Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Jakob Nielsen, the guru of web usability, offers a stimulating post in the form of "American English vs. British English for Web Content". The waxing and waning of empires (of the mind) and all that. He also addresses "Spoken English" and declares that "The guidelines are clearer for spoken English, as used in video voiceovers, podcasts, and the like." All well and good, until we come to this: "U.K. regional dialects, such as Scots, Irish, Welsh, and Northern English are hard for foreigners to understand (and Cockney is impossible)."

Now, this is worthy of parsing, not for the sake of pedantry, but clarity. The bone of contention here is "U.K. regional dialects". Let's begin with Scots, which is an Anglic variant of early northern Middle English spoken in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, where it is known as Ulster Scots or Ullans. A regional UK dialect? Perhaps. Then there's Welsh (Cymraeg or y Gymraeg), which is a Celtic tongue spoken in Wales (Cymru). A regional UK dialect? No. Finally, and most contentiously, there's Irish. A lot of people would take umbrage at the idea of either Irish Gaelic or Hiberno-English being referred to as a regional UK dialect. Many of these people are moderate nationalists, but some are very unpleasant separatists, terrorists and gangsters who never miss an opportunity to create mischief when given the opportunity. Just sayin', like.

Maybe Jakob was tired and nodding off when the lumped the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish together. It can happen. Even to the greatest. After all, in the Iliad Homer has Menelaos kill a minor character, Pylaimenes, in combat, but later the very same Pylaimenes is alive to witness the death of his son. The great Roman poet Horace was so upset by this that in his Ars poetica he noted:

... et idem
indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus
(... and yet I also become annoyed whenever the great Homer nods.)