Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, this is Jeffrey May. I’m calling from Montreal.
And I used to live in Nova Scotia, and my God, there are many, many regionalisms from the Maritimes in Canada. People use the word some, S-O-M-E, to mean something like very or quite or really like, that’s some good, or she’s some pretty. And if they want to emphasize that a little bit, they might say, she’s right some pretty. So these are things I’ve never heard anywhere else in North America, but it certainly sounds like Nova Scotia when I hear that.
Yeah, you definitely hear that in Nova Scotia. Of course, there it’s some cold a lot of the time, right? Yeah, some windy, I’ll tell you. It’s very windy. Anything else fun you heard there?
Well, the more peculiar one was the following. And I don’t know if you know about this or if you’ve heard it anywhere else, but a very big inhalation when people are saying, yeah. And that really is so Nova Scotian. So you’re having a conversation with somebody. It’s almost like you’re hiccuping. You’re having a conversation and somebody’s agreeing with you and they’ll go, and you hardly hear anything except the inhalation. And that’s so peculiar and so cool.
Oh, yeah. That’s called a pulmonic aggressive. And it’s definitely a characteristic of Newfoundland and Labrador English as well as Nova Scotia. Again, that same part of the country. So you’ve heard about that one?
Yeah, we have heard about that. There’s a book by Sandra Clark, Newfoundland and Labrador English, and she talks about this. She’s done research on it, and she talks about her research and what others have found out about this feature. And she says, like much of the regionalisms and specialness of the speech of the maritime provinces and other provinces nearby, it probably comes from British and Irish and Northern Europe heritage. But you can also hear that in the Atlantic provinces and in Ottawa Valley and in Maine.
And there’s a story in a book called From Clerks to Corpora. It’s a collection of linguistic essays. The essay is by Peter Sankvist, but he repeats a story about how the stereotypical Mainer, that is people from Maine, also do this. And they’re stereotyped as saying ayap. But that’s actually a rendering of the Mainer’s use of the pulmonic aggressive. And in this story, he talks about how a medical doctor from Kentucky who was working in Maine, in down east Maine, as they call it. Yeah, he asked this Mainer patient if he’s well and the patient does that pulmonic aggressive. And it sounds like that. And the doctor hears what he thinks is a gasp for breath and becomes concerned about the patient’s health, not realizing it’s just a way of saying yes.
Yep, yep, yep. It’s pretty cool. But the thing about this pulmonic aggressive is not only yes, it’s a discourse particle. Discourse particles are little bits of reactive sound or speech that we drop into conversation, and they’re not full grammatical utterances. They can have a lot of roles, but often they just show that we’re paying attention, and they can say things like yeah, no, or mm. Like they just kind of, it’s a sound we make to say, yeah, I’m following along.
Yep, yep, yep. Yep, yep. So that’s pretty cool. The phrase that you want to Google if you want to find out more than you could possibly stand about it is pulmonic ingressive, P-U-L-M-O-N-I-C-I-N-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E, pulmonic ingressive.
Yeah, it’s pulmonic like pulmonary. Yeah. Right, right, I got that. And a friend of mine from down home in Nova Scotia told me about a book which I’m going to pick up when I was asking him about this. And it’s called The Blue Nosers Book of Slang. And if you don’t know about that one, that might be one for both of us to check out.
That sounds good. It’s called How to Talk Nova Scotian. Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
Well, it’s really been fun talking with you. All right. Take care now. Bye. Take care. Bye.
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