The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
RUSTIC SPEECH
AND
FOLK-LORE
BY
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO
MELBOURNE BOMBAY
1913
OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
Under the heading of ‘The Varieties of English Speech’an article of mine appeared in The Quarterly Review ofJuly, 1907. The favourable reception accorded to it at thetime prompted me to embark forthwith on a larger workdealing with the same subject.
Many books both scientific and popular have been writtenconcerning dialect speech and lore, but nearly all of themare special investigations of some particular dialect. I havetaken a bolder flight than this. I have not given a detailedaccount of any one dialect, but I have surveyed them all,and have gathered words, phrases, names, superstitions, andpopular customs, here and there, wherever I found somethingthat appealed to me, and that I felt would appeal to othersas well as myself. It was impossible to make any onecategory exhaustive, for such was the mass of material opento me for selection, I might say I was ‘fairly betwattled andbaffounded’. The only thing to be done was to make myselections fairly representative of the whole.
My aim in dealing with the linguistic side of my subjecthas been to show that rules for pronunciation and syntaxare not the monopoly of educated people who have beentaught to preach as well as practise them. Dialect-speakingpeople obey sound-laws and grammatical rules even morefaithfully than we do, because theirs is a natural and unconsciousobedience. Some writers of literary English seem toenjoy flinging jibes at dialect on the assumption that any[Pg iv]deviation from the standard speech must be due to ignorance,if not to vulgarity besides. Since I wrote the last chapterof this book, I read in a criticism of Stanley Houghton’sPlay Trust the People, this sentence describing the Lancashire‘father an old mill-hand and the homely mother to match’:‘They are both drawn, you feel, to the life, and talk withease, not to say gusto, that curious lingo which seems to anoutsider mainly distinguished by its contemptuous neglect ofthe definite article’, The Times, Friday, Feb. 7, 1913. Nowthe definite article in north-west Lancashire is t, in thesouth-west and south t, or th, and in mid and south-eastLancashire th. When this t stands before a consonant, andmore especially before a dental such as t, d, it is not by anymeans easy for the uninitiated to detect the difference insound between the simple word and the same word precededby the article, between, for example, table and t table, or dogand t dog. But this is not ‘contemptuous neglect’ on thepart of the Lancastrian! It would be nearer the mark tosay that the Lancashire dialect is characterized by itsretention of a form of the definite article very difficult topronounce in certain combinations.
Further, I have endeavoured to show by means of numerousillustrations, how full the dialects are of words and phrasesremarkable not only for their force and clearness, but oftenalso