The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - a Novel

While talking about this project to my mother-in-law, she mentioned that she had recently read a book that took place on Guernsey.  Naturally, I was interested, since I'd warmly welcome another form of research outside of academic papers.  The 2008 novel is called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

From what I've heard it's made up of letter correspondences between England and Guernsey directly after World War II.  I know the German occupation of the Channel Islands and the evacuation of most of the children to Britain during the war played a huge role in the decline of Guernesiais.  Hopefully there will be a bit of insight into the language use during this time, but either way I was in need of a book for my travels to Montréal this week.  My Anthropology Student Union is attending the American Anthropological Association's Annual Meeting, also known as the 'mack daddy of conferences' as my prof put it.

I've continued on with a few more of the BBC Guernesiais lessons and I'm wondering how I should proceed from here.  Perhaps I could compile my own vocabulary and common phrase lists or perhaps focus more on the pronunciation and orthography? Hmm...

BBC Archive - Learn a Bit of Guernsey French

Today I spent some time on the BBC website where they have a Learn Guernsey section archived from 2005.  There's about 40 lessons each consisting of 6-10 exchanges in a short dialogue.  I've noticed that many of them begin with comments about the weather and then continue with more day to day exchanges, such as inviting someone for tea or talking about a recent holiday.  The lessons have the exchange written first in Guernesiais and then the English translation written below it.  There is also a rudimentary pronunciation hint included in parenthesis.

What's really great about these lessons is that there are sound files available for each dialogue. This allows you to listen and follow along with the written dialogue. First a Guernesiais woman speaks a sentence, then there is a short pause (this is where I try and repeat ;)), and then a British women says it in English. The Guernesiais is fairly slow and the woman articulates well. I can only assume that it would be spoken much more quickly when spoken naturally. In fact, I think I've read recently somewhere in the in the mountain of articles on Guernsey I have accumulated that Guernsey people do speak quite quickly. I find the intonation of the woman's speech on the sound clips interesting though, and it may be quite authentic.

What is slightly annoying about the the sound clips though is that they don't play well on any of the computers I've tried. They are .ram (which I think means they are realaudio). Anyways, they do not allow me to pause and I often have to reload the file. Also, some of the files also sound as though the ladies become posessed at the end of the lesson (voices are fastforwarded or played in reverse?) which may be due to corrupted file or perhaps a problem in my download.

My goal for the day was just to go through a few of the lessons and get used to the pronunciation of the language. I'm going to see if I can convert the files into another format so I can play and pause them at my leisure ;)

Also, as a preliminary impression, I'm finding Guernesiais very similar to French, which was to be expected since it is also known as Guernsey French and Norman French.  After repeating a set of Guernesiais expressions with a headset on, my husband, who can converse pretty well in Quebecois French, would ask if I were talking about pancakes (guern: crêpes) or sugar (guern: chucre). 

Still no word from La Société Guernesiais about my book order mix up. Now it's a weekend, so I probably won't hear back until Monday.

A package from Guernsey!!

Yay!  My parcel from Guernsey has arrived :)!

So exciting to receive something from the place I've been reading so much about.  I ordered 2 small books from the La Société Guerneisiase.  Hopefully this will get my learning of Guernesiais rolling!  One book should be a small grammar and the other should be a collection of Folklore by Marie De Garis.

Oh, poop... There's been a mix up and I've received a Glossary of Guernsey Place-Names insead of Guernesiais: A Grammatical Survey.  I've sent an email asking for a digital copy.  Hopefully they will comply.

These are the books I received:

This blog is part of a project that I am doing for my Anthropology course on endangered languages.  My goal as of right now is to learn as much Guernsey French as possible over the next month or so.  I will document my learning, my accomplishments, my difficulties, and also any other thoughts and ideas I may have along the way.  If you have any suggestions, criticisms, or find any faults with my content, I strongly encourage you to contact me through email or leave a comment.  Actually, any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :)

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