364 Mr, Can on the Nortliumhrian Dialect, &c. 



runnand, (and so throughout our present participles,) was 

 entirely left off in the north of England and in Scotland, as 

 may be seen in documents out of number. 



In our popular poetry, and in all written specimens of the 

 dialect of Northumberland, great interest would be conferred 

 by its restoration. 



The sound of ing is absolutely never heard in the popular 

 Northumbrian, except in accented syllables such as bring, 

 king, ring : making is instinctively pronounced makarv' or 

 makim\ 



The cause of the loss of the English participial termination 

 in and, clearly lay in the previous loss of the participial or 

 adjectival inflections which served to define the present par- 

 ticiple as such. When these inflections fell into disuse, and 

 the other disiinct inflections of the verbal nouns in ing also 

 had been lost, the two parls of speech became confounded in 

 the ideas of unlearned writers, and the participle gradually 

 slid into the form of the verbal noun, — very much to the 

 wrong and detriment of our language. 



Let us now turn our attention to the verbal noun, for here 

 again the Northumbrian exhibits an interesting remnant of 

 Anglian usage. 



In the Anglian, as in the Anglo-Saxon, or West Saxon, the 

 more primitive veibs formed nouns of action in i^ig, but a 

 large number of verbs of a derivative character formed them 

 in ung ; and verbal nouns, or nouns of action in ung, were 

 on the whole the more frequent. 



Now the Northumbrian dialect has evidently taken the 

 latter, unconsciously, as its model, as the standard English 

 has taken the former. For all our verbal nouns of this kind 

 are pronounced with an obscure sound nearer to that of 

 short u than to short i. 



What then ought to be the spelling in order to give effect 

 to this peculiarity of the dialect ? 



The vowel y originally had this very intermediate character 

 between u and ^, and those who are familiar with the old 

 northern English, and old Scottish literature and muniments, 

 will remember how much addicted our ancestors were to 

 writing this termination as yng. It appears to me that if we 

 recur to their usage, and merely add a grave accent over the 

 y to indicate its somewhat exceptional sound, akin to short 

 u, we shall do wisely. We should then write : — the makyng 

 of the hay -, the sendyng the boy ; the fellyng the tree ; the 

 ploughyng of the fallow ; the servyng ; the shearjaig ; the 

 harvestyng. 



