particularly distant from London, and was said to have originally been a shack for the gamekeeper or what have you on the grounds of a much posher mansion.
Previous discussion of archaic-sounding roof-related terminology. https://languagehat.com/cockloft/ I can tell you (as a result of having been engaged professionally on lawsuits related to a major fire in the West Thirties in Manhattan caused by rooftop demolition work carried out w/o appropriate safety precautions) that “cockloft” remains in active use among urbanites who have professional need to discuss the referent.
I remember seeing roofs being thatched in the Oxfordshire village where I went to primary school, in the 1960s. My recollection, from where I can’t say, is that the material they used then was reeds from Norfolk. This was before anyone had heard of globalization, and before the Chinese government hatched its plan to dominate international thatchery.
In the Midwest (US), while there may be native phragmites australis (water reed), the subspecies found most often is a European variety that is aggressive and tends to form monocultures. Ecological restorationists spend a fair amount of time on phragmites fighting. Maybe we could fund our efforts by bundling what we tear out and sending it to England.
Someone should do a documentary on the lost art of thatching and call it The Last Straw.
I’ve never heard of a shingled roof except in L.M. Montgomery books – I thought it was a way of making wooden roofs for wooden houses. I am therefore intrigued to hear that J.W. Brewer has seen one in Wales.
grasses, like heather
I would have thought that straw was grass (or at least a byproduct of grass) and heather wasn’t…
I was surprised that the percentage for heather was so low, and then realised that it was only for England and Wales.
I’m not sure how much of a tradition of straw thatching there has ever been in Scotland – some, I’m sure, but we don’t have the same proportion of arable land, for one thing (and even less if you only count wheat rather than oats and barley). Plenty of heather, quite a bit of assorted stone. (I feel like I read or watched something fairly recently which talked about splitting something which wasn’t actual slate to make roofing material – fine sandstone? – but I haven’t a clue now what it was.)
Is anyone else wondering whether Bodkin Willows is a birth name?
There have always been odd names about. Or it could be originally a nickname given to an apprentice with an appropriate surname, rather than wholly invented.
>I’ve never heard of a shingled roof except in L.M. Montgomery books
Could this be different word usage. The Scottish images I find almost all show roofs that would be called shingled in the US. In the US, a shingle means any sort of flat piece laid out in tiled rows overlain so that a higher layer drains onto the lower layer. Most common are asphalt or composite materials.
Or is there a distinction I’m missing?
>There have always been odd names about.
Sure. I think it was the coincidence that bodkin showed up in the definition of broach, and that a broach might be made of willow, since a pliant wood seems appropriate for the purpose, that set me wondering. But a roofing broach probably can’t be called a bodkin.
It may well have been parents’ whim. I lean towards a nickname, though maybe unrelated to broach.
What would JeninEd call a “normal” roof covered with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_shingle s? Although the wiki claim of “a very common roofing material in the United States” I guess has some implicature re less common in the U.K.? Looking more closely at an online photo of the Welsh cottage in question, I guess I can’t tell if the objects covering the roof are shingles or slates (if slates are deemed not to be a variety of shingles). But definitely not thatch.
Back to album covers etc. you can see at this link the cover art of a not-quite-a-platinum-smash 2019 release titled _Thatched Roof Glass House_. Featuring on the bass the semi-legendary Fred Smith* (who died earlier this year)!
https://alphacat.band/reviews-thatched-roof-glass-house
*Not the deceased-rock-musician Fred Smith whose widow is Patti Smith. The other one.
Slates if they’re made of slate, tiles if they’re made of tile. Otherwise I don’t really know. Probably still tiles if they behave like tiles, even if they’re not made of red tile stuff (clay?).
Shingles historically were called tiles, and shingle was a term applied to wood shingles, as is still mostly the case outside the US, says Wikipedia.
I think that’s roughly the same thing said in different words – outside the US generic flat roofing objects are called tiles, and specifically wooden ones are called shingles.
(Presumably not related to the shingles that make you very sore on one side.)
The common-in-the-U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_shingle has the shape and function of the old-timey cut-from-wood shingle it was developed to replace, and in some instances has a wood-pulp base under the waterproofing/fireproofing stuff. I don’t actually know what ingredients (organic or otherwise) make up the shingles on my own roof, which seems to be performing its function just fine, although it’s 24 years old and some U.S. insurers have underwriting algorithms that are skeptical of roofs that haven’t been redone/replaced in the last 20 years. The use of “tile” to describe something that isn’t ceramic or even ceramic-like is odd to my ear, but I guess that’s just another example of how foreigners sometimes Talk Foreign. I will defer to the roofers of the former Montgomeryshire for an accurate description in their own preferred words (translated from Brythonic into English if necessary) of the roof of the non-thatched Welsh cottage I previously mentioned.
Jen: red tile stuff (clay?)
Interesting!* The Danish/Norwegian cognate** tegl unambiguously denotes the material, while teglste(i)n and teglflis denote the bricks and tiles made from it, respectively. I can’t seem to find any other language with a simple term for the material “baked clay in bricks and tiles”. It does, however, seem quite common to use the word for brick as a mass noun (“The house was made of brick”), which is not a far step away from denoting the material.
* Professionaly, even. Designing brick-and-mortar structures is a large part of my actual job.
** Cognate within NW Gmc. The word is from Latin, and the root is cognate with the native Gmc. “thatch” word.
I wonder if the NY Times has fallen into some sort of new organic-building-materials obsession because it was only a month ago that they went with “Beware of Wolves, but Straw Houses Could Help With Climate Change.” (Quote from alleged little-pig-housing expert: “The straw house sequesters carbon; the wood house is pretty good, but the brick house is a carbon bomb that actually leads to climate disaster.”)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/10/nyregion/straw-house-hudson-ny.html (or ask the wayback machine for assistance)
Baked clay in roofing tiles is often called terracotta. I’m not sure of the bounds of that word – are there baked clay roofing tiles that are not terracotta?
I wouldn’t call a brick terracotta. Many English speakers at this point may think of terracotta as describing the color rather than the material.
Technically, “ceramic” includes all fired-clay substances including brick (Merriam-Webster, for instance), but I think few people think of brick when they hear “ceramic”. Maybe materials scientists? Archeologists?
BTW, M-W says there’s a pronunciation with initial /k/ that’s “especially British”. Any truth to that? I don’t remember ever hearing it.
Both LPD and CEPD list GB variant pronunciations with /k-/.
You learn something every day! Reminds me of kinema.
@Trond: German Ziegel = Dachziegel “roof tile”, but a Ziegelstein is a brick. For the other uses of “tile”, we have Kachel (on walls or stoves) and Fliese (on the floor).
@Jen in Edinburgh: Straw is prototypically dried stalks of tall grass, although it can sometimes refer to other plant matter. It’s hard to say where the boundaries of straw lie. I would consider dried reeds to be a kind of straw, but pine straw (the plentiful longleaf pine needles that are widely used as landscaping mulch around here) not to be actual straw. Heather, in any case, is definitely not a grass, since it’s a dicot. It doesn’t even particularly look like a grass, although I’m unsure whether you could have “heather straw” and, if so, whether it would actually be straw.
@Hans: Yeah, being concerned with the material, I played fast and loose with some nuances in Norwegian too. It’s taktegl (prefered by vendors) or tegltakstein (common) for roof tiles, flis for both wall and roof tiles — teglflis if that’s the material.
But tegl itself is somewhat specialized vocabulary. Most people just say mur. Even for concrete, thinking of it.
So a documentary on ceramic art at an offering of Celtic cinema could be sibilant-less?
Or is there no single speaker who uses /k/ in all those words?
There was one, but he choked on a guttural and died.
Me: flis for both wall and roof tiles
Aargh! For both wall and floor tiles.
Yes.
I’m used to Ziegel meaning “brick”*, so that Dachziegel is actually necessary, and know Ziegelstein only from reading. And my indistinct impression of Berlin is that both are unknown and Backstein is used for “brick”. I’d also restrict Kachel to… not sure, maybe thicker and/or more ornamental ones, as indeed found on stoves.
(…and I know one room lined with Fliesen on all sides, even the ceiling – it’s a toilet** in a roof, so one wall is oblique and the ceiling is exactly one (short) row of tiles.)
* Never as a mass noun; “made of brick” is aus Ziegeln (no participle).
** A… water closet. Not a bathroom; the bathroom is next door.
G Mauer “wall made of stone, brick or concrete”. Feminine like the native Wand “wall” despite the masculine original murus.
Also Keramik, keltisch, Kino. And skeptisch (probably the most common word with /sk/-).
Giant robots made of dried grass
@ulr: Thanks. Now I’m wondering whether anyone here has ever heard “keramic”.
Another one of these words is “leucistic”, (of an animal) having abnormal white external pigmentation but not albino. It’s less often spelled “leukistic”, but some birders or ornithologists say you should pronounce it with a /k/ no matter the spelling, as does this blog wrangler.
There’s room for pedantry here–some people restrict “leucism” to depigmentation due to a certain cause, which I don’t remember. The above link says that in reindeer, it’s a genetic defect often linked to deafness, and agrees with hints that I’m getting from Wikipedia and Google AI that it results from pigment cells not forming or not migrating to the skin during embryonic development.
I want to say “bikykle”, but I can’t bring myself to it.
Clay pantiles, red or sometimes brown or grey, were used all over the east coast of England and Scotland from the mid 17C onwards, an expensive alternative to reed or heather or peat, but fire-proof, long lasting and relatively light (because the curve meant less overlap). Originally they were imported from the Low Countries:
https://falkirklocalhistory.club/around-the-area/coasts/pantiles/
“Vessels from the Forth took coal, salt and herring to Denmark, Flanders, and the Baltic ports and returned with cargoes of timber, hides, wines, ceramics, bricks, and “holle dakpan,” or “roof tiles with hollows,” as the concave pantiles were described.”
“‘Dakpan’ is Dutch for ‘roof tile’”. ’Pantile’ appears in 1640 (England), 1669 (Scotland).
“A 1621 Act of the Scottish Parliament, repeated in 1681, required houses in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Stirling to be ‘theicked with lead, sclait, scailȝie* or tyle’.”
You could thatch with almost anything: https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/theking
* https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/skellie_n2
Scailzie: variant of skellie or skelly, meaning a reef, a skerry
[O.Sc. skelley, id., 1513, of somewhat uncertain orig., phs. Celtic. Cf. O.Ir. sceillec, Ir. sceillig, a rock, reef, which has not survived in Sc. Gael.]
A citation from c.1980 is nearest the 1621 sense:
“The group of houses, comprising the White House, and a smaller intermediate house dated 1718, and the Old Manse of 1703, stand even nearer to the open sea than the kirk: so near, indeed, that their gardens and offices have to be protected from the storms by massive vertical walls and aprons, founded on the skellies or strata of varied kinds of limestone.”
Giant robots made of dried grass
It’s when the authorities start constructing giant men made of wicker that you really should start to get alarmed.
(Basketry is intrinsically satanic. You know it’s true.)
> in reindeer, it’s a genetic defect often linked to deafness
That’s interesting. I didn’t do a deep dive but I’ve been aware of the idea many Dalmatians are deaf ((folk wisdom being that that’s why they make good fire house dogs, untroubled by the bells and sirens.) This is a site that describes the cause as genetic linkage between their piebald coloring and deafness.
I wonder whether the linkage between coloration and deafness is common in a broad clade of mammals that takes in reindeer and dogs, or just a coincidence. I’m also not clear whether leucism/albinism is even related to the predominantly white piebaldness found in Dalmatians.
Wicker is one thing but rattan almost comes out and says it’s satanic.
You could thatch with almost anything
Those materials also used to make bags for carrying produce from the fields, and for suspending as storage out of reach of rats. Important enough to appear in placenames: Raupō Bay (near Christchurch); Papatoetoe (a major suburb of Auckland); Nīkau Valley (near Wellington).
@Ryan: Also, white cats are prone to deafness, especially if they have one or both eyes blue, according to this page from the Cornell Feline Health Center.
The skin and the nervous system both develop from the ectoderm layer in the embryo, and the pigment cells form later in a structure called the neural crest. But someone, possibly named David, will be along to explain this correctly.
In Dalmatians, the same genes can affect spot pattern, lead to heterochromia, and cause congenital deafness. The deafness is related, because apparently, melanocytes also play an important role in the cochlea.
Interesting stuff. Thanks, Jerry and Brett.
Many thanks to PlasticPaddy, Brett, and cuchuflete! I’d found images that seemed promising, but the confirmation of pertinence to both the time and the specific setting is just what I needed. Hurray for Hatters (especially since the translation communities I could once count on for help are gradually crumbling…).
“of olde England”
Please stop doing that. Its ****ing patronising.
hat was no doubt alluding to the little-known nexus between thatching techniques and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olde_English_800.
Please stop replacing letters with asterisks. It’s fucking patronizing. Furthermore, I have no idea what your point is. How is it patronising/patronizing to provide a little gentle mockery of fake tradition?
Wait, are these master roof-thatchers practitioners of a fake tradition or a real tradition? Obviously, much of Olde English Folkloric Tradition was invented from whole cloth between let’s say 1870 and 1930 by urban intellectuals with questionable agendas, but roof-thatching seems like it would have been too hard for those sorts of people to figure out.
Oh, I didn’t mean that in particular was a fake tradition, just that it was part of a whole misty partly-imagined complex of traditions that laudatores temporis acti like to moon over, and I summarize the whole complex as Olde England. (Vaguely related: Is “Ingerland” and acceptable pronunciation of England?)
ENG-GL-LAND! ENG-GL-LAND! …not a football fan, just having some phonological fun here.
…Now that I think of it, the gill-arch skeleton is neural crest, and that includes the ear ossicles; so maybe that’s what’s going on. Without a middle ear you aren’t quite deaf, but the frequency range shrinks a lot, and so does the sensitivity.
I’m not aware of anything related to melanocytes in the cochlea, though.
When I read that paragraph in the Times on Sunday I wondered if it would show up here.
From the abstract of M Tachibana, “Cochlear melanocytes and MITF signaling”
Amazing. A useful reminder that biology doesn’t have to make sense.
Jerry F: From the abstract of M Tachibana, “Cochlear melanocytes and MITF signaling”
What does the T stand for?
David M. blockquote>Melanocytes occur not only in the skin and eyes but in the cochlea, where they exist as intermediate cells of the stria vascularis.
Amazing. A useful reminder that biology doesn’t have to make sense.
And that evolution works with everything available.
In principle, couldn’t it be the other way around? Some obscure intermediate signalling cells turned out to be really useful as UV protection in bare skin?
I’m reminded of this recent paper:
Clivia Lisowski et al: Homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages under overcast conditions, Science, 28 May 2026
I thought the melanocytes in the inner ear were rather weird when I first learned about them, but using white blood cells to increase magnetic susceptibility for navigational purposes is another whole level of bizarre!
I could also have cited the concluding paragraph of the discussion:
It’s tempting to speculate that this actually is an inherited trait in vertebrates or something, lost or weakened in species that have come to rely more on other means like e.g. sight, reasoning, or linguistic accumulation of knowledge. And should we expect traces of this magnetic sense to be unevenly distributed in humans? A part of the talent of skilled orienteers? A selected trait in gatherers, or in cultural groups who traditionally orient by cardinal directions rather than body-centric directions?
Wow, what amazing stuff!
What does the T stand for?
the?
ENG-GL-LAND
i learned the yiddish song “dray shvester” from a friend who’s part of a direct isnad to winchevsky, who wrote it. in that lineage’s deep london yiddish (a poylish/SW-leaning lect), the country’s name is more-or-less /ɛŋ.ɡɛ.lɔnd/.
the first two lines, where “england” appears have a cute phrasing, too (i’m transliterating it as if it were in YIVOish):
in england iz do a shtot lester / in london iz do aza skver
[in england there’s a city called leicester / in london there’s a square like that]
cultural groups who traditionally orient by cardinal directions rather than body-centric directions?
I’ve sometimes wondered about that. I am quite certain that I could not do that myself at all, but perhaps it’s actually a pan-human ability which only properly manifests in cultures which orient by cardinal directions: rather like the question of, if you were a woman who could see four primary colours, how would you actually get to know about it, embedded in a world of people who can only see three, and speaking only their chromatically-deficient languages? How would you acquire the relevant concepts?
As with deaf Dalmatians, this is a sort of learned folk tale that I’ll pass along without verifying, to prompt someone here who knows to tell us more. I’ve read that some people from such cultures can, if taken into a dark room and spun around for a while, still accurately tell which direction is which.
What does the T stand for?
“Transcription”, I just found out.
I’ve read that some people from such cultures can, if taken into a dark room and spun around for a while, still accurately tell which direction is which.
We had a discussion about that here some years ago, but I don’t know which thread.
When an old English gammon whinges about losing a trivially important subset of an otherwise healthy tradition, calling it “olde” is an appropriate level of mockery. It would be like using ‘Murican to describe an old man in Iowa lamenting the fact that the local drive-in movie theater no longer lets him bring his gun.
“We had a discussion about that here some years ago” — you’re most likely thinking of THE BOOKSHELF: THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS, though there have been some others. Ryan, the book that thread is about is really good.
Or maybe like if you had used crone to describe an old or middle-aged woman, mourning whatever ridiculous and stupid things you may mourn. Because the insult is just in good fun, right? Surely you don’t actually intend offense to the old man and his sadness?
If you’re going to lecture others on why the things they’re mournful about are dumb to you, and why you feel justified in mocking them for it (mildly? It was meant mildly, right?), it’s in much better taste to compare it to an example that is self-mocking.
You seem instead to have chosen to just punch down at some second stock villain you’ve caricatured in your own fantasy world, completely randomly, just to show you hate those people too. Probably from the comfort of a neighborhood loaded with “hate has no home” signs.
– Signed, an ugly old arthritic mourning his decrepit knees and cracking face.
Thanks, ktschwartz. And such a nice gesture from you makes me sad I replied grumpily to the commenter just above. I’ll try to “pay it forward” more often.
And just purchased!
Great! And (just checked) the Deutscher book does mention a blindfolded-and-spun-around-in-a-darkened-house test.
Slates if they’re made of slate, tiles if they’re made of tile.
For me a slate roof is a type of tiled roof. I hesitate to refer to an individual slate tile as “a slate”, the default sense of which for me is the slate used by schoolchildren in days of yore, despite that not cropping up in conversation nearly as often as roofs. I don’t have “tile” as a mass noun and I’m not sure what material is implied; terracotta or clay in general perhaps?
I lack the “tile” sense of “shingle”, and also the brass-plate “set out one’s shingle” sense, which Separated by a Common Language brought to my attention.
Imaginable…
One was actually found 16 years ago – with tests that don’t exactly grow on trees.
“The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy” — I initially read that last word as “trichomancy” and thought “Huh, divination by hair.” And it turns out there is such a thing!
@mollymooly: Tile as a mass noun is a little weird, at least for me. There is no problem with
However, some constructions with mass tile seem slightly off to me. Compare
And brick as a mass noun? Similar?
Me (L2), I consider those iffy:
? They delivered the tile for the new roof.
? There’s a pile of rock outside, for the field stone wall.
? There’s a heap of stone outside, for the foundation.
“Brick” works for me the same way everywhere.
@Trond Engen: I would say mass brick is a little bit iffier even.
Backstein: that’s actually the word for (clay) brick I knew first, before I learnt Ziegelstein
Dutch dakpan “roof tile” – German Dachpfanne (the same).
@hans
There seems to also be a register or usage distinction, i.e., I think you can have a Backsteinkirche/ofen but not a Ziegelsteinkirche/ofen. Or is Backstein more the material and Ziegelstein the individual brick?
The one-volume dictionaries (Duden, Wahrig) list Backstein and Ziegelstein as synonyms for Ziegel and list similar compound nouns for Backstein (Backsteinbau) and Ziegel (Ziegelbau).
@PP: Both can refer to the material and to individual bricks IMD. But maybe ulr or DM may want to comment on this. In compounds, Backstein- indeed seems to be more frequently used.
Ninja’d by ulr
Never heard of it, and would never have guessed it refers to a single tile!
Ziegelofen exists, but it’s an oven for making bricks out of fresh clay.
Really? It’s a word I have known since childhood.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this blog, it’s that German is a land of contrasts.
@hans, dm, ulr
Thanks for clarifying this. It may be just a case of “compounds are what they are”, i.e., in English you have clay pigeon but not *ceramic pigeon (although maybe both clay oven and ceramic oven are possible, I would only use the former, but ceramic hob and not *clay hob, go figure).
Dachziegel. Together constituting a Ziegeldach. 😐 For materials other than terracotta-or-so, I’d resort to Schindel, but that word almost never comes up.
BTW, I finally looked up with the deal with shingle and Schindel is. Wiktionary has it all; seems to be sporadic attrition of the once rare consonant cluster /dl/.
I’m with ulr here, I knew that word also before I learnt Dachziegel. The fact that Dutch has dakpan makes me think that it may be a Northern / Western German word.
Mursten for walls, tagsten or tegl for rooves, teglsten or tegl for the material. All can be count or mass. But keramik for porcelain and allied materials for vases, cups and plates. Oh, and you can put skifer on your roof; wooden shingles are not a thing, but thatch (stråtag) used to be. The specific kind of rushes that you use is tagrør.
Pfanne rings no bells, I don’t think we stole that.
Schiefer means “slate” – but just the rock as a material. A countable plate to write on is Schiefertafel; I don’t know how to call one used as a shingle and might even resort to Dachziegel aus Schiefer (aus “made of”).
I don’t know how to call one used as a shingle and might even resort to Dachziegel aus Schiefer (aus “made of”).
I never thought about it, but some quick googling suggests Schieferplatte (which also designates slate tiles used for other purposes than roofing).
I suppose a woman with deuteranomaly (the most common version of red-green colorblindness, and the one I have) on one X chromosome and protanomaly on the other X could have five different cone cell photopigments. Neither of the mutant genes are particularly rare, nor is having a domain boundary in the X activation mosaic in a region the size of the retina. So it probably does happen (at a rate about a hundred times rarer than the condition described in the paper David Marjanović linked), although if tetrachromacy is hard to detect, pentachromacy would be even harder.
to me (reference point a little south of DM) a slate would definitely be a Schindel aus Schiefer (resulting in a Schieferdach), which seems quite logical – after all scindere is what you do to either raw material to obtain the tiles, and also visually, once weathered on some old bell tower it’s much harder to tell slate from shingles than from tiles
Same here, skifer is the material (mass noun). There must be a count noun for the individual slate shingles, but if it isn’t simply skiferplade I have no idea. (The first Danish webshop I find indeed calls them skiferplader and skifersten. Not tagsten af skifer which would however not be a solecism).
I got my son to check his copy of Through the Language Glass. He didn’t find (and couldn’t remember) a spinning-around test, but did come up with this:
Very anecdotal — and sensitive to biases.
Levinson also recounts how Guugu Yimithirr after flying to Melbourne insist that the sun in Melbourne doesn’t rise in the east. This suggests that the clues are in the landscape or something rather than daylight (or geomagnetism). The Guugu Yimithirr live along the Queensland coast with the sun rising from the sea, so that may not say very much. But it’s certainly no support for my speculation upthread.
Norw. skifer is a mass noun. Skifertak “roof covered with slate”. Takskifer “slates for covering a roof”. Individual slates are probably takstein or heller depending on the speaker — skifertakstein or skiferheller if the material must be specified.
The spinning test is in the paragraph right before the one about flying to Melbourne — you have to search for “spun” rather than “spinning”. Anyway, it’s just two sentences: “Levinson relates how one speaker [of Tzeltal Maya] was blindfolded and spun around over twenty times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without problem at the direction of ‘true downhill.’ ” So that was just one person. This was from Brown and Levinson 1993.