"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet". So wrote the Bard of Avon, and yet I wonder. I wonder what his reaction would have been to find he wasn't wearing the clothes he thought but something entirely different. What would his response have been then? Let me explain.
I written in the past about the version of German spoken by
the Swiss people and it's, at times surprising,
differences with High German.
I stumbled across one of these recently. Over Christmas I was back in the
UK and while there I bought a pair of corduroy trousers. On my return I started
wearing them to class, as one would. Imagine my surprise when in a beginners
class I was told I was wearing "Manchester Trousers". At the time
I was concentrating on the finer points of Present Simple Grammar and so I
let it slip (filing it a a need to check vocabulary), but when one of my advanced
classes also told me the same thing I had to explore it further. It seemed
at first that it would simply be the name for the style of trousers like Oxford
Bags but there was one further twist to take. It turns out that the material
- corduroy - is called "Manchester" in Swiss German. My dictionary
clearly states it's "kordsamt" in High German.
As is always the case, you answer one question and another comes along to replace it. In this case it's how the H*ll did they get this name? As near as I can work it out it's a similar situation to the origin of the name Denim which - according to legend - was a bastardisation of the material of Nimes in France it was "De Nime". If a similar process happened here then the cloth from Manchester could quite easily become Manchester Cloth.
So are you wearing a well known English city?
