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

whether the letters be at the beginning or end of words. I am much
disposed to believe that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, used
indiscriminately the letters à and ð for D only, and sounded them as
such, as we find now frequently in the West; although our
lexicographers usually have given the two sounds of th to à and ð
respectively. The vowel O is used for a, as _hond, dorke, lorke, hort,_
in hand, dark, lark, heart, &c., and other 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-äth, for both; fay-er, for fair; vi-ër for fire;
stay-ers for stairs; show-er for sure; vröo-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, thä 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