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Friday, 4 October 2019

Counting sheep






YouTube - An ancient survival of language used to count sheep in the Lake District and surrounding areas. There is a mix of languages including Old Welsh, Old English and probably Old Norse. For example Pimp is equivalent to the modern day Welsh for five.

So definitely not a traditional way to count MPs.

4 comments:

Penseivat said...

I was once told by a sheep farmer that they simply counted the legs and divided by four. Mind you, the fact that I was only eight years old (hopefully) excused me believing him.

A K Haart said...

Penseivat - I have a vague memory of someone telling telling me the same thing too many decades ago. Can't recall the circumstances though.

Scrobs. said...

Seem to have missed this post, Mr H!

Interesting ways of counting sheep here, this is the Sussex version!

http://scroblene-webley-bullock.blogspot.com/2007/08/inter-county-semantics-round-2.html

A K Haart said...

Scrobs - interesting - people might assume that one, two, three etc should work better but apparently not.