Would anyone on the list have sources to recommend that outline the
conventions used in 16th-century texts to reproduce certain kinds of English
dialect speech -- a discussion that tells you (e.g.) that "z" substituted for
"s" signals a speaker from Somerset?
I ask because I'm completing an edition of the Martin Marprelate tracts
(1588-89), texts that occasionally employ phonetically spelled dialect
voices. Some of the dialects are easier to identify than others, such as the
"Welsh" substitution of "f" for "v" (leading to the tracts' sly use of
"fickers" for vicars). In other cases, however, even while I'm pretty sure
the voice is dialect, I don't know which (if any) specific region is
intended. An example:
"If you demand then, whether bishops be ecclesiastical or civil governors.
They themselves say beath, and ai say brethren, that for the stopping of your
meaths and other causes, I wad counsel them, if they wad be ruled bai me, to
be neither nother. Now if yaw demand again ...."
Here, "beath", "ai", "meaths", "wad", "bai", "yaw", and perhaps "neither
nother" seem meant to reproduce a dialect voice. (Though elsewhere, if only
one word is in question, it can be difficult to tell if the word is meant to
be dialect, or if it's simply a victim of the tracts' exceptionally, even by
the standards of the time, messy typography and erratic spelling).
While I can find discussions of individual cases (such as Shakespeare's
Fluellen), I'd very much appreciate any help to more general sources. And if
anyone has come across a reference to Marprelate sufficiently esoteric that I
might not have come across it after a few years of searching, I'd be happy to
hear about it *offlist* -- I'm particularly interested in references from
manuscript sources.
Thanks!
Joseph Black
Department of English
University of Tennessee
(423) 974-6942
[log in to unmask]
|