Question about a word in northern England dialect.

[LanguageLover]

13. Most likely it is: "Cup Laib"

I really still don't know the answer for sure but I think it is "Cup Laib".

Firstly, if you carefully notice the magician pronounce the second word, he puts his "lips" together. Now, there are only three letters in English where you have to press or "snap" your lips together to pronounce the letter and those are "P", "B" and "M". I can't think of any others where you need to do that.

We are also sure that the word starts with an "L", which many others above have guessed. So, I started looking for words which begin with "L" and end in either "P or B or M" and which would also match the approximate pronunciation we hear.

Of course, we cannot constrain ourselves to standard English because the word is surely in a local dialect or in a different language. Searching in "Scottish-Gaelic" I found the word "Laib", which simply means "Lip".

Therefore, a "Cup Laib" translates in English into "Lip Cup" or literally, "A Cup for the Lips". In other words, it is a "drinking cup". That's what seems reasonable enough to me in our context.

Strangely, if you "join" the two words together and write in lower case - like "cuplaib" - the Google translator says it means "couple". Then perhaps it is best that while writing we don't join the words "Cup Laib" together (just to be sure, keep them separate).

Of course, the magician is pronouncing it as "Koop Laa-ib", which I think we can all understand. I am sure the pronunciation "Koop" for "Cup" derives from the German phonetic rules of pronunciations.

I also found that "Laip" means "Lap" and "Laim" is the same as the English "Lime".

I didn't start my search with Scottish-Gaelic though. When he said he is from the "north", I initially thought he was from the north of England and therefore, started searching there. I found that in the far north-eastern borders of England with Scotland - near and north of Newcastle - there is an English dialect known as "Geordie". In fact, I did find a relatively small dictionary of "Geordie" dialect words online too. However, I could not find any words there which would match the words I was looking for. It was then that I broadened my search to Scottish-Gaelic.

That's all from my personal guesswork. I would wait now for a true linguist to step in and tell us what the real word is, if my own guess is wrong.

By now the discussion is surely buried under much more recent ones. Hopefully at least the original post writer will see my answer.