I'm looking for the origins of a couple of colloquialisms. Apologies for any misspellings. Wah as in Us: "Shut up, man! He'll hear wah!" Vorn eye as in Almost: "She's very old now - vorn eye 89, in fact." Yem as in Home: "I'm knackered, man! I'm gannin yem."
Hey @OurJud - actual geordie here (though not that slang with my words, don't actually use them myself but know a lot of people who do) 'Yem' is the only one I'm sure about after learning about it in history class. It's a remnant of an invasion at some point in the history of the North East. I believe it comes directly from Anglo Saxon language. Managed to find a little page, seems no one 100% agrees where that's come from : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hyem I've always heard people pronounce 'Wah' as 'Wih' or 'Wuh' where I live. I've always thought it came from us using bad English and it was just the Geordie way of saying 'we'. If we were to say 'Shut up, man! He'll hear us' it doesn't roll of the tongue quite as easily as saying 'we'. I didn't manage to find much on that one. I've never heard of 'vorn eye' before. Wonder if there are any others from our part of the world on this forum who could help out?
Thanks, @Shbooblie, I was beginning to think this thread had died a death. I hasten to add that none of these phrases come from the horse's mouth, so to speak - they're all taken from my all-time favourite tv show Auf Weidersehen, Pet. I'll see if I can dig up the phrases in question on youtube. "Because he'll hear wuh!" (Brenda just after the 7:12 mark) "You can vorn eye be in Manhattan..." (Oz just after 5:00)
a lot of geordie and mackem sayings come from the old norse this is the bit of the country that the danes held on to longest as the saxons gradually pushed back into the danelaw (this is also true of some north yorkshire dialect) Also this area was also the first area to be settled by angles and saxons who came over as mercenaries to fight the picts after the romans left, so some words are angle/saxon
