Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 November 19

= November 19 =

Pirate speech
Where, and when, did modern fictional "pirate speech" originate? I mean expressions such as "Argh! hang them from the yardarm" "Pieces of eight!", "Ahoy mates" etc. delivered in a typically gruff semi-drunken tone, (as opposed to Jack Sparrow's florid rather camp delivery) My guess is J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, or film adaptations of the story, but might it be earlier? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:39, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels such as Treasure Island? — SGconlaw (talk) 12:51, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Some information at International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and see also Piracy in the Atlantic World. DuncanHill (talk) 12:59, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Treasure Island of course has Long John Silver's parrot, with its cry of '"Pieces of Eight". Silver himself says things like "Avast, there! Who are you, Tom Morgan? Maybe you thought you was cap’n here, perhaps. By the powers, but I’ll teach you better! Cross me, and you’ll go where many a good man’s gone before you, first and last, these thirty year back—some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes. There’s never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a’terwards, Tom Morgan, you may lay to that." DuncanHill (talk) 13:13, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * See also Shiver my timbers and the works of Captain Marryat. DuncanHill (talk) 13:15, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * More links here, here and here. There is wide agreement that Robert Newton has a lot to answer for. --Antiquary (talk) 13:16, 19 November 2020 (UTC)


 * The parrot-on-the-shoulder as a pirate fixture is from the novel Treasure Island (Long John Silver's Captain Flint), but the affirmative interjection used by the pirates in that novel, including Long John Silver, is "Aye", not "Arrr". But the pirates use a lot of terms that are not usually found in the speech of landlubbers, such as "Avast!" or "Shiver my timbers!" --Lambiam 13:31, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary has several relevant articles. --Antiquary (talk) 13:36, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * To err is human. To arr is piratic. --Lambiam 10:15, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * It strikes me that Stevenson would have used language for his pirates that was recognisable as pirate-speak to his audience. "Shiver my timbers" and walking the plank ("some by the board" quoted above) and so on would surely have been used as they already meant something to those for whom he was writing. He was not a writer to throw unnecessary barriers in front of his readers. DuncanHill (talk) 13:41, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the Robert Newton's portrayal, using a highly exaggerated West Country dialect, which really locked in the "how Pirates talk" thing. There was not a specific "pirate speech" meme before Newton's portrayal in the film, no one thought pirates talked specifically like that (if they thought about it at all, it's likely no one had any specific expectation for how a Pirate would speak).  His performance in Treasure Island (1950 film) basically invented the concept (see the references already cited above by Antiquary).  You can contrast Long John Silver with the other famous pirate character of the same time period, Captain Hook is described by his creator JM Barrie as having a rather posh appearance and manner of speech, he's almost always portrayed as a sort of Restoration-era fashion, with a big black wig and fancy cravat ala Charles II.  The first significant film portrayal of Hook was the animated Peter Pan (1953 film), and he talks nothing like Newton's West Country pirate.  -- Jayron 32 16:42, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * But as we have seen, the expressions used long predate Newton's performance of the scripts he was given. The accent is his, the words came before (and of course Barrymore got in first with the "arrh"). The modern fictional Pirate speech clearly is present in Stevenson, and Stevenson was quite deliberately (as he himself said) writing a book for boys, so it seems clear that he would have been drawing on an established tradition and idiom with which those boys would have been familiar. DuncanHill (talk) 16:51, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * There was an established dialect used by British seafarers, "ahoy" being drawn from that. See Ship English: Sailors’ speech in the early colonial Caribbean by Sally Delgado. Alansplodge (talk) 09:59, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * (ec) The terms were not used specifically by pirates, though, but by seamen in general. In the oldest known published use of "shiver my timbers", the phrase is used by a character in a play designated as "an Old Sailor". The term "avast" was still in use in the US Navy in the 20th century. --Lambiam 10:01, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The Delgado work above notes that "Practical difficulties for the researcher are compounded by the recognition that most seventeenth and eighteenth century seamen were illiterate (Kelly 2006: 167) and therefore were unlikely to have left any written evidence of the features common to their everyday speech". Alansplodge (talk) 10:32, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * We're conflating several things here, though. There's the jargon of the British Navy (or of naval work in general), which neither Stevenson nor Newton invented and was not unique to piracy.  There's the speech patterns of the underclasses, which prior to fairly recently, were not habitually recorded in details that allow us to recreate them reliably, and then there's the heavily rhotic, "arrrrgh" accent which has become uniquely associated with the romantic, cartoonish, "pirate" concept in modern thought, which is uniquely Newton, based on the West Country dialect (and also not particularly associated with Pirates before the 1950 film...)  -- Jayron 32 15:11, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * There was also the 19th-century lingo of seafarers in general, independent of any navy, such as used on merchant and passenger ships. It is not as if nothing of this has been recorded, just like we can learn some "language of the street" from Dickens. Stevenson sailed to the US in 1879 and back to Britain again a year later, where he wrote Treasure Island. Quite possibly, he picked up some expressions en route, aware that one day they might find use in his writings. --Lambiam 17:56, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The OP asked about expressions. He also mentioned delivery. You don't seem to want to address the expressions, only the delivery. And the question really isn't about how real pirates talked, it's about how representations of pirates in popular culture speak. So, we have the "typical" pirate expressions being used by Stevenson, and my point that Stevenson must have been drawing on established representations of pirate-speak in his book for boys stands. To say that Newton originated the "Bristo-Cornish" accent used (or attempted) today says nothing at all about the actual language and expressions. DuncanHill (talk) 15:37, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I thought others had covered that adequately, so I felt no need to repeat what they had said. But you are correct, I did not repeat the correct things already noted by others.  Not sure why you felt the need to point that out, but thanks? -- Jayron 32 17:56, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * A comment on the vocabulary question. Per our article Treasure Island, Stevenson was inspired most specifically by the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates which you can read online. It contains quite a lot of quoted or reported speech, none of which matches the nautical slang considered pirate speak today. (Example: “I am captain of this ship now, therefore you must walk out.” Or “Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarter.”') But the Long John Silver words mentioned earlier in this thread are well attested in the OED as sailor vocabulary. They have ahoy showing up in print in 1748, matey in 1794, avast in 1681, pieces of eight in 1606 and “lay to” used Long John Silver’s way in 1583. This rather looks like Stevenson was drawing on established representations of sailor speak rather than pirates-in-particular speak. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2020 (UTC)


 * International Talk Like a Pirate Day was last month, but anyhoo...
 * Q: What is a pirate's favourite element?
 * A: Gold, of course. What use is argon to a pirate?
 * Dread Pirate O'Realname aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:12, 22 November 2020 (UTC)


 * As a late sidebar, note that "Pieces of eight" (in Spanish Reales de a ocho) was not particularly a piratical or even nautical expression, merely a common name for the Spanish dollar coins, each worth eight Spanish reales, that were widely used as an international currency for more than 300 years. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.26.5 (talk) 11:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC)