Spoken like a true Canadian…
So was I, North America, the Canadian part, West Coast, North Vancouver to be exact.[(-D][swg]
How can we know how the French spoke in the 18th century?..
Visit Quebec City…
Point well taken but apparently linguists can make deductions from language drift. Spoken (well and written, technically) languages appear to evolve and although there are strictly speaking no analogous “genetic markers” there are artifacts in languages that can be detected and traced backwards.
Robert McNeil of PBS Newshour fame wrote a very interesting book called the Story of English which was accompanied by a PBS Special documentary. Using dialects and regional accents in spoken English permits deductions to be made. Truly fascinating stuff in part because English is perhaps the most tortured and flexible language ever developed. The most people on the planet who learn English as their “mother tongue” live in thec Indian subcontinent. Good luck following thei
details, details… [(-D] [(-D], wait, dont they call that the “great white north”??? [(-D]
-PMR
The Frozen Chosen.
We like beer. Real beer. [:-^]
“They” would have to be Americans. For Canadians North means North of the 60 th parallel. One of the many digs successfully launched at our friends to the South (of 49 where I live) by the unscrupulous McKenzie “brothers”. The white part doesn’t start until North of the Arctic Circle.
“Northern Ontario”, for example, is what Hog Town folks, AKA the Big Smoke, (okay, Toronto), call anything north of Peterborough. Those in Peterborough call Northern Ontario anything north of North Bay, or Thunder Bay. For example, New Liskeard, Timmins, Larder Lake, Swastika, Cobalt, Kenora, Lake Nippising, that’s all northern Ontario. For people living up there, it’s James Bay and Hudson Bay where it gets a little northerly.
Elsinore? As sambuca is con mosca, con le sorcio?
54° 40’ or Fight!
I was always fond of fast time freights, and how best to yard them on arrival. As it were.
Yup, a northern position is all relative, except of course if you live at the point refered to as the North Pole! No one is North of Santa… Up here in Canada, we distinguish the Near North or sub-arctic (which relates to boreal, mostly conifer, forest), and the Far North (arctic and Tundra).
Simon
Growing up in B.C. surrounded by friends and family that worked in the resource industries, “up North” meant North of the B.C./Yukon border, while the far North was always North of the Arctic Circle.
It is over 4000km from Vancouver to the most Northerly point in Canada, I remember working flights both civilian 737s and military C-130 Hercules at Vancouver that were coming and going to/from the far North, those crews were spent when they got back from that trip. The aircraft were filthy dirty from the dirt runways.
Brent, I took a few plane trips between Vancouver and Whitehorse as part of my contract work. The scenery is just outstanding!
Simon
I’ve driven to and from Yellowknife and Calgary twice now. Spectacular experience. The McKenzie River crossing (by bridge now) is amazing. Wild bison roam the highway North of there in the McKenzie reserve. Also along the Dempster between Whitehorse and Dawson City.
In 2013 I drove back from Yellowknife right through the enormous forest fires raging at the time. They closed the highway after me. Fire right to the edge of the road in places. Nowhere to go but onwards, once we left Yellowknife there was no turning back and only one road onwards.
49 as the boundary was settled long before that. Thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm Canada did ok out of the pig war, we got a bunch of the NW that was well South of 49…
We’d have got Oregon and Washington had David Thompson not been so polite to the American schooner skipper who dropped into the mouth of the Columbia just as Thompson got there after shooting the entire length of the lower Columbia!
We had the same experience in 1995 on the road to Dawson City. We were the last ones through, and the fires were along both sides of the road.
Yikes. This sounds terrifying. Having flashbacks of watching the film Only the Brave…
Happily, we were able to get to Dawson City, and then on into Alaska.
Dawson City was the best part of our two week trip. It is worth the effort to get there.
Wife and I drove from Oshawa, quite close to Toronto, to Alaska in 2004 and 2007.
On the highway between Whitehorse and Dawson City they have signs telling you the last time each area you pass thru burned. Some places you could see trees that had been fire killed one hundred years before that were still standing.
Took the top of the world highway from Tok Alaska to Dawson City in 2007. Much of it had been burned in 2004, which was long enough for the fireweed to be blossoming for miles.