from my email:-
From: xyyzz@bigpond.com

Subject: Brofoged

Hi Hugh,

I have unsubscribe the Denmark list for private reasons, but someone sent me the stuff as a laugh. I then had a look in the archives this morning and note the silly argument about Brofoged incl. your posting.

As you know, I was born in Denmark ~ Bornholm ~ in 1934.

Let me assure you we had several Brofogeder and they were Brolæggerinspetører (as in cobblestone layers/installers supervisors) and their only job related to cobblestone roads and streets - I even knew on personally or rather my father did, as they had their tools mended in my father's shop! I even remember a cobblestone road being built from Ringeby (close to my home) right through Præsteskoven to Almindingen!
In Rønne they have kept the old brolagte streets in many of the old parts of town.

That a brofoged also could be an inspector/keeper of bridges is also a fact --- but a totally unrelated occupation!

In the very old days in Jylland they also used timber as brolægning of a road so the claim that brolæggning relates to building bridges over land does make sense ----------- but as related to late 19th and 20th century Denmark - a brolagt road or street was/is a cobblestone road or street - and the occupation of the man was strictly a supervisor of cobblestone layers ------and that is what was asked for in the first place.


Cheers,

xyyzzan udlansk dansker
a Danish expat in Australie

Hullo

I lived in Copenhagen for 20 years and am going back for the next 3 months

I know all this - I meet paviors at work on the steets of Copenhagen and talk with them - some of the contractors are not qualified as paviours only as gardeners, not brolæger, so the quality of work I see is variable.

I was trying to calm the group down

Forman pavior is the best translation of brofoged in this modern sense of leader of agroups of workers,
and toll bridge collector of tolls or manager if it was a bridge not a turnpike - but then these are words not found in school english learned by the Danes

Amateur etymology is the bane of genealogy and it gets repeated and repeated

I find old Danish easy to read because I learned Faeroese first so know a lot of alternative words that modern danes don't

How many years since you lived in Denmark?

I find I have to work hard at maintaining my english when over there
using BBC world service daily and newspapers

the New York Danes speak a quaint old fashioned Danish,
and the older Icelanders take pride in good Danish but the younger ones use english as the second language of choice
for them Danish is a school subject.
With english they have more choices of higher education and university education for example.

Have you come across a slavfoged ?

Which is a really old historical occupation - in the context of slægtsforskning - or a ghost story about Nyhavn?

The modern Danes are really bad at ghosts, luckily a bit survives in older books and in the Grundvigean Dansk Folkemindesamling but in UK we exploite our ghosts as a tourist attraction.

======================

no time to make proper hypertext
had a computer free day yesterday
I took me to Wales to the Monmouthshire AKA Gwent county record office.

Today too many unread messages to count
123 in one in box
200+ usenet messages
only 3 in my private box
60 in my rootsweb administratieve mailbox
19 about mariners
and in gmail 140 about Danish genealogy
over a cople of days
and about 100 about Monmouthshire, Bristol and Somerset. wittgenstein and Post Popperian philosphy

pavior paviour in English http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pavior

the word bro in Danish causes translation confusion meaning a bridge, a pier, a quay and - mostly in compound words - a paved or cobbled road -- which it justs occured to me goes back to Viking archeology where roads across wet and boggy places were causewayed and wood laid.