Scots don't speak English!

I should have made clear that that was the map of the bomb locations on 7/7, not today's.

Looks kinda like a crescent.

Mornington Crescent?

I'm sorry, I haven't a clue. But perhaps you knew that.

Disallowed due to police action.

Finsbury Park via Turnpike Lane.

That's closed isn't it, permanently? Has been for years, or have I missed something.

Yes, you have miised your turn. Now its my turn again.

Holloway Road

Don't know. It's even more years since I was last there.

It seems to have undergone a truncation if a press release can be believed. A PR showing the services on the London Underground was issued at 17:20 yesterday, July, 21. It included:

Northern - operating between Morden to Stockwell, Kennington to Edgware via Bank and Morning Crescent to High Barnet and Mill Hill East only

MC is lighter by a ton.

Mornington Crescent station was closed from 1992 until 1998. The closure was only intended to be for a matter of months while the elevators were replaced, but it happened to coincide with a budget crisis; other renovations were done during the delay, at least.

X-No-Archive: yes In message , Mark Brader writes

Thanks for that, Mark. IIR it was arguments over the closure that sparked off those disgraceful incidents at the 15th Mornington Crescent world conference in New York a few years ago and led to the ban by the mayor on future conferences from being held in New York.

Mornington Crescent was always an odd place. When I was a regular Tube traveller back in the 1960s, very few trains used to stop there. It was also notable for issuing very thin paper tickets, like old-fashioned bus tickets printed on a paper roll.

In message , JF writes

I'm sorry but you've asked for this: Using the Lord Chamberlain's 1984 Third Amendments and making bridges wild, I'll start with:

Swiss Cottage

My favourite definition is that language is a dialect with an army.

Thom

York.

bridges

No, sorry: you can't use that rule in international games. You could have opened with Ealing Broadway, though; and that would, in effect, have forced Bank on the next player as an over-leash.

(Followups directed to alt.usage.english, where Laura is reading this)

Laura Spira:

Specifically, trains to the Edgware branch did not stop there, which would be about half of the ones that went through it. And of course trains on the City branch don't go through it at all. So about 1/4 of the total Northern Line service used to stop there, instead of 1/2 as now.

(Monospaced font required for diagram, of course)

to Edgware to High Barnet (and Mill Hill East) ^ ^ \ / \ / # # Camden Town (platforms on both branches) * / \ / | ( # Mornington Crescent \ | \ # Euston (platforms on both branches) `+-#---> to the City | v to Charing Cross

• indicates no junction; * indicates that there is one, with trains from both southern branches running onto both northern ones.

The reason for this odd configuration is that the western curve connecting Euston (City branch) to Camden Town is newer than everything else on the diagram, having been added in the 1920s. The two southern branches were originally separate railways -- the City & South London (extended to Euston in 1907) and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead (first opened in 1907).

The C&SLR and CCE&HR came under common ownership in 1913. While they both traversed Central London from north to south, the former ran only south from there (terminating at Euston as noted, and including both two northern branches), and the latter only north (terminating at what is now Embankment). So in due course it was decided to combine them, providing access from both North and South London to both the CCE&HR and C&SLR lines in Central London.

In the south the CCE&HR was simply extended to meet the C&SLR at a new Kennington junction, but in the north existing interchange station at Euston was not laid out in a way that would let it be made into a junction. So instead the C&SLR was extended in a curve to meet the CCE&HR at Camden Town as shown. Incidentally, the works also required enlarging all of the existing tunnels on the C&SLR, which when originally opened in 1890 had been viewed as a shorter line focused on local services, and been built smaller than was later found to be desirable.

The combined route was not given any name at first, then in the 1930s the name Edgware-Morden Line was used for a few years, and the term Northern Line was applied in 1937.

The problem of Scots is the problem of what criteria you will admit as approrpriate in categorising languages. If what separates languages is simply crossing some threshold of amount of difference, then whether Scots and English are two different languages is a question of where you set the threshold. If you permit differences of provenance to count, as biolgists do when deciding what constitutes a separate species, then Scots is a different language because of its different origin and roots. It arose in a different place from a somewhat different mix of the same general linguistic soup as English. As communication and travel improved, not to mention the influence exerted by English armies, it then confusingly started to drift closer to English.

In biology the controversy over permissible distinguishing criteria has become very sophisticiated and technical, using terms such as cladistic and phenetic. The question is whether evolutionary development counts in distinguishing languages, or is it just difference?

I would have thought that the same development applies to any British regional English dialect. It's not as if the people of Yorkshire, Somerset, etc. at some point deviated from an imaginary standard English.