Jack Windsor Lewis’ blog 151 mentions the fact that ‘ch’ is counted as a single letter when alphabetising Welsh, Spanish (but not Portuguese) and Czech. Double ‘ll’ is likewise a single ‘letter’ in both Welsh and Spanish (as an example, lomo comes before llegar in a list of Spanish words), and ‘aa’ (increasingly old-fashioned alternative to ‘å’) in Danish and Norwegian, where it is given the last place in the alphabet.

This leads me to ask: how are these letters treated in crosswords compiled in the relevant languages? Do the ‘ch’ ‘ll’ or ‘aa’ occupy a single box, or are they spread over two boxes as they would be in English crosswords?

Some years ago I had a dispute with a very reputable linguist on the question of whether Korean orthography was a syllabary or an alphabet. I maintained that it was an alphabet since each ‘block’ making up a syllable was transparently made up of individual strokes whose phonological value was constant. His counter argument was that in Korean crosswords, the whole syllable is necessarily placed within one box, and that therefore the writing system is a syllabary.

We agreed to disagree.

In a comment on last week’s post about ’snow terms’, John Cowan takes me to task for comparing apples with lemons (a ‘malo-citrine’ comment is how he puts it) when I wrote that ‘lie’, ’settle’, ’stick’ and ‘pitch’ were alternative terms in use in various dialects of English. He maintains that while ‘pitch’ is a dialectal word “in this sense”, ‘lie, ’settle’ and ’stick’ are “part of the standard dialect”.

This raises the question: where is the boundary between two languages, two varieties or two dialects? To me, if the use of a word with a particular sense is restricted to one or more discrete geographical or social areas, then it is evidence of a particular geographical or social dialect. ‘Stick’ is a case in point: Amy Stoller, in another comment on the same post, admits that she had never thought any other word could be used, because that is what she is used to hearing in New York. To me this is good evidence that it is part of New York dialect, as it is of several North Midland dialects in England. I’m not sure why John thinks that “pitch”, on the other hand, is dialectal: it is a word I’m familiar with, and this sense is simply an extension of that for putting up a tent.

We generally speak of British English and American English as being the two major varieties of the language, but each of them comprises a large number of dialects. To me, a dialect is distinguished by its phonetics, phonology, grammar and vocabulary (including the semantics of individual words). British and American English might be considered “super dialects”, but they certainly have different phonetics, phonology, grammar and vocabulary from each other, some features of which are common to all or many of the dialects within that variety. I am not sure where I stand on the question of when two dialects become separate languages: the famous difficulty is for Swedish, Danish and Norwegian – three languages or one? They are intercomprehensible, but generally reckoned separate languages. The old saw about languages having gunboats determines that they are three, but then British English and American English are still one language despite both having their own gunboats …

England has had far more snow this winter than for many a long year – 18 according to the Meteorological Office.

When snow falls and does not immediately melt, what is it doing? In Scotland, it is said to be lying. In many parts of England it settles, but in the North West of England – and maybe elsewhere – it sticks. And in Wiltshire at least, it pitches. At first sight, this last seems the oddest, but we pitch a tent when we set it up, so this is a similar use of the word.

When we think of dialectal variation, we usually think of the unusual words that occur in one area but not others. Most speakers of English would not consider their use of ‘lie’, ’settle’, ’stick’ or ‘pitch’ in this sense as dialectal, but it is just as much part of local dialect as is Glaswegian ‘yin’ for ‘one’, or North Staffordshire ‘purvet’ for ‘rummage’.

Last week, Birmingham City Council announced that it was no longer going to put apostrophes in its street names. This caused an outcry in the press. I can only assume the council needs the publicity, because the placing of apostrophes in place names has been inconsistent in many places and for many years, and without anybody, apparently, noticing.

Take the London Underground. The Piccadilly Line has stations at King’s Cross and Earl’s Court, but next door to Earl’s Court is Barons Court.

Then there’s the East Coast main railway line out of King’s Cross. It has stations at Brookmans Park and Potters Bar. King’s Cross itself, and also King’s Lynn, at the other end of the First Capital Connect line, are both seen with and without the apostrophe.

There is an ambiguity in one of the Piccadilly Line’s northern stations: Arnos Grove. How is this pronounced? Does it depend on the name’s origin? If there is potentially an apostrophe in the name, then it is /ˈɑːnəʊz/, but if not, then presumably /ˈɑːnɒs/ is better. I can’t recall having heard an announcement that would clarify it for me. Perhaps both pronunciations are used indiscriminately.