Homespun Compounds
In the days of King Alfred, and of Ælfric, the Abbot of Eynsham, literary English possessed numbers of good, home-grown, compound words, which have since been lost, and replaced by some more learned or diffuse substitute. People said then: book-craft for literature; star-craft for astronomy; father-slayer for parricide; deed-beginner for perpetrator of crime; together-speech for colloquy; old-speech for tradition; well-willing for benevolent, O.E. bōc-cræft, tungol-cræft, fæder-slaga, dǣd-fruma, samod-sprǣc, eald-sprǣc, welt-willende. Sometimes again we have replaced the old compound by a more concise but less picturesque synonym. For lore-house we say school; for dim-house, prison; for again-coming, return, O.E. lār-hūs, dim-hūs, eft-cyme. In the spoken dialects we have the natural development of a living tongue, practically untouched by what are called the learned influences; hence, where in the literary language we should use a word of Latin origin, we frequently find a homespun compound used by dialect-speakers. We shall see in a later chapter to what a large extent these compounds are figurative and metaphorical; the few here quoted belong only to the simplest type: beet-need (n.Cy. Yks. Lan.), a person or thing that helps in an emergency, cp. O.E. bētan, to improve; cap-river, a termagant; cover-slut (Lei. Nhp. War. Shr.), a long apron used to hide an untidy dress; has-been (Sc. n.Cy. Lakel. Yks. Chs. Lin. War. Shr.), a person, animal, or thing, formerly serviceable but now past its prime, as the old Lincolnshire man said: It stan’s to reason at yung college-gentlemen like you knaws a vast sight moore then a worn-oot hes-been like me, bud you weänt better God Almighty an’ ten commandments e’ my time, an’ soä I’ll just stick to ’em while I’m happ’d up [till I am buried]; he-said, or he-say (Wm. w.Yks.), a rumour; never-sweat (Yks. Rdn. Oxf.), an idle lazy fellow; rip-stitch (Lakel. Yks. Lan.), a romping boisterous child, e.g. What a rip-stitch that lad is! If aw send him out i’ th’mornin’ wi’ his things o’ reet an’ tidy, he’ll come back at neet like a scarecrow; rogues-agreed (Som.), confederates, e.g. They purtend avore the justices how they ’adn never a-zeed wan t’other avore, but lor! anybody could zee they was rogues-agreed; good-doing (e.An.), charitable; penny-tight (Lin.), short of money; uptake (Sc. n.Cy. Nhb. Cum.), intelligence, comprehension, generally in the phrase in or at the uptake, e.g. He’s gleg i’ the uptak [quick in understanding].
Some fine shades of Meaning
Fine shades of meaning are often expressed in the dialects by some slight variation in pronunciation which to our ears might sound purely arbitrary or accidental, and also by the distinctive use of one or other of two words which from a dictionary point of view are synonymous. For example, drodge and drudge both mean a person who works hard, but the difference is this: a drudge is always kept working by a superior, a drodge is always working because she cannot get forward with her work; the word drodge implies blame, and drudge none. Geeble (g soft), gibble (g soft), jabble (Bnff.), signify a quantity of liquid. The word geeble contains the notion of contempt and dissatisfaction. When there is a small quantity and greater contempt and dissatisfaction indicated, gibble is used, and when a larger quantity, jabble is used. Muxy and puxy (Som.) mean miry, but a muxy lane would be merely a muddy lane, whereas a puxy lane would be at least ankle-deep in mud; steal and slance (Lan. Chs.) mean thieve. A boy may take a piece of pie from his mother’s larder, and he will have slanst it, but if he did the same thing from his neighbour’s place he would have stolen it. Words like this would never be confused by people accustomed to use them in everyday life.
CHAPTER III
SPECIMENS OF DIALECT
Difficulties of the Vernacular
Our difficulty in understanding the vernacular of a dialect-speaker arises in great measure from the fact that many of the sounds being unfamiliar to us, we cannot tell which syllable belongs to which word, and so we cannot rightly divide up the sentence into its component parts. This would of course be much more easily done if we could at once write down on paper what we have heard, and then stake it off in sections, like the cryptic word which the Kentish woman wrote to the village schoolmaster, to explain the absence of her boy from school: keptatometugoataturin, which became quite clear when divided up thus: kept-at-ome-tu-go-a-taturin, that is, kept at home to go a-harvesting-potatoes. For instance, what sounds like oogerum (Yks.) stands for a whole sentence: hug her them, that is, carry them for her. The sentence always quoted as the classic puzzle of this type is: ezonionye-onionye, which being interpreted means: have any of you any on you? Another catch specimen of Yorkshire dialect is t’weet maks’m pike’m, the wet makes them pick themselves, used of fowls cleaning themselves after rain. Then further, many of the commonest words have by the unhindered action of the laws of living speech become so worn down, that we hardly recognize them in this their dialect form, though we are using them every day ourselves in the standard language. Take for example such a sentence as: I shall have it in the morning, which has been pared down to: as-et-it-morn (Yks.). Our forefathers a thousand years ago would have said: Ic sceal hit habban on ðǣm morgne, every single word of which remains firm and intelligible in its skeleton shape of: as [I shall]-et [have it]-it [in the]-morn. Add to this an enormous vocabulary of words non-existent in literary English, it is no wonder if sometimes the accents of a country rustic sound in our ears like an unknown tongue. A story is told of a Yorkshireman who went into a store of general wares in London and asked: What diz ta keep here? Ans. Oh, everything. Yorkshireman: Ah deean’t think thoo diz. Hesta onny coo-tah nobs [pieces of wood that secure the tie for the legs of cows when being milked]?—a question which reduced the cockney salesman to a state of helpless amazement.
Specimens from various Dialects