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Specified "Uncollected" items in RESOURCES are reproduced here with the kind permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Compiled by Rosemarie Morgan for TTHA: unauthorised copying is a violation of the United States' copyright laws. Sampler 11 |
1902 WESSEX DIALECT GLOSSARY |
From Wilkinson Sherren's The Wessex of Romance (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 293-304. |
DIALECT Excerpted from The Wessex of Romance The vitality of the dialect in the face of the wear and tear of nearly a thousand years is extraordinary; the purity of its main derivation from the Saxon is undoubted, there being scant intermixture of Latin and Norman words. Its picturesque and homely virility is remotely akin to the language of the unrevised edition of the Bible, the kinship being strengthened not only by the use of words now archaic, but by occasional similarity in sentence construction. The "go to" of Scripture lives on in the expression "set to," and the use of "do" in the emphatic form in which it is found in the Prayer Book is retained--"We 'do' give Thee most humble and hearty thanks." In many respects the Dorset vernacular cannot be differentiated from the Somerset dialect, while, on the other hand, it has considerable likeness to Devon folk speech. . . . .The letter f is given the sound of v, as in "vo'k," "folk," and s is usually hardened to z. For the long a in "cake" and the single vowel sound in "bean," double sounds are substituted; thus, "ceáke," "beán." There is a proneness to drop r before s, as in "wo'se" for "worse," and a steady shifting of s for p, as in "clapse" for "clasp." A few nouns still hold the old plural ending en for s--cheesen, housen, vu'zen and stwonen. The Rev. William Barnes quoted a current saying in his time which still holds good: "It has been said of this folk speech that everything is 'he' but a tom-cat, which is termed 'she.'" The frequent use of the masculine personal pronoun is certainly noteworthy; of a tree it is even said: "he's a-cut down." Without entering further into the theory, a comparison in point of expression is here given. The passage chosen to represent the standard English is from Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive, a rendering of which in dialect form is then given with as much phonetic exactness as possible. "Men will be taught that an existence of play sustained by the blood of other creatures is a good existence for gnats and jelly-fish, but not for men; that neither days nor lives can be made holy or noble by doing nothing in them; that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may not lose its moments, and the best grace before meat the consciousness that we have earned our dinner." "Men will be a-teached that litsome sperrets a-kept up by the plight of vo'k, be a tidy liven vor gnatses an' jally-vish, but not vor the likes o' we; that days an' lives should be chockful o' work to mak'en upright an' holy; that the bestest prayer at the dawnen be to gi'e the goo-bye to dawdlen, an' the bestest greáce avore a'setten down to woone's victuals be the veelen in the heart that the bit an' drap have been a-zweaetd vor." Rare instinct is shown in the treatment of the dialect in the Wessex novels; an absolute reproduction of it would have been impossible as a generally intelligible literary medium, and Mr. Thomas Hardy has given his readers the true racial flavour of the folk speech without wearying them with a pedantic fidelity to it (290-292). |
Wilkinson Sherren's
GLOSSARY
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Specified "Uncollected" items in RESOURCES are reproduced here with the kind permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Compiled by Rosemarie Morgan for TTHA: unauthorised copying is a violation of the United States' copyright laws.
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A-Stooded: The Abbot's Coffin, Bindon Abbey: in the bridal-night episode in Tess the distraught Angel Clare sleepwalks by night and carries his bride of only a few hours to be laid in a stone coffin set among the ancient ruins in the grounds of the nearby Abbey. [Photograph, courtesy Sumiko Inoue © 1996] |
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Photograph courtesy Andromeda Oxford Limited, 1985
H-I-J-K |
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Jis: Just Joppety-joppety:Nervous trepidation |
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K N A P |
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Segment from Caspar David Friedrich's (1774-1840) |
Ruins of the Abbey of Eldena in Pomerania, c.1820 |
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| O- P -Q |
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Stonehenge, John Constable (1776-1837)
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| Y - Z |
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END of Sampler 11
Specified "Uncollected" items in RESOURCES are reproduced here with the kind permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Compiled by Rosemarie Morgan for TTHA: unauthorised copying is a violation of the United States' copyright laws.
