Yes, they are 'shires', but no-one English says 'shire', unless they're pretending to not know how to pronounce them. Aptly, I found this in the current issue of The Week:
STANLEY ELLIS 1926-2009
Stanley Ellis, who has died aged 83, was often compared to Shaw's Prof. Higgins. An expert in English dialect and accents, he could trace a person's place of origin to within a few miles merely by listening to them speak. This talent was most famously put to the test during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in 1979. The police had received a gloating phone call from a man claiming to be 'Jack', and asked for Ellis's help in finding him. The call turned out to be a hoax, but it has since emerged that the phonetician successfully pinpointed the man's accent to the area of Castletown (pop. 3,000) in Sunderland, Tyne & Wear.
Ellis was born in Bradford (pro. 'Bratf'd' by Bradfordians, don't y'know), the son of a wool mill overseer. He attended a local grammar school and went on to study English at Leeds University. There he met Prof. Harold Orton (or Arold Horton, for fans of misplaced haitches), who was carrying out a survey of English dialects. Ellis became his principal researcher, travelling around the country in a caravan with his wife and child and having long conversations with ageing rural types. During his investigations he discovered that Northerners were more inclined to hang on to old ways of speaking than Southerners, and men more so than women. He also noted wide varieties in vocabulary: for example, he collected 88 words or phrases for 'left-handed', including gibble-fisted and squivver-handed. The runt of a litter could also be called a crit, a nizgul, a wreckling or a nestle-tripe.
The Ripper case made Ellis famous, and in 1983 he took early retirement from his career as a lecturer in order to devote more time to his forensic work. He also presented linguistics programmes for Radio 4, on which his genial, unpompous nature was evident.
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Looking through even that bit of typing, how many of us are an 'off'n' person, how many of us say 'ofTen'? I'm in the off'n camp, which might be a more southern pronunciation - don't know for sure, though. Ee, bah gum, it's all good fun, like, t'int it?
STANLEY ELLIS 1926-2009
Stanley Ellis, who has died aged 83, was often compared to Shaw's Prof. Higgins. An expert in English dialect and accents, he could trace a person's place of origin to within a few miles merely by listening to them speak. This talent was most famously put to the test during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in 1979. The police had received a gloating phone call from a man claiming to be 'Jack', and asked for Ellis's help in finding him. The call turned out to be a hoax, but it has since emerged that the phonetician successfully pinpointed the man's accent to the area of Castletown (pop. 3,000) in Sunderland, Tyne & Wear.
Ellis was born in Bradford (pro. 'Bratf'd' by Bradfordians, don't y'know), the son of a wool mill overseer. He attended a local grammar school and went on to study English at Leeds University. There he met Prof. Harold Orton (or Arold Horton, for fans of misplaced haitches), who was carrying out a survey of English dialects. Ellis became his principal researcher, travelling around the country in a caravan with his wife and child and having long conversations with ageing rural types. During his investigations he discovered that Northerners were more inclined to hang on to old ways of speaking than Southerners, and men more so than women. He also noted wide varieties in vocabulary: for example, he collected 88 words or phrases for 'left-handed', including gibble-fisted and squivver-handed. The runt of a litter could also be called a crit, a nizgul, a wreckling or a nestle-tripe.
The Ripper case made Ellis famous, and in 1983 he took early retirement from his career as a lecturer in order to devote more time to his forensic work. He also presented linguistics programmes for Radio 4, on which his genial, unpompous nature was evident.
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Looking through even that bit of typing, how many of us are an 'off'n' person, how many of us say 'ofTen'? I'm in the off'n camp, which might be a more southern pronunciation - don't know for sure, though. Ee, bah gum, it's all good fun, like, t'int it?
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