A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect of the English Language

‘Well, taakin about he da bring inta me yead wat I promised var ta tell ee about’: representations of south-western speech in nineteenth-century dialect writing

“…As example (1b) shows, periphrastic do is not inflected for third-person singular subjects, nor does it carry sentence stress, as signalled by <e> in ded ‘did’ in example (1a). This is substantiated by Barnes (1886: 22), who remarks that in Dorset ‘ do unemphatical is pronounced as de in French’, whilst Jago (1882: 57) explains that ‘the Cornishman in saying, “I do know,” does not use the word do with emphasis, as in ordinary English’.…”

“…Examples such as (2a) suggest that do periphrasis was employed as a marker of habitual aspect, which Barnes (1886: 23) notes for the dialect of Dorset in present and past contexts to indicate ‘repetition or continuation’. He writes that ‘She beät the child, is beat at some one time ’, while ‘She did beät the child, is was won't to beat ’.…”

“…This is indeed marked as characteristically Devonshire by Jago (1882: 59), who reports that in east Cornwall ‘we hear people saying her for she ’ as ‘[t]he Devon dialect drives back the Cornish from the east of the County’. Similarly, Barnes (1886: 19) notes that ‘[w]hen a pronoun in an objective case is emphatical, it is given in its nominative shape instead of its objective case … “Gie'e the money to I , not he ”’, which Dartnell & Goddard (1893: 124) likewise record in Wiltshire, where ‘I, he, and she do duty as accusatives’.…”

“…The south-western character of these representations took different shapes in different dialects, while the available evidence suggests that the meanings indexed by these two grammatical peculiarities were shared in most cases. Even though there is little in the form of qualitative commentary in this regard, we are informed that ‘Dorset men are laughed at for what is taken as their misuse of pronouns’ (Barnes 1886: 17), which was likewise a characteristic of the speech of ‘the Devonshire peasant’, who ‘confounds the nominative with the accusative’ (Bowring 1866: 26). A source of derision or curiosity as exchanged pronouns may have been, such comments, which mirror the commonly received view amongst outsiders, were counterbalanced by voices pointing to their honourability, also of the ‘frequent use of the word do ’ that Jago (1882: 57) noticed in Cornwall.…”

“…Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary ( EDD , 1896–1905) cites this work amongst its Devonshire sources. One of the examples employed by Hartier is: I dü manage tü tuney up a bit wan time and another (Dev_2). Interestingly, Barnes (1886: 25) points out that in Dorset ‘ y -ended verbs’ (e.g. tuney ) showed ‘a repetition or habit of doing, as “How the dog do jumpy,” i.e.…”