Griffiths Whare de yea belang?

A Dictionary of North East Dialect
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-0-85716-271-7
Verlag: McNidder and Grace
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Where de yea belang?brings together the distinctive vocabulary of the North East dialect. 'Abackabeyont, bait-poke, cracket, drucken, etten, fettle, guissie pigs, lonnin, marra, nyen, plote, queen-cat, reckling, skinch, tew, upcast, vine, willok, yem, zookers!' If you enjoy finding out about dialect words - how and where and when they were used - and where they came from - this is the best guide to help you explore the world of North East dialect. Until the 20th century, dialect was a marker of economic, social and cultural change. We know that the North East maritime connections with the Dutch led to the introduction of many 'new' words. The Scottish influence of the keelmen (fisherman) on the Tyne and their effect on local language was much more radical. Although the Tyneside dialect and identity and this way of speaking is fast waning, the popularity of discovering this language and dialect shows there is still a great interest in the languages and dialect of the past. The late Bill Griffiths (1948-2007)was an extraordinary writer and poet: radical, experimental and scholarly, but also had a great sense of humour. He was a wonderful champion of the North East, its people and heritage. Born in Middlesex, he read history before graduating in 1969. Bill ran his own independent press and published political pamphlets and essays on the arts and poetry. After gaining a PhD in Old English he fled London and settled in Seaham where he embraced the northern way of life. 'He was also a scholar of Old English and dialect who know how to make his work accessible. Private and uncompetitive, he was at least these things: poet, archivist, scholar, translator, prison-rights campaigner, pianist, historian, curator, performer, editor, short-story writer, essayist, teacher, book-maker and lyricist. The Saturday before he died, Bill discharged himself from hospital to host the Dialect Day at the Morden Tower in Newcastle upon Tyne. He died as he lived: cataloguing, awarding Best Dialect prizes, opera on his radio, the poetry paramount.' Obituary, The Independent, 20 September 2007.

The late Bill Griffiths (1948-2007)was an extraordinary writer and poet: radical, experimental and scholarly, but also had a great sense of humour. He was a wonderful champion of the North East, its people and heritage. Born in Middlesex, he read history before graduating in 1969. Bill ran his own independent press and published political pamphlets and essays on the arts and poetry. After gaining a PhD in Old English he fled London and settled in Seaham where he embraced the northern way of life. 'He was also a scholar of Old English and dialect who know how to make his work accessible. Private and uncompetitive, he was at least these things: poet, archivist, scholar, translator, prison-rights campaigner, pianist, historian, curator, performer, editor, short-story writer, essayist, teacher, book-maker and lyricist... The Saturday before he died, Bill discharged himself from hospital to host the Dialect Day at the Morden Tower in Newcastle upon Tyne. He died as he lived: cataloguing, awarding Best Dialect prizes, opera on his radio, the poetry paramount.' Obituary, The Independent, 20 September 2007.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Griffiths, Bill

Leseproben

Part One

The History

If we take language as the attribute of a nation and dialect that of a region, this is not to suggest that dialect is subordinate to ‘national’ language. In the case of English dialects, their roots go back to the fractionalising of society in the era of Viking and Norman invasions, so that many features of Northern English precede the efforts to set up a national English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The model is more one of parallel development and it would be more useful to think in terms of varieties of English, developing in parallel and interacting over a long period.

To what extent the ‘dialects’ of Old English (‘OE’ – the language of the Anglo-Saxons) can be taken as the direct source of Medieval dialects is debatable. Language is continuous, but the slight differences between Anglian (Mercian and Northumbrian) in the North, and West Saxon (in the South) give little warning of the divergence that was to take place. In vocabulary the Anglo-Saxon North already preferred ‘bairn’ to ‘child’ for example, and uncontracted forms of the verb to contracted ones, e.g. cymeð than cymð (‘comes’), weorðest than wyrst (‘become’); but even these distinctions were likely to be minimised by the spread of Late West Saxon as a written norm in the late tenth century, at a time when Wessex had absorbed the other ‘kingdoms’ into a recognisable England.

The real jolts that led to language change came with the arrival of the Vikings in the ninth century and the Normans in the eleventh, though there are understandably no exact records of how the spoken language changed or when. The Vikings contributed many new words to Northern English, some of which also entered Southern speech early on. The Normans effected a more total takeover of the state: under their rule, Anglo-Saxons were replaced by Normans in key positions and the status of English demoted. Instead of English being the language of government and literature, charters, wills, and other administrative and legal records would be kept in Latin, while the business of the ruling class would be conducted in Norman-French.

Deprived of any central supervisory machinery that might have secured its cohesion and consistency, spoken English diversified, curiously along the line from London to Cheshire that had served as the dividing line between West Saxon and Viking influence in King Alfred’s day (880s). To the north of that line was the Danelaw, to the south the Saxon kingdoms with West Mercia and Kent. Either these traditional loyalties were very persistent or – a distinct possibility – the divergence between Northern and Southern English had begun earlier, its effects obscured by the traditional nature of the written language. This affects the question of when words from Old Norse (‘ON’, the Viking language) entered English: in the ninth and tenth centuries, when Viking power was considerable and the cultural current ran (as it were) from Viking to Anglian; or in mid eleventh to twelfth centuries, when Viking power was on the wane, and the once-dominant settlers assumed a lower profile in Anglo-Norman society.

The making of Middle English

In the Middle Ages, English in the South exhibited many sound changes but was more conservative in its grammar; the North proved more conservative of vowel sounds, but more innovative in its vocabulary and grammar. It is these changes that lay the real basis of Medieval and modern dialects.

For example, the long OE vowel /a/ can change into /o/ in the South: the OE word ac becomes oak in the South, but stays as ac in the North, later breaking to give yek; finnd (find) retains a short vowel in the North, but lengthens and breaks to a diphthong in the South; the Northern /u/ (sometimes written ‘oo’) retains its OE value, while in the South it later changes to the dark ‘uh’ sound.

In the North it is to be expected that more words from ON would be absorbed than in the South. Many of these were never adopted into ‘national’ English, and either died out in the North (e.g. maugh ‘brother-in-law’ or tawm ‘a fishing line’) or survived to give a distinctive feel to Northern dialects (e.g. marra ‘work-mate’, cree ‘animal pen’). Paradoxically, while many OE words had died out by the end of the Middle Ages, examples can be better preserved in Northern than Southern English, e.g. thoo for you, neep for turnip. (Perhaps this was because of the keenness in the South to introduce new words based on French and Latin.)

The extent of Viking influence in the North East is a point of debate. When, in an East Durham charter of 1155 we find side by side as names of witnesses: Eilwin de Saham, his son Raven de Slinglawe, John son of Herebert de Saham, Roger Dreng, Ranulf de Hassewelle, Ailmar de Daltune, and the aristocratic Reinald Escolland – mixing Viking, French and Anglo-Saxon name elements – we are at a loss to determine whether this apparent mix is the result of chance relocation, intermarriage or a cross-cultural fashion in Christian names. It is to be remembered that language is a cultural, not a genetic matter; and it is certain that words of ON origin have long been in use in areas not believed to have been settled directly by Vikings. An example is beck (from ON) which corresponds to OE burn(e) ‘stream’. If dialect followed the lines of Viking settlement, beck should not be found in Co. Durham or Northumberland. It is true these areas show a relative lack of ON placenames and memorials, but it is unlikely this early exemption continued long, and beck is now the standard term in Co. Durham for a local stream.

Tendencies to regional consistency were at work even in the Middle Ages – for there was mobility as well as stability inherent in the feudal system: in interchange between manorial estates, in the access to local and regional markets and fairs, in the realities of feudal warfare, and in the obligation of pilgrimage. It is likely that throughout the Middle Ages the Church provided a channel of communication and a degree of cohesiveness within and between the fledgling dialects. It was not after all the Normans’ aim to extinguish English society, rather they acted as a super-class exploiting, but at the same time depending on the English population. They would hardly want their serfs to converse in Norman-French.

Major changes also occurred in grammar. Old English was an inflected language (like German or Latin) with different endings for masculine, feminine and neuter nouns, strong and weak adjectives, and the four cases (nominative for the subject of a sentence, accusative for the object, genitive for the possessive, and dative for indirect object or instrumental). Plus, different endings for singular and plural! Of these, only apostrophe-s for the genitive (king’s, etc.) and –s for the plural (kings, etc.) have survived for the noun.

An inflected language means the role of a word in the sentence is clear whatever the word order; in Modern English we need to observe the word order subject-verb-object to make the meaning clear: ‘the king killed the lion’ is very different from ‘the lion killed the king’. The loss of inflexions (case endings) was the major change that gave Modern English its simple, streamlined grammar.

One theory is that when Viking had to speak to Anglian, the niceties of inflexion tended to be lost, and a compromise language, a sort of mix or ‘pidjin’ resulted, with a simpler structure. However, it should be noted that OE itself did not satisfactorily distinguish between subject and object cases, leading early on to a risk of ambiguity. Even in the Anglo-Saxon period there was a tendency to adopt ‘sense order’ to make the meaning clear. Moreover, case endings (suffixes) were unaccented tags at the end of a word; because they were little emphasised, over time they tended to level (become similar). This led to greater dependence on sense order and that in turn reduced the usefulness of suffixes – a circular process that could account for their loss. Vulnerable and disestablished as English was, the spoken language had no way of monitoring or regulating change.

Some steps in the process, however, may have been deliberate. In the case of verbs, the endings for the present tense are also reduced to plus-s or non-s (speak and speaks). There is no precedent for this in OE or ON, and the conclusion is that the useful formula for nouns was applied to verbs, perhaps as a conscious improvement (simplification).

Many of these grammatical changes had their basis in the North. The South retained more of the OE verb inflections, and as late as 1611 these are found in the King James Bible of 1611 (e.g. saith, hath, casteth…). Not that Southern English had not changed also, but whether independently or in awareness of the North is less clear.

There may be differences, for example, in the rate North and South adopted French words. These came in two waves –...