> On 26/12/2013 16:49, [email protected] wrote: >> On 26/12/2013 3:02 AM, Gavin Bell wrote: >> >> "Aberdeen" is the city, the wider county is >> "Aberdeenshire". >> >> >> I have the counties of Ross and Inverness further >> up the tree of my Aberdeenshire ancestors. Is the >> correct way to punctuate their names to insert a >> hyphen: Inverness-shire ? That's the way I've >> usually found it, but occasionally I see the >> snakelike Invernessshire, > > I don't know about "correct" but I tend to use "Ross-shire" and > "Inverness-shire" as being less clumsy. Definitely less clumsy in appearance. I just wondered if there was some rule, amongst cartographers, for example, to use the hyphen. In my alternative career of indexing we have our own rules to ensure conformity, amongst professional indexers in their own countries, at least. >> and a few writers have >> waffled and use "the county of Inverness". > It's a bit unfair to call that "waffling"! "County of X" is a perfectly > acceptable (and widely-used) alternative to "X-shire". It does at least > maintain the useful distinction between the county and its capital town. > "Waffled" was intended to be a joke. I had a lighthearted vision of a frustrated writer trying it both with and without the hyphen, not liking it either way, and falling back on "county of" as an alternative. >> Is their any reason other than traditional usage > ... as a general principle, I would suggest that "traditional usage" is > how most language develops - you will look in vain for any signs of > logic behind most language changes. Laziness and fashion are the most > common drivers of linguistic change ... Of course. I used to explain that to my university students in the linguistics courses I taught, the basic first-year course in general linguistics and the postgraduate courses in onomastics and the history of the English language. > >> for Scottish counties to almost always include the >> "shire" >> syllable, whereas the English counties vary >> widely? Always Yorkshire, for example, but never >> Cornwallshire -- and then there are off and on >> ones like Devon/Devonshire. > Your premiss is faulty. For a good part of my lifetime there have been > numerous non "-shire" counties in Scotland. Not a premise, merely an observation. By "almost always" I meant that I more often see, in general usage, the "-shire" added to Scottish counties than I do to English ones, but not in all cases. > In the Northeast alone, we > have Moray and Kincardine, Interesting. My relatives from those parts say Morayshire and Kincardineshire. (Mind you, the latter name is used in a joking way because of its length in comparison to the size of the county.) And yes, I do know that the boundaries and official names keep changing, etc etc. My family members are generalizing when they say "Morayshire", and are sometimes referring to their own memories and sometimes to research into their ancestry in past centuries. > and a little way to the south we have Angus. > Further afield are Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross My ancestors moved south from there long before amalgamation. The few records I have for them say Ross-shire. However, given that those records are from the late 17th century and early 18th century, one assumes the usual "personal choice of the writer" and not an official rule. Perhaps it's just coincidence that the four or five references I have, from different villages and different generations, all use the full name. > and > Cromarty (which were amalgamated in 1891), Fife My mother-in-law, from Wemyss, fiercely insisted on "kingdom of Fife". Woe betide anyone who referred to "county of Fife" or "Fifeshire" in her hearing :-) ! Her maternal grandmother was from "the kingdom of Cornwall, not 'the county'", she always insisted. (Why do I feel compelled to add that those were idiosyncratic to her vocabulary and were then used affectionately by her relatives to please her? The terms may be official or not, may be used by many or only a few. That's not the point. I'm only giving a personal example and laughing -- affectionately -- as I remember how we used to tease her by saying "Fifeshire. Oops, I mean the Kingdom of Fife! Sorry, Eleanor!".) > > In the 19th century there was a more concerted effort to imitate English > usage in naming the county after its chief town, which gave us > jaw-breakers like Elginshire, Forfarshire and the immortal trilogy of > Linlithgowshire, Edinburghshire and Haddingtonshire. Oh, thank you, I like those :-) ! I've just made a note of them, to work them into a guest lecture in onomastics sometime! Margaret Gibbs > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >