Weathery strangeness

[vilakins]

On the way home this evening, driving in early evening sunlight, I was puzzled by the other side of the road being wet. Had the council had to spray it for some incomprehensible reason? It was soaked up to slightly over the dotted line in the centre, but my side was completely dry. Then I turned into my street--and it was raining gently.

Given Auckland's changeable weather, I've often driven though sharp demarcation lines between rain and sun, but I've never seen one that ran right down the centre of a considerable stretch of road before.

Incidentally, we also get lots of sun-showers (rain and sun at the same time) and 'glories', those dramatic rays of light through gaps in the clouds which I called 'God looking down' when I was a kid.

Comments

[linda-joyce.livejournal.com]

Idiosyncratic weather is something my valley shares with Auckland. I can remember leaving for junior school in the rain walking down to the river and finding the rain cutting off half way across the bridge.

I just love your childhood description of Glories.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I still say it to Greg as a joke. I don't think glories are anywhere near as common overseas as here.

Rain patterns are strange here. Greg came home later than me and said it rained only over our suburb. The sun's out again this morning--another lovely day! Though the aircon's broken at work and we have to have the windows open--a good thing for fresh air, but the trucks from the port are so loud!

[spacefall.livejournal.com]

On an unrelated note, I just discovered that my mate Justin has a friend in Auckland. The friend has been visiting the UK recently, and Justin was saying that BSL and NZSL are so close that they had no problems chatting away.

I recently read that NZSL regularly uses some signs that in BSL are only found in Wales. Not such a surprise historically, but interesting that the path of the language can be tracked like that. Justin is Welsh, so presumably he'd understand more NZSL than a Bristolian like me.


(this sign is used widely in Wales and NZ, but rarely in England -- I've never seen it outside of a book. The 'thaw' bit refers to the mouth pattern.)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That's interesting; there are a lot of Welsh names here, but also heaps of Scottish and Irish ones too. I wonder if we got signs from them too. Dunedin is very Scottish; there's even a slight burr to their speech down there.

I'd have thought that with Bristol being just over the border, there'd be quite a bit of dialect merging?

[spacefall.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd have expected so, but either it's true and I don't notice or people from Wales slip into another dialect when in Bristol. OTOH, it could be that Bristol and Cardiff dialects are similar and a bit different to the rest of Wales.

Interesting that a slight Scottish accent has persisted. I wonder if I could hear the difference between NZ dialects with my Brit ears.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Apart from the Scottish one in the deep south, most of our accents or dialects are class or race-related rather than region. Off-hand, there's educated/bourgeois (mine), pseudo-British (upper-class snobs who wouldn't fool a real Brit), working-class European (broader than educated, with some different grammar like 'youse'), back-country (reelly broad, mite!), Maori (purer vowels, syllables get almost equal emphasis, shares grammar with working-class, has some Maori words--I grew up speaking this one because I lived in a Maori village as a small child) and Islander (similar). Also there's now Asian (which means Chinese / Korean / Vietnamese etc here), Indian/Pakistani, and South African.

I can do them all, so if I'd known you were interested, I could have given you samples. :-)

[kerravonsen]

Dunedin is very Scottish; there's even a slight burr to their speech down there.
Not to mention (so I have been told) their penchant for using dialect words like "wee" (small)...

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

They do! 'Wee' as you said, 'crib' for a holiday home (the rest of us call it 'bach'), and 'punnet' for those things you buy strawberries in (we call 'em 'chips'). I'm sure there are more but I've never lived there. Greg is from Christchurch which was settled by English and his main difference from me is using 'come' for both present and past tenses, though I know an Aucklander who also does it. It drives me crazy.

[kerravonsen]

But we call it a punnet of strawberries too! Hmmmm.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Punnet was rare when I was a kid but it's become more common.

[kerravonsen]

Oh yes, I remember the sunshowers from when we lived there briefly when I was a child. I've never been in a place that had so many.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

During a break in the cricket for rain TMS informed us that sunshine and rain simultaineously was called a monkey's wedding. And for the rest of the day gave us international variants on this.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of that term till I saw it on a language website. They're sun-showers here, probably because they're not at all unusual. I think they're rare overseas so they get strange names.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yep, they're very common here.