ACTUELLEMENT ÉPUISÉ

Yorkshire Dialect Classics: An Anthology of the Best Yorkshire Poems, Stories and Sayings by Arnold Kellett (Hardcover, 2005)

À propos de ce produit

Product Information

What is Yorkshire dialect? In the 1920s, when most working-class people tended to speak dialect, a doctor in the Keighley area wrote an account for the Yorkshire Dialect Society of some of his experiences with his patients. He described how on one occasion he went to the home of an old farmer who was very seriously ill and thought to be dying. He examined him, and having found no perceptible pulse he turned to the wife and said: 'I'm sorry love. But I'm afraid poor John has passed away'. 'Nay, doctor', came a feeble voice from the man in the bed. 'Ah ammot dee-ad yet!' 'Thee 'od thi tongue, lad', snapped his wife. 'T' doctor knaws better ner thee!' This true story serves to illustrate an important point about Yorkshire dialect. In recent years it has largely disappeared from everyday life, and real dialect speakers are now an endangered species. But, like the old chap in this story, dialect is not dead yet. True, it is not in a healthy state, and everywhere it is being replaced by what we in the Dialect Society call 'local speech', which retains the accent and intonation of earlier days, but hardly any of the vocabulary and idiom which makes real dialect so distinctive. Somebody from London, for example, might assume that Yorkshire people who speak with a strong accent (we keep our vowels open in Yorkshire!) are 'talking dialect'. But it is nothing of the kind. If they were to speak the traditional dialect - the everyday speech of earlier generations - 'off-comed-uns' would hardly be able to understand a word of it. Does this mean, then, that real dialect, if not yet actually extinct, will eventually become what we call a dead language? I'm afraid it will. The continuing evolution of colloquial language makes this inevitable. And I do not share the view that dialects do not die, but only change. When the change reaches such a point that the local speech scarcely resembles its earlier form, we must accept that a demise has taken place. It is no use saying that Italian, French, and Spanish, for example, are simply changed forms of Latin. They have their own identity, and look back on Latin as a deceased, though honourable, parent - a dead language, in the sense that it is no longer spoken. Yet all is not lost. We do not disregard Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and so forth, just because nobody still speaks such languages. Nor do we neglect Chaucer just because nobody speaks Middle English any more. In the case of Yorkshire dialect, we are in a happier position. A minority still speaks it, and even more still understand it and remember it with affection. So we have an opportunity we must not miss. While Yorkshire dialect is still known and loved - and is at least within living memory - we should do our best to pin it down, while we still have time. That is the motivation for my own years of talks and books on our dialect. I am, I suppose, a linguistic conservationist. Parallel with our commendable effort to conserve buildings, beauty spots and archaeological items, I believe we need to research and display the artifacts of the language we call dialect. In a sense this book constitutes a kind of literary museum, with its specimens set out in roughly chronological order. But it is much more than that. These specimens can be brought to life again - either through personal reading, or through being read aloud by one of our surviving dialect-speakers. To hear dialect read competently and enthusiastically can be a delightful experience. Before we go any further, though, we should clear up two possible misapprehensions, often found amongst those who are not familiar with Yorkshire dialect. The first is the idea that dialect is a quaint and comical kind of speech - and a corruption of normal English. This may be true of what sometimes is mistaken for dialect - a slovenly, lazy way of talking, full of bad grammar and slang - much of this of recent origin. True dialect, far from being a deviation from the official standard, is essenti

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Country Publications Ltd
ISBN-13
9781855682269
eBay Product ID (ePID)
87512056

Product Key Features

Book Title
Yorkshire Dialect Classics: an Anthology of the Best Yorkshire Poems, Stories and Sayings
Author
Arnold Kellett
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
Literature, Literary Theory
Publication Year
2005
Number of Pages
160 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
198mm
Item Width
129mm
Item Weight
600 g

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Arnold Kellett
Country/Region of Manufacture
United Kingdom

Explorer par catégorie

Yorkshire Dialect Classics: An Anthology of the Best Yorkshire Poems, Stories and Sayings by Arnold Kellett (Hardcover, 2005)

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi

CD de musique best of classics

CD de musique best of bestie

CD de musique best of Année de sortie 2005

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda

Vinyles siouxsie and the banshees

À propos de ce produit

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Dimensions

Additional Product Features