Walter W. Skeat

“ In fact, few things are more extraordinary in the history of our language than the singularly capricious manner in which good and useful words emerge into or disappear from use in “standard” talk, for no very obvious reason. Such a word as yonder is common enough still; but its corresponding adjective yon, as in the phrase “yon man,” is usually relegated to our dialects. Though it is common in Shakespeare, it is comparatively rare in the Middle English period, from the twelfth to the 7 fifteenth century. It only occurs once in Chaucer, where it is introduced as being a Northern word ”

“ But the very form of the question betrays ignorance of the facts; for it is no more possible to do away with them than it is possible to suppress the waves of the sea. English, like every other literary language, has always had its dialects and will long continue to possess them in secluded districts, though they are at the present time losing much of that archaic character which gives them their chief value. ”

“ But the spelling of proper names is very corrupt in nearly all writings of the 14th century, and it is quite unnecessary to suppose that such a misspelling is to be laid upon the scribe. Even in the best MSS. of Chaucer, such names assume very singular forms, and we have no ground for supposing that the case would have been any different if Chaucer had written out his poems himself. Hence all such forms are best left as they stand, though it often happens that we can interpret them correctly by seeing through the disguise. Even in the Latin texts the spellings differ. ”

“ Hence it came about, by a natural but somewhat rapid process, that the only dialect which remained unaffected by the triumph of the Midland variety was that portion of the Northern dialect which still held its own in Scotland, where it was spoken by subjects of another king. As far as literature was concerned, only two dialects were available, the Northumbrian of Scotland and the East Midland in 43 England. It is obvious that the readiest way of distinguishing between the two is to call the one “Scottish” and the other “English,” ignoring accuracy for the sake of practical convenience. ”

“ Prig, 1) .
prima-vista, an old game at cards, resembling primero, and sometimes identified with it. Primviste, Earle, Microcosmographie, § 13 (ed. Arber, p. 33) ; ‘Prima . . . a game at cardes, called Prime, Primero, or Primavista’ (Florio) . Ital. prima vista, ‘first seen, because he that can first show such an order of cards wins the game’ (Minsheu) .
primum mobile, the ‘First Movement’, in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the outer sphere (of a system of spheres) , which turns round from east to west once in 24 hours, carrying all the inner spheres with it. Bacon, Essay 15, § 4 ”

“ The spread of education may profoundly modify them, but the spoken language of the people will ever continue to devise new variations and to initiate developments of its own. Even the “standard” language is continually losing old words and admitting new ones, as was noted long ago by Horace; and our so-called “standard” pronunciation is ever imperceptibly but surely changing, and never continues in one stay. ”

“ The hawdod (described by Fitzherbert, Husbandry, 1534) is the beautiful blue cornflower, the most showy and attractive of all the flowers that grow in the corn; see EDD. The prefix haw means ‘blue’, see NED.; from OE. hǣwe, blue.
hare: phr. there goeth the hare, ‘That’s the direction in which the hare goes, that is the way to follow up’, New Custom, ii. 3 (Perverse Doctrine) ; in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, iii. 39; ‘Hic labor, hoc opus est, there goeth the hare away’, Stubbes, School of Abuse (ed. Arber, p. 70) . ”

“ The chief fosterer of our rather extensive Wessex (or Southern) literature, commonly called Anglo-Saxon, was the great Alfred, born at Wantage in Berkshire, to the south of the Thames. We may roughly define the limits of the Old Southern dialect by saying that it formerly included all the counties to the south of the Thames and to the west and south-west of Berkshire, including Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, and Devonshire, but excluding Cornwall, in which the Cornish dialect of Celtic prevailed. ”

“ When we talk of “speakers of dialect,” we imply that they employ a provincial method of speech to which the man who has been educated to use the language of books is unaccustomed. Such a man finds that the dialect-speaker frequently uses words or modes of expression which he does not understand or which are at any rate strange to him; and he is sure to notice that such words as seem to be familiar to him are, for the most part, strangely pronounced. Such differences are especially noticeable in the use of 2 vowels and diphthongs, and in the mode of intonation. ”

“ Yet it not unfrequently happens, as in the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, that the dialectal scraps indicate the pronunciation with tolerable fidelity, which is more than can be said of such portions of their works as are given in the normal spelling. It is curious to notice that writers in dialect are usually, from a phonetic point of view, more careful and consistent in their modes of indicating sounds than are the rest of us. Sometimes their spelling is, accordingly, very good. ”

“ The grammar is perfectly intelligible, and this is the surest mark of similarity of language; we may, however, note the use of send as a contraction of sendeth, and of oni for “any man” in the singular, while onie, being plural, represents “any men.”
The other chief variations are in the vocabulary or word-list, due to the fact that this Proclamation is older than the reigns of the first three Edwards, which was the period when so many words of Anglo-Norman origin entered our language, displacing many words of native origin that thus became obsolete ”

“ Trench further points out that many of our pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the formation of our early English, subsequently dropped out of our usual vocabulary, and are now to be found only in the dialects. A good example is the word eme, an uncle (A.S. ēam) , which is rather common in Middle English, but has seldom appeared in our literature since the tune of Drayton. Yet it is well known in our Northern dialects, and Sir Walter Scott puts the expression “Didna his eme die” in the mouth of Davie Deans (Heart of Midlothian, ch. xii) . ”

“ The Durham dialect of the Cursor Mundi and the Aberdeen Scotch of Barbour are hardly distinguishable by grammatical or orthographical tests; and both bear a remarkable resemblance to the Yorkshire dialect as found in Hampole. What is now called Lowland Scotch is so nearly descended from the Old Northumbrian that the latter was invariably called “Ingliss” by the writers who employed it; and they reserved the name of “Scottish” to designate Gaelic or Erse, the tongue of the original “Scots,” who gave their name to the country. Barbour (Bruce, iv 253) calls his own language “Ynglis.” ”

“ The obsolete words are not very numerous, and we meet now and then with half a dozen consecutive lines that would puzzle no one. It is needless to pursue the history of this dialect further. It had, by this time, become almost the standard language, differing from Modern English chiefly in date, and consequently in pronunciation. We pass on from Manning to Chaucer, from Chaucer to Lydgate and Caxton, and from Caxton to Lord Surrey and Sackville and Spenser, without any real change in the actual dialect employed, but only in the form of it. ”

“ The speaker of the “standard” language is frequently tempted to consider himself as the dialect-speaker’s superior, unless he has already acquired some elementary knowledge of the value of the science of language or has sufficient common sense to be desirous of learning to understand that which for the moment lies beyond him. ”

“ The result is that the Northumbrian glosses in this MS., throughout the three last Gospels, are of no great value, as they tell us little more than can be better learnt from the Durham book; on the other hand, Farman’s Mercian gloss to St Matthew is of high value, but need not be considered at present. Hence it is best in this case to rely, for our knowledge of Old Northumbrian, on the Durham book alone.
It must be remembered that a gloss is not quite the same thing as a free translation that observes the rules of grammar. ”

“ The evidence, which is necessarily somewhat imperfect, goes to show that the older dialects appear to have been few in number, each being tolerably uniform over a wide area; and that the rather numerous dialects of the present day were gradually developed by the breaking up of the older groups into subdialects. This is especially true of the old Northumbrian dialect, in which the speech of Aberdeen was hardly distinguishable from that of Yorkshire, down to the end of the fourteenth century; soon after which date, the use of it for literary purposes survived in Scotland only. ”

“ The history of our dialects in the earliest periods of which we have any record is necessarily somewhat obscure, owing to the scarcity of the documents that have come down to us. The earliest of these have been carefully collected and printed in one volume by Dr Sweet, entitled The Oldest English Texts, edited for the Early English Text Society in 1885. Here we already find the existence of no less than four dialects, which have been called by the names of Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex (or Anglo-Saxon) , and Kentish. ”

“ The Midland prevailed over the Northern and Southern dialects because it was intermediate between them, and so helped to interpret between North and South; and the East Midland prevailed over the Western because it contained within its area all three of the chief literary centres, namely, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. It follows from this that the Old Mercian dialect is of greater interest than either the Northumbrian or Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ Our modern language abounds with words borrowed from many foreign tongues; but a large number of them have come to us since 1500. Before that date the chief languages from which it was possible for us to borrow words were British or Gaelic, Irish, Latin, Greek (invariably through the medium of Latin) , Hebrew (in a small degree, through the medium of Latin) , Arabic (very slightly, and indirectly) , Scandinavian, and French. A few words as to most of these are sufficient.
It is not long since a great parade was made of our borrowings from “Celtic” ”

“ Latin is a language from which English has 87 borrowed words in every century since the year 600. In my Principles of English Etymology, First Series, Chap. xxi, I give a list of Latin words imported into English before the Norman Conquest. Several of these must be familiar in our dialects; we can hardly suppose that country people do not know the meaning of ark, beet, box, candle, chalk, cheese, cook, coulter, cup, fennel, fever, font, fork, inch, kettle, kiln, kitchen, and the like. Indeed, ark is quite a favourite word in the North for a large wooden chest, used for many purposes ”