Page:Glossary of words in use in Cornwall.djvu/342

PREFACE. IX which I have a share. His talo was brought to me by my house- keeper, a south country-woman, acquainted with the sound of the Yorkshire i, and she concluded her report with these words : ' He says he has got a new vnfe.* I replied, * What can that possibly have to do with iti Go again and ask him.' It turned out the man had said he had got a new tcarp, i. e. the materials for weaving a piece of doth, and he wanted support till he had done the work. This was misunderstood for wawf (wife), and kindly translated for my better information. This of course shows the idea my interpreter had of the Yorkshire long i. To show that long t sound is certainly not ah, I may mention that I sdbmitted my MS. of local anecdotes to a friend of considerable scientific and antiquarian attainments, who on finding I rendered this letter by azr, struck that form out as not sufficiently expressive, and actually inserted with his own hand H&yhe as a better rendering of the sound. It is possible he may have been betrayed into that from remembering that aw is sounded o or Jio ; but the fact remains that he thus rendered i far enough removed from ah. To the same effect it may be mentioned, that at a Town's meeting in 1873 to consider the propriety of supporting religious teaching, and to canvass the voters in favour of what was called the Bible candidates, the inhabitants assembled in large numbers, and gave utterance to their extremely liberal sentiments by bawling out during the speeches, ' We want no Bauble here ! ' suggesting to a southern stranger a certain Cromwellian purity and puritanism. But not so ; it was the Book they objected to as being likely to disagree with their digestions, of which no doubt they took a perfectly correct view. It IB a somewhat amusing fact, that in a company of Yorkshiremen each thinks his own dialect the most genuine. I was informed by a resident near York that the true dialect of the county was spoken in the vale of York. Captain Harland, who has given the English Dialect Society the Glossary, * Series C, No. 1,' thus writes : 'The Swaledale dialect .... is altogether different from the barbarous jargon of the West Biding of Yorkshire, the north of Lancashire, or the colliery districts of Durham and Northumberland.' Whether our dialect merits the strong words above quoted it is not for me to