“Why, that feller don’t know how to spell!”
Gravely I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced, so far as possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was of no use. My friend was outraged. “That tale-teller then is jest makin’ fun of the mountain people by misspellin’ our talk. You educated folks don’t spell your own words the way you say them.”
A most palpable hit; and it gave me a new point of view.
To the mountaineers themselves their speech is natural and proper, of course, and when they see it bared to the spotlight, all eyes drawn toward it by an orthography that is as odd to them as it is to us, they are stirred to wrath, just as we would be if our conversation were reported by some Josh Billings or Artemas Ward.
The curse of dialect writing is elision. Still, no one can write it without using the apostrophe more than he likes to; for our highland speech is excessively clipped. “I’m comin’ d’reck’ly” has a quaintness that should not be lost. We cannot visualize the shambling but eager mountaineer with a sample of ore in his hand unless the writer reports him faithfully: “Wisht you’d ’zamine this rock fer me—I heern tell you was one o’ them ’sperts.”
Although the hillsmen save some breath in this way, they waste a good deal by inserting sounds where they do not belong. Sometimes it is only an added consonant: gyarden, acrost, corkus (caucus); sometimes a syllable: loaferer, musicianer, suddenty. Occasionally a word is both added to and clipped from, as cyarn (carrion). They are fond of grace syllables: “I gotta me a deck o’ cyards.” “There ain’t nary bitty sense in it.”
More interesting are substitutions of one sound for another. In mountain dialect all vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds of a are confused with e, as hed (had), kem (came), keerful; or with i, grit (grate), rifle (raffle); with o, pomper, toper (taper), wrop; or with u, fur, ruther. So any other vowel may serve in place of e: sarve, chist, upsot, tumble. Any other may displace i: arn (iron), eetch, hender, whope or whup. The o sounds are more stable, but we have crap (crop), yan, clus, and many similar variants. Any other vowel may do for u: braysh or bresh (brush), shet, sich, shore (sure).
Mountaineers have peculiar difficulty with diphthongs: haar (hair), cheer (chair), brile, and a host of others. The word coil is variously pronounced quile, querl or quorl.
Substitution of consonants is not so common as of vowels, but most hillsmen say nabel (navel), ballet (ballad), Babtis’, rench or rinch, brickie (brittle), and many say atter or arter, jue (due), tejus, vascinator (fascinator—a woman’s scarf). They never drop h, nor substitute anything for it.
The word woman has suffered some strange sea-changes. Most mountaineers pronounce it correctly, but some drop the w (’oman), others add an r (womern and wimmern), while in Michell County, North Carolina, we hear the extraordinary forms ummern and dummern (“La, look at all the dummerunses a-comin’!”)