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| Uncovered: lost British accents from prison camps of first world war British Library gets recordings of PoWs, captured by a German linguist, highlighting regional accentsCrackling and quavering over the distance of almost a century, the voice of George Campbell from Aberdeen still rings out sweet and cheerful. His song was the Bonnie Banks o'Loch Lomond, and although on 22 July 1916 he was a prisoner behind the wire of Sennelager camp in Germany, he had good reason to hope he would see those bonnie banks and braes again, unlike his comrades still floundering and dying in the mud of the trenches.Campbell's is among hundreds of voices of men who escaped the hell of the Western Front by being taken prisoner, only to be confronted by an ardent young German linguist with a crate of shellac discs and a portable recording device. Their voices, recorded in German prisoner of war camps between 1916 and 1918, survived in the Berliner Lautarchiv. The British Library has now acquired digital copies of all the British voices and documentation.In 1916 Wilhelm Doegen, a linguist and phoneticist who had studied at Oxford in the 1900s, realised that fate had provided him with a captive audience, literally, and an extraordinary variety of accents and languages of the British empire including Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi, Welsh, Scots and Irish voices.He got special permission from the authorities to take his equipment into camps including Sennelager in Westphalia, and Wunsdorf in Brandenburg, where along with Indian and African troops singing and telling folk tales in their own languages he recorded regional accents from all over Britain, many now virtually extinct, including voices from Aberdeen, Macclesfield, Bletchington and Wolverhampton. It is the oldest collection of English dialect recordings in the world.Descriptions of conditions in the camps, the poor food, the punishments, the foiled escape attempts, would have to wait for autobiographical accounts after the war. Doegen's subjects mainly read short extracts from the Bible, from a few sentences to three or four minutes, or of texts he provided them.As Armistice Day approaches there is an eerie power in hearing the actual voices of men living through a period of history that shook the world. Many of their names, ages and where they originally came from and were brought up survive in the accompanying documents, so that the histories of individuals can be traced and matched to their voices."It's interesting that there seems to have been no attempt to capture what you might call officer class voices; it was clearly the regional accents that he wanted," said Jonathan Robinson, curator of social science at the library. "Among the most interesting is the voice from Bletchington – now so close to London it's barely perceived as having an accent, but I think people would be startled to realise what how West Country the accent of rural Oxfordshire sounded at that time."He is particularly fond of the many Yorkshire voices: "That was how my own grandparents would have sounded – but it certainly isn't how I sound now."First world warBritish LibraryGermanyMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book Buzz: What's new on the list and in publishing Sarah Palin's memoir is selling huge; a measure of the power of Oprah's Book Club; and Colum McCann's award winner goes paperback. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
The Haunts of Miss Highsmith The biographer Joan Schenkar retraces Patricia Highsmith’s footsteps through Greenwich Village, as it figured in her real life and as it appeared in her fiction. feeds.nytimes.com |
In the Beginning A poet translates the Hebrew Bible in a contemporary idiom. feeds.nytimes.com |
Moomins cook up recipe book Tove Jansson's much-loved characters are set to reappear in a book introducing Finnish cuisineFrom the unflappable Moominmamma's syrup to fight autumn coughs and colds to Moominpappa's spiced mulled wine for a frosty night, the culinary skills of Tove Jansson's much-loved Moomins are set to be revealed in a cookbook later this year.Drawing inspiration from Jansson's descriptions of life in Moominvalley, a place where "very often unexpected and disturbing things used to happen, but nobody ever had time to be bored, and that is always a good thing", Finnish writer Sami Malila has created a series of 150 "forest" recipes which will be published in The Moomins Cookbook this July, complete with original illustrations by Jansson.Jansson, who died in 2001, wrote and illustrated nine Moomin books in total. Her gently eccentric characters and their friends have captured children's hearts since they first appeared in the 1940s – and despite having no mouths in her drawings, the Moomins generally manage to eat well. "Moominpappa was busy on the veranda, making punch in a barrel," she writes in Finn Family Moomintroll. "He put in almonds and raisins, lotus juice, ginger, sugar and nutmeg flowers, one or two lemons, and a couple of pints of strawberry liqueur to make it specially good. Now and again he had a taste ... It was very good."Later, the inhabitants of Moominvalley gather for a feast. "There were big piles of gleaming fruit and huge plates of sandwiches on the bigger tables, and on tiny little tables under the bushes there were ears of corn and berries threaded on straws and clusters of nuts nestling in their own leaves," she writes. "Moominmamma put the fat for frying the pancakes in the bathtub because there weren't enough basins, and then she carried up eleven enormous jars of raspberry juice from the cellar. (The twelfth had been cracked, I'm sorry to say, when the Hemulen let off his squib.)""They're traditional Finnish recipes – it's an introduction to Finnish cuisine," said editor Emma Hayley at independent publisher SelfMadeHero. "There's drinks, salads, desserts, breakfast at the end of a Nordic summer night – it's great fun, with dialogue and Moominisms interspersed throughout the recipes." Other recipes will include the Snufkin's picnic pot, the Lighthouse Keeper's fish pie and potato au gratin for hungry Moomins.The cookbook has already been published in Finnish, Swedish and French, where it is doing well, Hayley said. Jansson's writings have recently undergone a revival in the UK, with her adult novels The Summer Book, The Winter Book, Fair Play and The True Deceiver all reissued in the last 10 years.Children and teenagersFood & drinkHouse and gardenAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |