Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. Elizabeth Mary Wright
of Contents
Among common errors still persisting in the minds of educated people, one error which dies very hard is the theory that a dialect is an arbitrary distortion of the mother tongue, a wilful mispronunciation of the sounds, and disregard of the syntax of a standard language. Only quite recently—May 5, 1910—in reviewing a book called The Anglo-Irish Language, a writer in the Times Literary Supplement says: ‘The Anglo-Irish dialect is a passably good name for it … , but it is something more than a dialect, more than an affair of Pidgin English, bad spelling, provincialisms, and preposterous grammar.’ Here we have a very good modern instance of the old error. A dialect, we are to understand, consists of ‘Pidgin English, bad spelling, provincialisms, and preposterous grammar’. This comes of reading dialect stories by authors who have no personal knowledge of any dialect whatever, and who have never studied any language scientifically. All they have done, perhaps, is to have purchased the Dialect Glossary of some district, or maybe they have asked a friend to supply a little local colouring. A lady once wrote to the Secretary of the English Dialect Society as follows: ‘Dear Sir, a friend of mine intends writing a novel, the scene of which is to be laid in Essex in the sixteenth century. Will you kindly give her a few hints as to the local dialect of that period?’ Authors of this type put into the mouths of their dialect-speaking characters a kind of doggerel which the above definition aptly describes, their readers then run away with the idea that this hotch-potch is the ‘spit and image’ of a real, living, English dialect. As a matter of fact, our English dialects exemplify so well the sound-laws of living speech, and the historical development of an originally inflected language, that the Neuphilologen in Germany are calling for Dialect Reading Books for German students studying English. A Professor in the University of Giessen has just bought fifty copies of Wright’s Grammar of the English Dialects for his Seminar. Now and then a solitary German student is sent over to England to encamp in a remote country village and write a learned Dissertation on the characteristic vowel-sounds of the district; an arduous task for a young foreigner whose knowledge of literary English as she is spoke is an uncertain quantity. But the field of English dialects offers other allurements besides those which attract the philologist and the grammarian. The language-specialist merely digs and quarries, as it were, in the bare soil and rock, where he finds rich ores amply sufficient to repay his pains and toil, but there remains plenty of room for the rest of us who are less laboriously inclined, and at every turn are enticing paths. The real charm lies in the fact that it is a ‘faire felde ful of folke’, natural, homely, witty folk. If this book succeeds in pointing out a few of the many ways in which the study of our English dialects may not only contribute to the advancement of knowledge, but also give us a clearer insight into the life and character of the British peasant and artisan, it will have achieved the aim and object of its existence.
‘Countryman. We old men are old chronicles, and when our tongues go they are not clocks to tell only the time present, but large books unclasped; and our speeches, like leaves turned over and over, discover wonders that are long since past.’
The Great Frost of January, 1608. Social England Illustrated, A Collection of XVIIth Century Tracts, p. 166.
CHAPTER I
DIALECT SPEAKERS
Insignificance of London
With the spread of education, and the ever-increasing means of rapid locomotion throughout the length and breadth of the land, the area where pure dialects are spoken is lessening year by year. It used to be Mam and Dad and Porridge, and then ’twas Father and Mother and Broth, but now ’tis Pa and Ma and Soup, is a saying concerning farmers’ children in the Midlands. In the words of an old North-country woman: T’young ’uns dizn’t talk noo leyke what they did when ah wer a lass; there’s ower mich o’ this knackin’ [affected talk] noo; bud, as ah tells ’em, fooaks spoils thersens sadly wi’ knackin’. An’ then there’s another thing, when deean, they can mak nowt bud mashelshon [mixed corn] on’t. There is a very old proverb in Cheshire, applied to any one who goes out of the country for improvement, and returns without having gained much; such a one is said to have ‘been at London to learn to call a streea a straw’. It is not often now that one could hear it said: Ah deean’t gan bauboskin’ [straying away] aboot leyke sum on ’em, ah sticks ti t’heeaf. The place where a mountain or fell sheep is born, and where it continues to live and pasture, is called its heaf, and the word is often in the Northern counties thus picturesquely used in a figurative sense. When one looks at the placards announcing in large letters the extraordinarily cheap day trips offered by the Great Western or the Midland Railway, or sees hoardings decorated with garish posters portraying the arid sands and cloudless skies of Blackpool or Morecambe, how dim and distant seem those past days when in their stead he who runs might read an advertisement such as this: ‘The York four-days Stage Coach begins on Friday the 12th of April. All that are desirous to pass from London to York, or from York to London, or any other place on that road, let them repair to the Black Swan in Holborn, or to the Black Swan in Conney Street in York, at both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the whole journey in four days (if God permits), and sets forth at five in the morning.’ Small wonder if people then stuck to their heaf, and dialects remained pure and unadulterated. But even to-day one can still find country places where our great cities are known only by name. The inhabitants may ask us casually: Hoo’s traade doon London waay?—but you feel, in so doing, they merely wish to make polite conversation. Two or three years ago we lunched at a small village inn not far from Skipton in Yorkshire, and before leaving the landlord asked us to write our names in his visitors’ book. When we had finished, he read over the entry, and said, ‘Ah, you come from Oxford, perhaps you know London?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ we said, ‘we go to London sometimes.’ ‘Then you’ll happen know my brother,’ was the confident rejoinder. This last summer we stayed at a most primitive inn—with a courtesy title of Hotel—on the moors under the shadow of Penyghent. The landlord fetched us and our luggage from the station, and as he was uncording a box of books he observed, ‘You come from Oxford then.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, feeling proud of my connexion with that ancient Seat of Learning. ‘Oh!’ said mine host of the Golden Lion, ‘How’s hay down there?’
The Yorkshire Bite
To gain the full benefit and enjoyment of a sojourn in a country village, it is an immense advantage to be able to speak the dialect yourself, or at any rate to be able to understand and respect it. That is why we prefer the West Riding of Yorkshire to any other part of England, for there we are at home with the native, and are not looked upon as ‘foreigners’. The name Yorkshire has become a synonym for acuteness not unmixed with a touch of unscrupulousness. In Lincolnshire, for example, when anything is done which is very clever, sharp, or unscrupulous, they say: That’s real Yerksheer. To put Yorkshire on a person means in Lancashire to cheat, trick, or overreach him; in Lancashire and Lincolnshire a sharp overreaching person is called a Yorkshire bite. Even in his own country the Yorkshireman has this reputation. It was a native who told us the following story. Two Yorkshiremen, whom we will call A. and B., were accustomed to send their horses to the same Show. A.’s horse always won prizes, and B.’s never did. One day B. complained to A. ‘I can’t think why Mr. So-and-so (the judge) never gives me a First Prize; my horse is every bit as good as yours.’ ‘Well,’ said A., ‘I tell you what you had better do before the next Show; you send Mr. So-and-so a good big ham.’ The day came, and this time it was B.’s horse that won the First Prize. A. was both angry and astonished. He went to B. and asked: ‘Did you send that ham?’ ‘Yes,’ said B., ‘but I sent it in your name, not mine.’ Another Yorkshireman on his death-bed found satisfaction in the thought that he had outwitted an Insurance Company. ‘Ah’ve dun ’em, Joe, ah’ve dun ’em. T’doctor says ah’m bahn [I am going] to dee, an’ ah wor nobbud insiured six munths sin,’ he boasted to a sympathizing friend. It would, however, be grossly unfair to judge the Yorkshireman on the strength of this proverbial characteristic. He has very many other qualities equally characteristic and much more desirable, but which become famed in phrase and story only when found