Draw the circle with centre at D and radius A D; any chord of the parabola through the vertex is cut harmonically by the parabola, the circle, and the double ordinate through D.
Foreign Settlements in Kansas.
A CONTRIBUTION TO DIALECT
STUDY IN THE STATE.
Explanatory.—Some years ago when the subject of dialect study in Kansas, or rather of Kansas dialect, was mentioned, Mr. Noble Prentis, a gentleman who is warranted in speaking with authority on Kansas, was inclined to think that he settled the question in short order by declaring that there is no Kansas dialect. Probably the majority of intelligent citizens of the state would turn off the subject with the same reply. In the sense of a mode of speech common to the inhabitants of Kansas and peculiar to them, Mr. Prentis was indeed right. There is no vocabulary, at least no extensive vocabulary, by which the native of Kansas may be recognized in the American Babel. We have no distinctive pronunciation by which we may be known from the inhabitants of Nebraska or set apart from the citizens of Missouri. The verb fails to agree with its subject and the participle is deprived of its final ‘g’ with about equal frequency in Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado.
But in the same sense it is true that there is no Kansas flora, no Kansas fauna; that is, there is no plant and there is no animal found quite generally in Kansas and found nowhere outside of Kansas. The remark that there is no such thing as a Kansas dialect rests upon a misapprehension of what is meant by the term. In just the same way that we speak of the flora and the fauna of Kansas we may speak of the dialect of Kansas. Yet to avoid popular misapprehension it may be better to speak of dialect in Kansas, rather than of Kansas dialect.
Dialect study involves the observation and description of all facts concerning the natural living speech of men, and especially those points in which the speech of individuals or groups differs from that of the standard literary language as represented in classic writers and classic speakers. Standard literary English is always a little behind the times. It is the stuffed and mounted specimen in the museum. Dialect is the live animal on its native heath. Most people, indeed, will think that their speech does not differ materially from standard English. They say, “We speak near enough alike ‘for practical purposes’. But a thousand years hence the pronunciation of our country may have changed so much that it will seem like another language, and our descendants will write learned theses to prove that we pronounced ‘cough’ like cow or like cuff. A new language will have grown out of an old one, but no one know how it came about. Careful dialect study will help explain it.”