The Red Flag

credit: Oleksandr Rozhkov; Fotolalia

This is an off-topic blog entry.
Many Brits are familiar with these lyrics:

The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

I must admit I hadn't been familiar with the song until a few days ago I heard, for the first time in my life, 'The Red Flag', and I was most astonished because the melody sounded ever so familiar to me - it's the German Christmas carol 'O Tannenbaum'. The mind-boggling question is: How are they related?

Minnesotan English

(source unknown)

What's "Dalindyrik"?

Word-medial glottal stop

Glottal stops do not only occur at the beginning of words which otherwise start with a vowel, e.g. almond, enter, idea, but may also be heard word-medially before a syllable with an initial vowel. Inserting glottal stops word-medially is by no means unusual. Here's an example taken from a speech Tony Blair gave in 1996 in Blackpool at the Labour Party conference. He said:

Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education.

Listen to the way he pronounces priorities.