Interfaces.

Duncan Booth duncan.booth at invalid.invalid
Sat Nov 17 06:41:47 EST 2007


Bjoern Schliessmann <usenet-mail-0306.20.chr0n0ss at spamgourmet.com> wrote:

> Benjamin wrote:
>> Python is has duck typing. "If it quacks like a duke, it's duck."
> 
> How do dukes quack, exactly? :)
> 
> Regards,
> 

They quack with a North-eastern Scottish accent of course.

The following excerpt from "Scots: Practical Approaches" should make it 
clear:

> A. From Scotland the What?, by Buff Hardie, Stephen Robertson and
> George Donald (Gordon Wright, 1987) 
> 
> In this comic monologue from 1982, the owner of a toy shop in
> Ballater, near Aberdeen telephones the Princess of Wales to ask what
> her son would like for Christmas. 
> 
> Noo, fit wid he like for his Christmas, the loon? Fit aboot a pair o’
> fitba beets? Beets. Beets. B-O-O-T-S, beets. Weel, I ken that, but
> he’ll surely grow intae them. Weel I’ll tell ye fit I’ve got. It’s
> something very suitable. It’s oor ain special line in soft toys, and
> it is a cuddly futret. A futret. Div ye nae ken fit a futret is?
> Futret. F-E-R-R-E-T, futret. Now, cuddly futrets is exclusive tae the
> Toy Shop, Ballater. We get them specially made up by a wee wifie, in
> Hong Kong. Oh, an’ fit a job I hid explainin’ tae her fit a futret is.
> Ye wid like a futret? Oh we’ll fairly manage ye a futret. Noo fit size
> o’ a futret wid ye like? We’ve got a dinkie futret, a mini futret, a
> life-size futret, a jumbo futret or a mega-futret. Ye’d like a jumbo
> futret? No, it disnae hae a trunk. No, it’s got a string that ye pull,
> an’ it sings Run, Rabbit, Run. Weel, fit else div ye expect a futret
> tae sing? Now is there onythin’ else the loon wid like? Fit aboot a
> rubber duke...for his bath? A duke. No, no, nae that kinda Duke.
> D-U-C-K, duke. A quack quack duke. Like Donald Duke. Donald Duke. He’s
> a freen’ o’ Mickey Moose...Moose...M-O-U-S-E, Moose! God, div ye nae
> understan’ English, lassie? 
> 
> This extract is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all,
> obviously, it illustrates some of the stereotypical features of NE
> Scots: the /f/ phoneme in ‘fit’, the /i/ in ‘beets’ and the /dj/ in
> ‘duke’, as in ‘Donald Duke’. Other features (such as the /u/ in
> ‘moose’ are shared with most other varieties of Scots. One obvious way
> of approaching this text would be to ask what characteristics are true
> of the pupils’ own variety of Scots, and what characteristics are not.

http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/Scots_Practical_Approaches.html




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