1905.] on the Scientific Study of Dialects. 8D 



pressing that^ seven ways of expressing these^ and thirteen ways of 

 expressing those. Attention was also drawn to the pecuUar manner 

 of expressing the perfect tense in some dialects. 



Lexicographij. — According to A. D'Orsay, in " The Study of the 

 English Language," p. 15, the common rustic uses as a rule scarcely 

 more than 300 words. This is a gross mis-statement of facts, but it 

 serves as an excellent example of how little educated people generally 

 know about the vocabulary of the working classes in country places. 

 If we take the largest modern English dictionary and exclude from it 

 aU literary words not found in books written between the years 1700- 

 1900, and also exclude from it all scientific and foreign words intro- 

 duced since 1800, it will be found that the total vocabulary of the 

 Scottish and English dialects is considerably greater than the sum 

 total of all the hterary words that have been in use during the last 

 two hundred years. The letters A-0 of the English Dialect Dictionary 

 contain 17,519 words, and it may be safely inferred that the six 

 volumes of the Dictionary contain at least 100,000 words. 



It often happens that the dialects have preserved old genuine 

 forms of a word, which have disappeared from the literary language, 

 e.g. alablaster, Tcindom, kittle, apricock, crotvner, etc. At first sight 

 one might think that it was the dialects which have corrupted the 

 hterary English forms, but such is not the case as is shown by the 

 history of the words. It would be possible to collect from the Enghsh 

 Dialect Dictionary hundreds of similar examples. The modern 

 dialects have often preserved words which have disappeared from the 

 literary language for at least a thousand years, and if it were not for 

 the modern dialects we should not know what some of these words 

 meant, even in Anglo-Saxon. Take, for example, the word Crundel, 

 in Sussex and Hampshire. In these counties the word means " a 

 ravine, a strip of covert dividing open country, always in a dip and 

 usually with running water in the middle " ; what is caUed in Scotland 

 and the North of England a gill. In the Codex Diplomaticus, edited 

 by Kemble, over sixty Crundels are mentioned, but the meaning of 

 the word has always remained a puzzle to Anglo-Saxon scholars until 

 the word was found in the modern dialects. In Sweet's Anglo-Saxon 

 Dictionary it is defined as " a cavity," and, with a query, " a chalkpit," 

 •*a pond." In Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary it is 

 defined as " a barrow, a mound over graves to protect them." In 

 Leo's Angelsachsisches Glossar it is defined as " a spring or well." 

 And Kemble defines it as " a sort of watercourse, a meadow through 

 which a stream flows." Another interesting word is Tallet, " a hay- 

 loft, especially one over a stable ; the unceiled space beneath the roof 

 in any building ; an attic." It is used in Cheshire, Staffordshire, 

 Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and all the West Midland 

 and South Western counties. It is an early Celtic loanword from 

 Latin tabulatum, " a floor, flooring, storey " ; it occurs in old Irish as 

 taibled, " a storey," and in North Welsh taflod, South Welsh iotvlod. 



