[personlurking]

After years in Portugal I still can't differentiate where anyone is from within the country, but put me a Brazilian event and I can tell you where each person is from in Brazil (where I also lived) by accent and word-choice alone. I'm impressed by my lack of ability when it comes to Portugal. Perhaps it's more nuanced.

However, the language gradient you speak of is one of the reasons I love Iberia. If only modern English, as you note, would be so interesting.

By the way, the region the author speaks of is beautiful, in case anyone plans to take a lazy drive through it. If yes, don't forget Andorra.

[jacobush]

But go to Scotland and modern English gets quite more interesting.

[Jaruzel]

Go further North (the Orkney Islands) and it gets more interesting yet, as the Norse influence creates a whole new dialect.

[arethuza]

The North East of Scotland has a particularly "interesting" dialect - things like "Fit like ma loon?"

I'd love to know where the terms "loons" and "quines" for boys and girls came from.

It's a sair fecht.

[wolfhumble]

Loons I am not so sure about (http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/loun has some interesting info on the name though, see e.g. item 5) but quines sound somewhat similar to the word for woman in today's Scandinavian languages: Danish: kvinde, Norwegian: kvinne and Swedish: kvinna.

You can also find it again in the word Queen (originally woman) that seems to share similar words and meanings in different European languages: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/queen

Fascinating stuff! :-)

[arethuza]

My family is from a North East fishing village and apparently I've got one Finnish ancestor about ~300 years ago - I've wondered if that's where I got my distinct epicanthic folds from!

[wolfhumble]

It's all in the family! :-)

[jacobush]

Before the Swedish zpelling reform a century ago, "kvinna" used to be typed "qvinna". So even there, not far removed from "queen".

[jhbadger]

"Quine" is a great name for a girl because after all, she can produce a daughter. Although sans parthenogenesis, the daughter's not an exact copy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

[ranit]

Not quite similar:

> ... program which takes no input ...

The only recorded human quine produced a son.

[grey-area]

Braw