Gerrit in t’reet place!

As the King’s English balkanises into separate dialects with their own standards bodies, it’s becoming essential to honour their individual orthographies in print. You can recognise Yorkshire dialect by its heavy sprinkling of random apostrophes.

Only they’re not random, according to the Yorkshire Dialect Society, one of the oldest such bodies (established 1897). And once again North Yorkshire Council has been taken to task for its haphazard apostrophisation, needing to replace hundreds of posters put up at tourist spots with the correct phrase, which happens to be:

Gerrit in t’bin.

Yours-truly thought he’d pick the brains of his favourite AI: ChatGPT 4o. The following bizarre exchange took place, Putinesque in its casuistry:

Insert apostrophes in correct places in this sample of Yorkshire dialect: “Gerrit in’t bin”

Sure, the correct placement of apostrophes in the Yorkshire dialect phrase “Gerrit in’t bin” is as follows:

“Gerrit in’t bin”

This phrase is already correct with its apostrophe placement:

• “Gerrit” is a contraction of “get it.”

• “in’t” is a contraction of “in the.”

So the phrase “Gerrit in’t bin” correctly means “Get it in the bin.”

The Yorkshire Dialect Society does not agree.

Understood. According to the conventions of Yorkshire dialect, the phrase should be written as:

“Gerrit int’ bin.”

Here:

• “int'” represents “into the,” with the apostrophe placed before the “t” to indicate the dropped “o” from “into” and “he” from “the.”

This conforms to the way the Yorkshire Dialect Society typically transcribes such phrases.

Don’t you mean: with the apostrophe placed after the “t”

Yes, you’re right. The correct placement of the apostrophe is after the “t” to indicate the dropped letters. So the phrase should be written as:

“Gerrit in’t bin.”

This correctly represents “Get it in the bin” in Yorkshire dialect, with “in’t” indicating the contraction of “in the.”

I gave up at this point.

I don’t think ChatGPT is quite ready to rule the world just yet awhile. So – sorry Donald Trump – for the foreseeable future we’ll just have to carry on picking our lords and master by free and fair elections.