A ‘But and Ben’ is a Scottish phrase for a small and simply designed house, often made up of just a couple of rooms. The words come from the outer room (But) that was added, or butted, onto an inner room (Ben). A Scot will say someone is ‘ben the hoose’, which means inside the house.
I love making houses using English Paper Piecing. Here are some of my designs.
An English Paper Piecing Journey 
These are cute! I also noticed a distinct similarity between the Scottish words “but” and “ben” and the Dutch (I’m exploring my Dutch heritage and learning the language.) In “Nederlands” the words are “buiten” (outside) and “binnen”… so your “wee but and ben” makes perfect sense to me!
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That’s so interesting. Thanks for telling me as I doubt I would have got to know that otherwise. Although I am a Scot, I grew up in India and I am busy learning Hindi online, the language that was all around me as a child. It’s fun to learn a language, if a little challenging at times!
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I love learning languages! I’m always noticing similarities (and differences) between various languages, and I’m fascinated by how closely intertwined language and culture can be. Good luck with Hindi. That’s a language I know nothing about!
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Actually it’s pretty easy and learning to write it is fairly straightforward too, as it’s phonetic. Getting the authentic pronunciation is probably the hardest part but I don’t have a problem with that bit. It’s ingrained. : )
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Dutch is fairly phonetic, but there are a lot of spelling rules (just as there are in English) and while I’m a great speller in English, I make tons of spelling mistakes in Dutch. I don’t think I’ll ever learn LOL
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