CHAPTER II DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day | ||
02. CHAPTER II
DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES
The history of our dialects in the earliest periods of which we have any record is necessarily somewhat obscure, owing to the scarcity of the documents that have come down to us. The earliest of these have been carefully collected and printed in one volume by Dr Sweet, entitled The Oldest English Texts, edited for the Early English Text Society in 1885. Here we already find the existence of no less than four dialects, which have been called by the names of Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex (or Anglo-Saxon), and Kentish. These correspond, respectively, though not quite exactly, to what we may roughly call Northern, Midland, Southern, and Kentish. Whether the limits of these dialects were always the same from the earliest times, we cannot tell; probably not, when the unsettled state of the country is considered, in the days when repeated invasions of the Danes and Norsemen necessitated constant efforts to repel them. It is therefore sufficient to define the areas
The investigation of the differences of dialect in our early documents only dates from 1885, owing to the previous impossibility of obtaining access to these oldest texts. Before that date, it so happened that nearly all the manuscripts that had been printed or examined were in one and the same dialect, viz. the Southern (or Wessex). The language employed in these was (somewhat unhappily) named "Anglo-Saxon"; and the very natural mistake was made of supposing that this "Anglo-Saxon" was the sole language (or dialect) which served for all the "Angles" and "Saxons" to be found in the "land of the Angles" or England. This is the reason why it is desirable to give the more general name of "Old English" to the
Manuscripts in the Southern dialect are fairly abundant, and contain poems, homilies, land-charters, laws, wills, translations of Latin treatises, glossaries, etc.; so that there is considerable variety. One of the most precious documents is the history known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued even after the Conquest till the year 1154, when the death and burial of King Stephen were duly recorded.
But specimens of the oldest forms of the Northern and Midland dialects are, on the other hand, very much fewer in number than students of our language desire, and are consequently deserving of
Having thus sketched out the broad divisions into which our dialects may be distributed, I shall proceed to enter upon a particular discussion of each group, beginning with the Northern or Northumbrian.
CHAPTER II DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day | ||