Discussion Groups / British English / February 2005

If the spelling of Shakespeare's day represented Middle English, then it
had already standardised. Not completely, perhaps, but enough so that
there was no longer a completely phonetical representation.

Matthew Huntbach

On Thursday, in article <35t4cfF4ro70dU1@individual.net>
    "einde.ocallaghan"@planet-interkom.de "einde. ocallaghan"
    wrote:

When I first went to live on the shores of the Lake District (in what was
then Cumberland), in 1968, I was fascinated by the broad Cumbrian dialect
spoken by one of our drivers.  I got to speak with him for many hours
over the following years.  (He told me that shortly post-WWII, some
researchers from the BBC had asked to record his speech, just as they are
currently doing again with the Great British Public, but he'd declined
since they weren't prepared to pay him!)

One of the fascinating parts of his vocabulary was that he would use the
"Cumbrian Sheep Score" numbers[1] quite unpretentiously (OK, many
Cumbrians will say "yan" for "one", but few say "tithera" except when
telling disbelieving off-comers about the way the shepherds "used to
count").

Further questioning of him revealed that he had cousins in the village of
Ulpha; now Ulpha was less than ten miles away as the crow flies, but
nearer to 25mi by road.  He recalled how there had been a big inter-
family gathering there back in the early 1950s, and whilst both the
Ulphians and the Bootleites spoke broad Cumbrian dialects, they had great
difficulty in understanding each other (like the eyren vs eggys problem).

So perhaps such dialect problems had persisted far longer, at least until
the coming of the "television age".

[1] In the early 1970s, someone at the University of Lancaster wrote a
PhD thesis on Sheep Scores, and I was able to read a copy.  He had
examples from all over England and Wales (the numbers are obviously
cognate with Welsh numbers, so presumably a Celtic hold-over), ranging
from Tudor times to the [then] present-day.  Such numbering was recorded
in use in Epping Forest (on the outskirts of London) even until the
C20th.  (He also had examples from Maine in the early C16th, which seem
to provide confirmation of Caradoc having reached North America.)

I looked one level higher, i.e. http://www.uni-trier.de/~multimed/, and
found the homepage of a Professor Dr. Jürgen Strauss, who can be
contacted at the following email address: strauss@uni-trier.de

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan

But it was the literary standard language long before and even had the
Academie Française to protect its purity.

And even today most Germans don't speak the standard version,
Hochdeutsch. They still speak dialect although most can now understand
Hochdeutsch and speak a local variant of it as well as their local
dialect - although admittedly some Bavarian politicians don't even
attempt to speak anything even vaguely resembling Hochdeutsch.

I believe you're correct here.

Northern and Eastern Germany are also predominantly Protestant with a
modern language Bible and liturgy which laid the basis for the standard
language (although it's also the standard language of the Catholic
South, too, for otehr reaqsons I won't go into), but nevertheless most
people still speak a variant of the local dialect - many people often
find it difficult to understand people from other parts of the country.

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan

The seamless transition of Castilian into Basque (or vice versa) would
be quite a stunt.  Where are these dialects spoken?

Giles.

To add to all the other claims in this thread I've also heard one for
the southern Irish accent. The reality, I guess, is that beyond
certain broad assumptions we have no way of knowing exactly how they
sounded then. The accent surely varied considerably over short
distances and evolved during the period.

I find it difficult to imagine Hamlet speaking with an accent like Gerry
Adams or King Lear with an accent like the Reverend Ian Paisley. Indeed
the mind does quite a bit of boggling. ;-)

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan