Course paper Theme: Dialect words in English Content: Introduction

Southern dialects (Southern), divided into ten subgroups:
1) part of Pembrokeshire and Glamorganshire;
2) Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, north. and east. parts of Somersetshire, most of Gloucestershire, southwest. Devonshire;
3) most of Hampshire, Isle of Wight, most of Berkshire, southern Surrey, west. part of Sussex;
4) sowing. Gloucestershire, east Herfordshire, Worcestershire, S. part of Warwickshire, north Oxfordshire, southwest Northamptonshire;
5) most of Oxfordshire;
6) north of Surrey, northwest. Kent;
7) most of Kent, east Sussex;
8) west. Somersetshire, NE Devonshire;
9) east. Cornwall, most of Devonshire;
10) west. Cornwall.
Scottish dialects are divided into nine groups:
1) Shetland and Orkney Islands;
2) Caithness;
3) Nairn, Elgin, Banff, Aberdeen;
4) east. Forfar, Kincardine;
5) app. Forfar, most of Perth, parts of Fife and Sterling;
6) south. Air (Ayr), app. Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Wigton ;
7) SE. Argyle, sev. Air, Renfew, Lanark;
8) Kinross, Clackmannan (Clackmannan), Linlithgow (Linlithgow), Edinburgh, Haddington, Berwick (Berwick), Peebles (Peebles), 9) east. Dumfries, Selkirk, Roxburgh.
Finally, the English dialects of Ireland are subdivided into dialects of 1) Ulster, 2) Dublin, 3) Wexford. (See Appendix 2, Fig. 4) Note that in April 1974, as a result of the transformation of local governments, the administrative division of Great Britain was changed - three new counties and six large municipality counties (counties of cities, metropolitan counties) were created .
In this work, however, we will adhere to the former administrative division of Great Britain, because it is on this division that all the main studies and dictionaries of modern English dialects are built.
2.2 Features of modern English territorial dialects.
One of the main features of modern English territorial dialects (as well as dialects of other languages) is their conservatism. These or other deviations from the literary standard are mostly due not to evolution, but to the lack of evolution: many linguistic phenomena of various periods of the history of the language are preserved in dialects, as well as various kinds of foreign language layers - Scandinavian, Norman, etc. Another feature of modern English dialects is their variance at all language levels (phonetics, grammar and especially vocabulary).⁵
Many authors also point out that the so-called "redundancy" is a characteristic feature of the dialect system. This refers, for example, to the turnovers used in Ireland, such as: Its sorry you will be. Its sleepy I am instead of You will be sorry. I am sleepy or paraphrases like I do love (instead of I love), used in the southwestern counties, a pile of negatives in a phrase, etc. English dialects are characterized by pleonasticity in all its possible varieties. Compare, in particular, the pleonastic use of as: I hope as that ye'll not be vext. I am going to my uncle's as next Sunday.
The synchronous state of the phonetic system of modern English dialects is directly due to the specifics of its historical development in a particular area, mutual contacts of dialects, the influence of language samples of the language of the winners (for example, the Normans) on the language of the vanquished or the absence of such influence. If in some territories (especially the southern ones) the pronunciation of a number of sounds and sound combinations coincides with the literary standard (the latter, to one degree or another, has penetrated all English dialects), then in other areas significant differences can be noted compared to the national language - the pronunciation of individual sounds in English dialects in some cases not only differs from the literary one, but also differentiates in certain territories.
The main phonetic differences between dialects and the literary standard are both in quantitative characteristics (longitude of the vowel in dialects in place of brevity in the literary version or, conversely, shortness of vowels in dialects in place of longitude in the literary standard), and in qualitative indicators of individual sounds (the tendency to diphthongization monophthongs of the literary language and, conversely, to the monophthongization of diphthongs, the spread of not only ascending, but also descending diphthongs, voicing of deaf stops of the literary language and stunning voiced, a wide range of phonetic variants).
For dialects, the pronunciation of those sounds that are not pronounced at all in the literary version is very characteristic. On the other hand, many sounds pronounced in the literary version are omitted in dialects. The use of parasitic sounds in the word, epentheses, consonant exchanges, dissimilation, mobile formatives is also very characteristic.⁶
Being on the periphery of the literary language usage, territorial dialects show great freedom in the use of grammatical forms and the implementation of grammatical categories and processes. “Just the marginal subsystems (or private systems) of various levels most often turn out to be a cumulative center for neutralizing the pressure of the system,” notes Prof. E.A. Makaev, “... The very existence of two or more private systems coexisting on equal terms with the central system, is an ideal case of neutralizing the constraints imposed by the pressure of the system." It is enough to point out at least such phenomena typical of dialects as the formation of plural forms of nouns simultaneously with the help of several (identical or different) grammatical indicators, the possibility of expressing the interrogative and negative forms of the verb without the auxiliary verb do (the prefix can even be used as a negative formant of participles un-), contamination of the forms of the nominative and object cases of personal pronouns, etc. However, as many linguists rightly point out, it is the wide possibilities of using and combinatorics of a wide variety of grammatical means in one or another part of the language system that invariably combines dialectically with restrictions in the implementation and combinatorics of other language units or processes. This, in turn, leads to a certain stabilization, alignment of the basic foundations of the organization of the language system, to the preservation of a certain systemic balance. That is why "compared with other forms of language, the oral folk language (the vernacular) is distinguished by the greatest constancy and harmony of its structure both in synchrony and in diachrony, although it is here that the minimum attention is paid to the correctness of speech."
The vocabulary of modern English dialects is characterized by extreme conservatism. A huge number of words, completely out of use already at the end of Old English and at the beginning of Middle English, have survived in dialects. Moreover, these words as living elements of everyday speech are often used in their original meaning. For example: to atter 'poison (yes. ættrian), boose 'feeder in the stall (yes. bosih), bysen 'blind (yes. bisene), to camp 'fight (yes. campian), to dree 'endure (yes. drēogan ), to hot 'order (yes. hātan), to reese 'fall (yes. hrēosan), to lathe 'invite (yes. lapian), hards 'tow (yes. heordan), to rine 'to touch (yes. hrīnan) , to irm 'ill treat (yes. ierman), to heal 'hide (yes. helian), stevvon 'voice (yes. stefn), seal 'time, season (yes. sæl), etc. As can be seen from the above list, many dialect words phonetically and graphically coincide with the words of the literary language, although semantically they are not connected with the roots and meanings to which the words of the literary language (homonyms) go back. Many words that are common to dialects and the literary language have a different meaning in the dialects than the literary one.
The study of English dialects was, from the very beginning, to a large extent connected with the analysis of Old English and Middle English texts. Comparison with dialect material in many cases made it possible to identify erroneous spellings and meanings of Old English and Middle English words in manuscripts (the so-called "ghost words"), to clarify the meaning of words that are incomprehensible from the context and not attested in related Germanic languages. The involvement of dialect material also made it possible to identify words that were erroneously correlated in glosses with Latin lemmas, to which in reality they had nothing to do, clarified some phenomena of Old English and Middle English phonetics and grammar.
Thus, in the manuscript of the Old English epic "Beowulf" (verse 1363), we find the word hrinde in the meaning "covered with hoarfrost." For a long time, scholars (for example, Grein) considered this spelling to be erroneous instead of the usual hrimige (modern rimy), which is found, for example, in the Old English language monument "Blickling sermons" ("Blickling Homilies"). However, subsequent dialectological studies showed that in the dialects of Scotland, Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire, the meaning of "hoarfrost" is expressed not by the word rime, but by the word rind, but "covered with hoarfrost" - a derivative of rindy. The form and meaning of most of the "unusual" words found in Old and Middle English texts are clarified to a large extent when compared with dialectal material.
The study of dialects was also of great help in Shakespeare studies, where the use of dialectal material made it possible to correctly interpret the meaning of a number of words. So, in "Troilus and Cressida" we find the expression sleeveless errand in the meaning of "useless business". This usage is also recorded in northern English dialects. The verb make in Shakespeare, as in dialects, is used in the meaning of "to close" (The doors are made against you - "As You Like It"). The word base is used to mean "dark (about color)": Is black so base a hue? ("Titus Andronicus"), cf. Yes. basu, swiss buslig.
Interesting are the forms cham (= I am), chill (= I will) found in Shakespeare, exactly corresponding to the dialectal usage in some English counties (for example, in Somerset). In Macbeth (V, 1, 75) we read the phrase: My mind she has mated and amazd my sight. The word mate is used in modern dialects to mean "to confuse". As M.M. Makovsky, English social dialects (in particular slang) at all levels (lexicon, grammar, phonetics) are based on English territorial dialects.⁷
It should be noted that even in countries for which English is the main language, the study of English dialects is extremely unsatisfactory, mainly by lone enthusiasts. One of the first attempts to collect and describe a relatively large dialect material was made between 1561-1577. L. Nowell in his "Vocabularium Saxonicum". This most interesting dictionary, which until recently remained unpublished, is now published by A. Marckwardt ("Laurence Nowell's. Vocabularium Saxonicum", ed. by A. Marckwardt, Ann Arbor, 1952). A. Gill, in his Logonomia Anglica (1619, second edition 1621), gave the earliest description of English dialectal grammar and phonetics. The next serious work in the field of English dialectology is the extensive dictionary of the famous biologist J. Ray (J. Ray), published in 1674 (second edition 1691) and containing a comparison of the vocabulary of northern and southern English territorial dialects. A systematic study of English dialects was carried out by the "English Dialect Society" ("English Dialect Society"), founded by W. Skeet in 1873 and abolished in 1896 after the release of 80 volumes of the most valuable dialectological studies. The apotheosis of the Society's activity was the six-volume dialect dictionary by J. Wright (1898-1905). In 1897, J. Wright organized the "Yorkshire Dialect Society", and in 1907 - "Scottish Dialect Committee". However, the work carried out by these organizations cannot be compared with the truly gigantic activity of the English Dialectological Society.
Most of the special studies devoted to the description of the features of individual English dialects were published outside of England and were not written by the English - the Swedes (J. Chederkvist, X. Brilliot, X. Koekeritz), the Germans (W. Klein, X. Mutshman, K. Schilling), the Dutch (E. Crazing), the Swiss (P. Wettstein, E. Diet).
It should be noted that almost every county in Great Britain currently has its own dialectological society and special dialectological journals are regularly published: "Journal of the Lakeland Dialect Society", "Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society", "The Journal of the Lancashire Dialect Society" and etc. In 1882, the "Society for the Publishing of Scottish Texts" ("Scottish Text Society") was founded, which published most of both old and new works written in Scottish English (for example, the poetry of Henryson, D. Lindsay and etc.). In the 50s-60s. of our century, a number of dissertations have been written in Great Britain, in which various aspects of English dialects are re-examined.
It should be noted that many English dialects (especially northern ones) have a long and almost uninterrupted tradition of writing. Not to mention the indisputably dialectal monuments of the ancient period (such as the Northumbrian and Kentish glosses in Old English or "Cursor Mundi", "The Bruce", written by J. Barbour - in Middle English), one should point to a number of writers, both famous, and less well-known, who over the past few centuries have written their works mainly in English dialects. In Scotland, these include, for example, A. Ramsay (1686-1758), W. Scott (1771 - 1832), R. Bergusson (1750-1774), R. Burns (1759-1832), S. Ferrier (1782- 1854), D. Moir (1798-1851), J. Macdonald (1824-1905), W. Alexander (1826-1894), as well as writers of the 20th century. - C. Murray, J. Salmond, J. Robertson, J. Bell, R. Bruce Trotter and others. Writers S. Laycock (1826-1893) and J. Hartley (1839-1915) stood out in Yorkshire, and a poet in Dorset W. Barnes (1801-1893) and others. As you know, many classics of English literature (for example, C. Dickens or B. Shaw) used English territorial dialects to characterize the speech of their characters.