pages 178-179

178                 Illustrations of Lancashire

Rochdale occupies the centre of the most distinctively Lancashire-dialect region. As ordinarily employed, the phrase vaguely denotes the rural speech of the manufacturing districts. But beyond the Ribble, and more particularly beyond the Lune, there is unmistakable variation from the genuine Lancashire of "Tim Bobbin"; and in Furness there is an echo of Cumberland. In genuine. Lancashire we have first the old-accustomed permutations of the vowels. Then come elisions of consonants, transpositions, and condensations of entire syllables, whereby words are often oddly transformed. Ancient idioms attract us next; and lastly, there are many of the energetic old words, unknown to current dictionaries, which five centuries ago were an integral part of the English vernacular. The vowel permutations are illustrated in the universal "wayter," "feyther," "reet," "oi," "aw," "neaw," used instead of water, father, right, I, now. "Owt" stands for aught, "nowt" for naught. Elisions and contractions appear in a thousand such forms as "dunnoyo" for "do you not," "welly" for "well-nigh." "You" constantly varies to thee and thou, whence the common "artu" for "art thou," " wiltohameh" for "wilt thou have me." A final g is seldom heard; there is also a characteristic rejection

Peculiarities                179

of the guttural in such words as scratched, pronounced "scrat." The transpositions are as usual, though it is only perhaps in Lancashire that gaily painted butterflies are "brids," and that the little field-flowers elsewhere called birds' eye are "brid een."
The old grammatical forms and the archaic words refer the careful listener, if not to the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred, at all events to the Canterbury Tales; they take us pleasantly to Chaucer, and Chaucer in turn introduces us agreeably to Lancashire, where "she" is always "hoo," through abiding in the primitive "he, heo, hit;" and where the verbs still end in n: "we, ye, they loven," as in the Pro-
logue -

"For he had geten him yet no benefice."

Very interesting is it also when the ear catches the antiquated his and it where today we say it and its. Often supposed to correspond with the poetical use of "his" in personilications (often found in the authorised version of Scripture), the Lancashire employment of his is in truth the common Shaksperean one, his in the county palatine being the simple genitive of the old English hit, as in Hamlet, iv, 7-

"There is a willow grows aslant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream,"