For hope of pelfe, like worldly elfe, to moile and toile.
To rape and scrape (Chs. Not. Glo. e.An.) is to scrape together, to get by any means in one’s power; to raunch and scraunch (War. Shr.) is to snatch greedily, e.g. Look at that ŏŏman slave and drave (Wil.) is to toil; shaffling and haffling (Chs.) means acting in an undecided, shilly-shallying way; wafting and draughting (Chs.) means bustling about; to wink and skrink (Cor.) means to make signs by winking. The following story is told of a Cornish lad: he had been left in charge of the Sunday dinner whilst the family were at church, and like King Alfred, he let it burn. He repaired to the church, and endeavoured by his energetic signs from the porch, to draw out the housewife. She in turn made signs to him to wait, when, growing impatient, he cried out: ‘Yiew may winky and skrinky as long as yiew du plase, but the figgy dowdy [plum pudding] is burnt gin the crock.’
By habs and nabs (Yks. Lin.), and by hobs and jobs (Shr.) are phrases signifying little by little, bit by bit; by hulch and by stulch (Chs.) is equivalent to by hook or by crook; hitheracs and skitheracs (Yks.) are odds and ends.
CHAPTER X
PHONOLOGY AND GRAMMAR
The average educated Englishman has no accurate conception of what a dialect really is, beyond a vague notion that the term covers a mass of barbarisms, corruptions, and mispronunciations of the King’s English, devoid of any order or system, and used by the illiterate rustic in a haphazard fashion with no regard to consistency. But as we have already seen in Chapter VII, in very many cases it is the standard language which contains the anomalies and the corruptions, whilst the correct forms have been handed down in the dialects where systematic sound-laws and exact grammatical rules have been regularly developed and carried out unhampered by the arbitrary rules of fashion, or the regulations of a stereotyped spelling 400 years behind the pronunciation. As Max Müller puts it: ‘the real and natural life of language is in its dialects,’ The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 55.
A dialect may be defined as one of the subordinate forms or varieties of a language arising from local peculiarities of pronunciation, vocabulary, and idiom, or as that form or idiom of a language peculiar to a limited region or people, as distinguished from the literary language of the whole people. Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with the second of these three characteristics of a dialect, namely vocabulary, but we will now consider in some detail the first on the list, namely pronunciation, and here we cannot fail to be struck by the wonderful uniformity and regularity of the sound-system of modern dialects.
To classify the modern dialects of a country is a difficult and unsatisfactory task. If we possessed about three hundred detailed grammars of the principal English dialects spoken in the United Kingdom, and could find hundreds of competent people willing to answer queries about difficult or doubtful points, it might be possible to furnish a classification which would be tolerably accurate. But this is a state of things never likely to be realized. Though a great deal has been done in collecting material, it is as yet insufficient to enable any one to give the exact geographical area over which many of the grammatical phenomena extend, hence the boundaries given in the classification of our dialects are more or less roughly drawn. For all practical purposes we may divide the English dialects into the following seven groups:
Dialectal Groups