English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day | Page 3

"phonetic decay" is meant that insidious and gradual alteration in the sounds of spoken words which, though it cannot be prevented, at last so corrupts a word that it becomes almost or wholly unmeaning. Such a word as twenty does not suggest its origin. Many might perhaps guess, from their observation of such numbers as _thirty, forty, etc., that the suffix -ty_ may have something to do with ten, of the original of which it is in fact an extremely reduced form; but it is less obvious that twen- is a shortened form of twain. And perhaps none but scholars of Teutonic languages are aware that twain was once of the masculine gender only, while two was so restricted that it could only be applied to things that were feminine or neuter. As a somewhat hackneyed example of phonetic decay, we may take the case of the Latin mea domina, i.e. my mistress, which became in French ma dame, and in English madam; and the last of these has been further shortened to mam, and even to 'm, as in the phrase "Yes, 'm." This shows how nine letters may be reduced to one. Similarly, our monosyllable alms is all that is left of the Greek ele{-e}mosyn{-e}. Ten letters have here been reduced to four.
This irresistible tendency to indistinctness and loss is not, however, wholly bad; for it has at the same time largely contributed, especially in English, to such a simplification of grammatical inflexions as certainly has the practical convenience of giving us less to learn. But in addition to this decay in the forms of words, we have also to reckon with a depreciation or weakening of the ideas they express. Many words become so hackneyed as to be no longer impressive. As late as in 1820, Keats could say, in stanza 6 of his poem of Isabella, that "His heart beat awfully against his side"; but at the present day the word awfully is suggestive of schoolboys' slang. It is here that we may well have the benefit of the principle of "dialectic regeneration." We shall often do well to borrow from our dialects many terms that are still fresh and racy, and instinct with a full significance. Tennyson was well aware of this, and not only wrote several poems wholly in the Lincolnshire dialect, but introduced dialect words elsewhere. Thus in The Voyage of Maeldune, he has the striking line: "Our voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse-shriek." In at least sixteen dialects a flittermouse means "a bat."
I have mentioned Tennyson in this connexion because he was a careful student of English, not only in its dialectal but also in its older forms. But, as a matter of fact, nearly all our chief writers have recognised the value of dialectal words. Tennyson was not the first to use the above word. Near the end of the Second Act of his _Sad Shepherd_, Ben Jonson speaks of:
Green-bellied snakes, blue fire-drakes in the sky, And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings.
Similarly, there are plenty of "provincialisms" in Shakespeare. In an interesting book entitled _Shakespeare, his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood_, by J.R. Wise, there is a chapter on "The Provincialisms of Shakespeare," from which I beg leave to give a short extract by way of specimen.
"There is the expressive compound 'blood-boltered' in Macbeth (Act IV, Sc. 1), which the critics have all thought meant simply blood-stained. Miss Baker, in her _Glossary of Northamptonshire Words_, first pointed out that 'bolter' was peculiarly a Warwickshire word, signifying to clot, collect, or cake, as snow does in a horse's hoof, thus giving the phrase a far greater intensity of meaning. And Steevens, too, first noticed that in the expression in The Winter's Tale (Act III, Sc. 3), 'Is it a boy or a child?'--where, by the way, every actor tries to make a point, and the audience invariably laughs--the word 'child' is used, as is sometimes the case in the midland districts, as synonymous with girl; which is plainly its meaning in this passage, although the speaker has used it just before in its more common sense of either a boy or a girl."
In fact, the English Dialect Dictionary cites the phrase "is it a lad or a child?" as being still current in Shropshire; and duly states that, in Warwickshire, "dirt collected on the hairs of a horse's leg and forming into hard masses is said to bolter." Trench further points out that many of our pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the formation of our early English, subsequently dropped out of our usual vocabulary, and are now to be found only in the dialects. A good example is the word eme, an uncle (A.S. {-e}am), which is rather common in Middle English, but has seldom appeared in our literature