The Dialect of the West of England; Particularly Somersetshire | Page 3

syllables are lengthened, as _voote, bade, dade,_ for foot, bed, dead. The letter O in _no, gold,_ &c., is sounded like aw in _awful_; I have therefore spelt it with this diphthong instead of a. Such word as jay for joy, and a few others, I have not noted. Another remarkable fact is the disposition to invert the order of some consonants in some words; as the r in _thrush, brush, rush, run,_ &c., pronouncing them dirsh, birsh, hirsh, hirn; also transposition of p and s in such words as clasp, hasp, asp, &c., sounded claps, haps, aps, &c. I have not inserted all these words in the Glossary, as these general remarks will enable the student to detect the words which are so inverted. It is by no means improbable that the order in which such sounds are now repeated in the West, is the original order in which they existed in our language, and that our more polished mode of expressing them is a new and perhaps a corrupt enunciation. Another peculiarity is that of joining the letter y at the end of some verbs in the infinitive mood, as well as to parts of different conjugations, thus, "I can't _sewy, nursy, reapy_, to sawy, to sewy, to nursy, &c. A further peculiarity is the love of vowel sound, and opening out monosyllables of our polished dialect into two or more syllables, thus:
ay-er, for air; boo-?¤th, for both; fay-er, for fair; vi-??r for fire; stay-ers for stairs; show-er for sure; vr??o-rst for post; boo-ath for both; bre-ash for brush; chee-ase for cheese; kee-ard for card; gee-ate for gate; mee-ade for mead; mee-olk for milk; &c.
Chaucer gives many of them as dissyllables.
The verb to be retains much of its primitive form: thus _I be, thou,_ or _thee, beest,_ or _bist, we be, you be, they be, th?¤ be_, are continually heard for I am, &c., he be is rarely used: but he is. In the past tense, war is used for was, and _were_: _I war, thou_ or thee wart, he war, &c., we have besides, _we'm, you'm, they'm_, for _we, you, they, are_, there is a constant tendency to pleonasm in some cases, as well as to contraction, and elision in others. Thus we have _a lost, agone, abought_, &c., for _lost, gone, bought_, &c., Chaucer has many of these prefixes; but he often uses y instead of a, as ylost. The frequent use of Z and V, the softened musical sounds for S and F, together with the frequent increase and multiplication of vowel sounds, give the dialect a by no means inharmonious expression, certainly it would not be difficult to select many words which may for their modulation compete with others of French extraction, and, perhaps be superior to many others which we have borrowed from other languages, much less analogous to the polished dialect of our own. I have added, in pursuance of these ideas, some poetical and prose pieces in the dialect of Somersetshire, in which the idiom is tolerably well preserved, and the pronunciation is conveyed in letters, the nearest to the sound of the words, as there are in truth many sounds for which we have neither letters, nor combinations of letters to express them. [I might at some future period, if thought advisable, go into a comparison between the sound of all the letters of the alphabet pronounced in Somersetshire, and in our polished dialect, but I doubt if the subject is entitled to this degree of criticism]. The reader will bear in mind that these poems are composed in the dialect of Somerset, north east of the Parret, which is by far the most general.
In the Guardian, published about a century ago, is a paper No. 40, concerning pastoral poetry, supposed to have been written by Pope, to extol his own pastorals and degrade those of Ambrose Phillips. In this essay there is a quotation from a pretended Somersetshire poem. But it is evident Pope knew little or nothing about the Somersetshire dialect. Here are a few lines from "this old West country bard of ours," as Pope calls him:
"_Cicely._ Ah Rager, Rager, cher was zore avraid, When in yond vield you kiss'd the parson's maid: Is this the love that once to me you zed, When from tha wake thou broughtst me gingerbread?"
Now first, this is a strange admixture of dialects, but neither east, west, north, nor south.
Chez is nowhere used; but in the southern part utche or iche, is sometimes spoken contractedly che. [See utchy in the Glossary].
Vield for field, should be veel.
Wake is not used in Somersetshire; but revel is the word.
Parson, in Somersetshire, dealer, is _p?￠son_.
In another line he calls the cows, kee, which is not Somersetian; nor is, be go for begone: it should, _be