The scene of the play is Sherwood Forest: the language, however, as far as I may venture an opinion, is not the language from which the present Nottinghamshire dialect has come down.
[§ 691]. Caution.—Again, the word old, as applied to language, has a double meaning.
The language of the United States was imported from England into America in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The language of South Australia has been introduced within the present generation. In one sense, the American English is older than the Australian. It was earliest separated from the mother-tongue.
The language, however, of America may (I speak only in the way of illustration, and consequently hypothetically), in the course of time, become the least old of the two; the word old being taken in another sense. It may change with greater rapidity. It may lose its inflections. It may depart more from the structure of the mother-tongue, and preserve fewer of its old elements. In this sense the Australian (provided that it has altered least, and that it retain the greatest number of the old inflections) will be the older tongue of the two.
Now what may be said of the language of two countries, may be said of the dialects of two districts. The one dialect may run its changes apace; the other alter but by degrees.
Hence, of two works in two such dialects, the one would appear older than the other, although in reality the two were cotemporary.
Hence, also, it is a lax expression to say that it is the old forms (the archaisms) that the provincial dialects retain. The provincial forms are archaic only when the current language changes more rapidly than the local idiom. When the local idiom changes fastest, the archaic forms belong to the standard mode of speech.
The provincial forms, goand, slepand, for going and sleeping, are archaic. Here the archaism is with the provincial form.
The forms almost, horses, nought but, contrasted with the provincialisms ommost, hosses, nobbot, are archaic. They have not been changed so much as they will be. Here the archaism (that is, the nearer approach to the older form) is with the standard idiom. A sequestered locality is preservative of old forms. But writing and education are preservatives of them also.
[§ 692]. With these preliminaries a brief notice of the English dialects, in their different stages, may begin.