Brythonic counting - yint tint tither nither bumf...

[pango]

I was reminded recently of a strange event when I was a child of coal miners reciting what I thought for years to be a rhyme. I realised a long time later that they were counting, and although it was something rarely heard, I came across it again in my 20's on hearing an old ploughman, Mr Rammage, counting potato furrows in his garden... yint, tint, tither, nither, bumf...

As a Fifer, this sounds like "this one, that one, that other, another...", but perhaps that is yet another remnant of understanding which has filtered down through the Tongue after the meaning has been lost. (Perhaps also an indication of the origins of the determiners "other" and "another".)

There has been much linguistic study on old counting methods used, "... to count important things like sheep and children.", in Wales, Cornwall, Somerset and throughout farming lands in England and into the Scottish Borderlands, indicating the astonishing persistence of our common Brythonic origins.

Sadly, there is a dearth of information on these traditions north of the River Forth and Eastern Scotland and it's beginning to look as though little work has been done on this topic in the area.

Any such information from Fife, Tayside, Angus or Speyside would be most welcome and I'd be most grateful for any leads whatsoever.

Ask yer Granny!

Thanks in advance.

 

[Eric_Methven]

This is still used around Keswick and other parts of the Lake District if I remember correctly.
1 Yan
2 Tan
3 Tethera
4 Pethera
5 Pimp
6 Sethera
7 Lethera
8 Hovera
9 Covera
10 Dik
11 Yanadick
12 Tanadick
13 Tetheradick
14 Petheradick
15 Bumfit
16 Yanabumfit
17 Tanabumfit
18 Tetherabumfit
19 Petherabumfit
20 Figit
Used for counting sheep, but also used in warehouses for repetitive counting.
This, and similar systems seem to go back to Saxon times and even earlier.
There are many variants still in use in some US states. Many though, have a hickory, dickery, dock rhythm to them.

Eric

 

[Eric_Methven]

Found a bit more info.

I just love language, it's variants and how it has developed and changed. This is a fascinating subject.

Eric

 

[Ogri the trog]

It might only be my reading of it but there are a lot of those words that look to be damned close to Welsh!

Curiously I often confuse both myself and the children by counting on fingers "one, two, some, many, lots" a base 5 repetition and it enables a count of 25 on two hands and considerably more if toes are used - though I often loose track by then!

ATB

Ogri the trog

 

[John Fenna]

See - I told you that you were all originally Welsh!
Language corrupts - the English language corrupts absolutely M8!

 

[Toddy]

yan, tan, tethera, pethera, baw, eeyan, eetan, eera, peera, bumf
yanadig, tanadig, tethedig, fedig, pimf, eeyanabumf, eetanabumf, eerabumf, peerabumf, jigot.

No idea how to write these out I've just written it as it's said. But the bumf and the jigot were a bump hands like one potato, two potato thing. Obviously old count markers. I do remember asking and being told that bigger numbers were just like the French do, two times twenty kind of thing. Tangigot and so on. The jigot was a sheep number iirc.

Astonishing corelation between the words from different areas

M

p.s. The family is from the Clackmannanshire/Hillfoots, Lothians & Fife areas, some up into Perthshire and Angus.

 

[Paul_B]

I hate to tell you but the origins of welsh language comes from Omric which is actually from North Lancashire / South Cumbria. I could tell you the history behind it or at least the current thinking on the history but that would involve looking into another forum where I got a right dressing down from a Welshman. Anyway. Needless to say the current Welsh language is actually a bastardisation of the old cymric language which was the result of a warlord / king that ruled the lands from south Cumbria through to Cheshire and north Wales as is now who kind of had to leave his land and went into Wales with a lot of his peoples. Thats IIRC the patronising lesson I got from that Welshman. Anyway the result is their language became old cymric and later on new cymric o modern Welsh.

BTW that guy was something to do with the linguistic and history of p or n type Celtic languages (can't remembe which the Brythonic languages fit under). Think he was a researcher or lecturer in it.

Another piece of info my mate who is in his 30s still uses the yan tan tethera counting system. He knows it all. He is Barrow born and bred with some NE blood in him so I'm guessing it is mainly from that part of Cumbria. He says it is the old Cumbrian counting system and the one they all once used. So Erics first list for Keswick counting is still being used in a handed down way by at least one person from the Barrow way. The second list for the Lakes does not tally with the first hand tradition that my mate has. Bear in mind on one side of his family you have generations after generations from that corner of the Lakes so as far as I am concerned it is as good evidence as you can get if there is a direct family line that has that counting tradition. Academics might say otherwise but you can't beat local, oral tradition. I'd trust it over a fusty academic.

 

[Paul_B]

Anyway if the academic guy was right then John Fenna needs to amend that statement to all Welsh are English!! TRy telling a Welshman that their anguage and traditions are actually English. While you're at it tell Giggs that he's English too so we can have a world class left footer in the English team (even if he is old and nearly past it he's still better than any left footer England teams have had over the last 10 years). Afterall he did play for the English schoolboys and under 21s IIRC.

 

[ProjeKtWEREWOLF]

Found a bit more info.

I just love language, it's variants and how it has developed and changed. This is a fascinating subject.



Eric

Some minor corrections to the welsh translations:

2 - DAU
9 - NAW
18 - DEUNAW

HC

 

[pango]

Hi Eric,
Most of the studies I've found seem to have been carried out in England with little or no information easilly available much north of the Borders.

It was at first believed to have survived from the Middle Ages and probably Saxon but is now proven to have existed from ancient times. Apparently regional pronunciations change over at ancient linguistic boundaries, Cumbric, for example, but I'm personally suspicious of this as this view conveniently ignores more modern influences. Brythonic place names survive almost unchanged throughout Britain, Cumbria, Cymru, Comrie, also Pit, Pen and Pre prefixes, and rivers, Tay, Dee, Don, Esk, Usk, etc, with similar examples on the continent.

There are schools of thought arguing that the tongue of eastern Scotland, Pictish if we must, was a separate language from an earlier Brythonic influx but after many hundreds of years since the common usage of these tongues, corruption from newer languages and regional accent, that would be difficult to prove in the present day. I personally am suspicious of these arguments as the place names speak for themselves, and where they have survived they have a certain consistency throughout Britain. The root of this assumption may lie in ages old propaganda and prejudice reducing those who stopped Rome in its tracks to dirty, ignorant, thieving barbarians (Pixies steal sheep and children!). There were later altercations with Rome when they came to Britain in the guise of Christians to discover an ancient and scholarly Christianity in the north and east which contradicted theirs... and predated Patrick and Columba!

It's of interest here that the last place "Aberdeenshire Gaelic" is said to be spoken is in the village of Pennan on the Aberdeenshire coast. Two women involved in studies reported being looked down on and snubbed by Gaels when visiting the Mod, as they weren't speaking proper Gaelic. There are also thought to have been differences in vocabulary and grammar, including words not existing in either Gaelic or English. One explanation of this is that the older Brythonic tongue simply wasted away in Eastern Scotland as a casualty of fashion, becoming first contaminated by Gaelic and, eventually, gibberish! Inverness was once Abernis, and I'll take a lot of convincing that Strathclyde wasn't once something like Clwyd. Political propaganda and the concept of divide and conquer is nothing new and The Venerable Bede's wishful thinking that the Gaels had wiped the Britons off the face of the planet doesn't hold water.

A hill in Galloway still bears the name of Drust/Drustan (Trystan?), believed to be a C4th Pictish king sent from Angus when Gaels occupied the disused fortification, who left his mark carved on an outcrop of rock, a beautifully fantastic Pictish wild boar. The hill is known today as Trusty's Hill, so he must have made quite an impression!
There were never enough Gaels in Scotland at the time in question and they would have been exterminated.

I remember a social worker telling me about an old woman from around Brechin (old Prechin) who spoke no English and whose lifelong friend had died the year before. She was visited by numerous students and researchers and would speak and sing for hours if they put a mike in front of her. They took her to the Mod but discovered that she wasn't speaking Gaelic. On taking her to the Edinburgh Festival however, she lit up and actually spoke to people at the next table who turned out to be from Brittany!

Something of interest are the conjectures that Modern English differs from all other European languages due to the irresistable influence of the language that brought us out of the Stone Age, and recent studies by geneticists indicate little evidence of extermination or mass invasion on a national level... with the exceptions of maybe Norfolk and Suffolk.

To put it in the words of a German mate of mine after I loaned him a book about a people, the Cimbri (sound familliar?) who moved south from Denmark in about 150 AD and scared the living daylights out of Rome (sound familliar?)...
"We are all the same volk! Doch?"

There's a region in Denmark known locally as Fib, linguistically a form of Fife, so I wonder if there are Danish farmers or fishermen who count... yint, tint, tither, nither, bumf...

Cheers.

 

[Hedgehog]

Fascinating stuff indeed.

I just dug up 5 systems written in a book of old Sussex speak - thy are quite different to the one here. Apparently some were used to count in pairs of sheep & others units of 5.

 

[Eric_Methven]

That's an excellent bit of information. Thanks so much for posting it.
On the subject of counting sheep - I used to help at shearing time when I was younger. The speed the farmer counted as ewes and lambs streamed through the gates before being separated amazed me. I asked him how he managed to count so many so fast. He replied "I count all the legs and divide by four".

 

[Miyagi]

This is a facinating thread.

 

[Toddy]

Define Briton.
Major invasions of the English (sic) lands came from the East. The west countries, Wales, Cornwall and the like were where the indigenous Iron Age tribal societies lingered longest.

Southern West Scotland was known in the early medieval as Wallia, that part of Wales that is in Scotland. The original intent of the word Wales was to convey native, original.
The Pictish Iron Age tribes came together into major kingdoms in response to the pressure of Romans and intruding Angles.
Pictish is a P celtic language, as is Welsh. Modern Scots and Irish Gaelic is a Q celtic tongue. Scots Gaelic differs in it's grammar structure, it's got P celtic roots somehow
The British Kingdom of Rheged stretched from Northumbria across the border into southern Scotland, right up to the Forth and Clyde. Dumbarton (or Dunbarton) Rock on the shores of the Clyde estuary is literally, "The fortress of the Britons".
Language flows as the people, but little pieces of the old ones are part of even our modern lives.

Thon Welsh scholar sounds a bit contentious, with his own private interpretation. I'd love to hear a linguists response.

cheers,
Toddy

 

[sam_acw]

I agree that languages are fascinating. It's interesting for me to see languages such as Manx and Cornish effectively brought back from the dead - there's a surprising amount of variation in Britain still despite the influence of compulsory education and TV.

 

[John Fenna]

The original intent of the word Wales was to convey native, original.
Toddy

See - I told you you were all Welsh!

 

[dwardo]

That's an excellent bit of information. Thanks so much for posting it.
On the subject of counting sheep - I used to help at shearing time when I was younger. The speed the farmer counted as ewes and lambs streamed through the gates before being separated amazed me. I asked him how he managed to count so many so fast. He replied "I count all the legs and divide by four".

Brillaint

 

[trekkingnut]

as someone with a very strong hebridean background, i would have said inverness was inbhir nis (inver neish) and always has been rather than abernes. that doesnt make sense, its an amalgamation of two words, and basically describes the higher ground of a headland which i assume is where the loch has been closed off from the sea.

There are gaelic speakers in aberdeen (you can actually study it there) but it was probably more of a class thing. gaelic was once the langauge of the court but when scotland had several wars amongst themselves and was taken over several times gained independence, taken over again, etc etc it fell out of grace and favour. and inglis or llalans became the official langauge. There is actually quite a substantial group of gaelic speakers in nova scotia (new scotland) and it is taught in their universities and schools should students wish to take it up. all their place names are in gaelic as well. very interesting. There is even a church in london that does services in gaelic four times a year and quite a few people sit and have a chat in gaelic (thats where i now live)

there are two distinct branches of the "celtic" language tree and this split is as follows. welsh, breton, cornish and irish, manx and scottish. Now there are similarities that cross over of course but i rarely find anything in welsh that i can understand, for example i believe that welcome is croesco (please accept spelling mistakes) and in gaidhlig (scottish gaelic) is is failte (the same as irish)

Therefore in reality welsh and gaelic are distant cousins and putting them into direct relation to each other i think will produce not a lot. The east coast of scotland used to speak doric or as its commonly known now, scots. This is a mixture of the local language of the time and the viking mix that was introduced. This may produce similiarities between it and gaidhlig because gaelic is a mix of the original hebridean language and Scandinavian input. Doric words are still used commonly today but the rest of the world just thinks scottish people cant speak english, they arent trying to. its called scots leid or llalans (lowlands) (scottish language) and despite it looking like terrible english when written it is in fact just a very similar language. try reading it at http://www.lallans.co.uk/sls_an_scots.html

Portuguese and spanish are 80% the same, but to each other it looks like they are just dyslexic. doric words like stravaig (to go on a pointless walk i.e stroll) laldie (to have a fight) whit, waun waur etc etc... i guess its just comparable to anglo saxon english. they wouldnt be able to understand modern english because it has been changed so much, just as we dont understand shakespear sometimes hehe. so doric/scots speaking people in the east of scotland and gaidhlig speakers in the west.

God i could go on about this for hours, im going to pull myself short i'm boring myself.

I would relish meeting someone from aberdeen that could talk gaelic and its sad if they were ever shunned although that doesnt sound like any hebridean that i know...

back to the numbers counting thingy.

Gadhlig: (accents omitted)

aon
dha
tri
ceithir
coig
sia
seachd
ochd
naoi
deich

i can see one or two similarities between welsh but not really the others.

 

[trekkingnut]

o and btw, was trekking through patagonia in 2008 and low and behold, i saw a sign saying.... croesco... i couldnt king belive it.....

i had heard about this place but had no idea where it was, there was a load of welsh minors that moved to patagonia in search of a better life and they all speak welsh in this town. they have welsh house names, welsh people names, they look welsh... rather than latin american and they even have welsh in school and in their local newspaper. the minors settled there in 1865... good effort to still hold onto to their origins until now!!!

wiki article about it if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Argentine

 

[Paul_B]

To me it does seem that the "experts" are only making educated guesses about the language. Through trace evidence such as place names and modern forms of Brythonic languages. Britain is a land of mongrels if you want to put it blunt there has been so much movement of peoples that I doubt very much any expert has the definitive answer on language origins. One question can a dead language be truly revived or will it always just be a modern interpretation that noone can contradict because it was dead as a spoken language?

If you want experts in sheep counting speak to a New Zealander. Saw one on countryfile once with the hobby farmer presenter and she pretty much counted up the flock in a couple of seconds in a field. As far as counting goes is a base 10 system or a base 5 or whatever base any quicker? I know we are all "trained" to use a base 10 counting system but is that really the fastest one? Once learned could another base number be faster? Afterall the Yan, Tan, Tethera counting system seems to be base 5. I suppose the one you're used to is the fastest for you.