A Grammar of the Dialect of Addingham in the West Riding of Yorkshire
Description
A study of the dialect spoken in Addingham and its immediate neighbourhood in the late 1940s, based on fieldwork data collected from eight principal informants. An Introduction presents information on the town and its dialect, the collector's fieldwork methodology and his study of local industries, activities and customs. Reference is made to William Carr's 'Dialect of Craven in the West Riding of the County of York'(London, 1828). This is followed by six chapters which present a descriptive account of the sounds of the dialect recorded in 1948, the development of Middle English sounds in the living dialect (vowels of stressed and unstressed syllables), a tabular summary of the Old English, Middle English, Scandinavian and Old French equivalents of the stressed vowels in the living dialect, and changes in consonantal sounds from the Old English and Middle English periods to 1949.
Nine appendices present extensive information on local industries, folklore and folk life. The first of these presents the terminology of the Addingham textile industry, including a brief history of the industry, pages from brochures advertising automatic looms, Pirn Winders, warping and beaming machines manufactured by George Hattersley and Sons Limited of Keighley, word lists relating to the stages in the production of cloth, informants' recollections of working in the industry and the textile industry as represented in Yorkshire dialect verse.
The second appendix concerns the Silsden clog-iron and nail industry, and comprises sections giving a brief outline of the industries, descriptions of nail making (including hand drawn diagrams of a forge and nail making tools) and clog-iron making (including diagrams), conditions of work and pay, sale of material, names for tools, nail-makers' hobbies and the oliver (tilt hammer).
Appendix III concerns customs and beliefs associated with death and burial, including sections on bidding, funeral clothes, food and memorial cards (photographs of such cards are included). The fourth appendix concerns domestic routines, with particular reference to the cleaning of floors and firesides. Appendix V describes the playing of the game knur and spell, and includes a tracing of a picture of players taken from George Walker's 'The Costume of Yorkshire'. Appendix VI contains biographical information on the collector's principal informants. The seventh appendix presents the terminology of oatbread making, including descriptions of the processes involved, drawings of equipment and utensils and a word list. Appendix VIII contains a collection of agricultural terms, contained in a word list and accompanied by a number of line drawings (plough, scythe, mistal, horse's gear and block cart).
The final appendix contains ms. transcriptions (phonetic and orthographic) of speech recorded on five gramophone discs which accompany the study. The principal informants are John Blaythorne and his son Fred Blaythorne, who were recorded in the University of Leeds' Department of Phonetics in February 1949.
The final section of the thesis comprises a Word List.
In addition to the completed, bound thesis, two accompanying files contain the collector's fieldwork and draft manuscript papers. The first file, labelled Material relating to the thesis of F. W. Moody on Addingham Dialect (Yorks.), contains 10 files of draft ms./typescript chapters. These cover the Preface, Bibliography, Abbreviations and Introduction (i-xviii), Chapter One (Descriptive Account of Sounds and Sounds of Dialect), Chapter Two (Development of M[iddle] E[nglish] Sounds: Stressed Syllables), Chapter Three (Tabular Summary), Chapter Four (Unstressed Syllables), Chapter Five (Consonants), Chapter Six (Grammar) and Glossary.
The second file contains unbound Survey of English Dialects questionnaire response book leaves, with responses recorded in ms. phonetic script for Books I-IX for Addingham (and Silsden, as one of the collector's informants was born and lived there for twenty-five years). These are copies and dated September 1948. Two hand-drawn sketches, one of a cart and one of a modern scythe, with component parts labelled phonetically, are also included in this file.
In addition, a third file contains correspondence between the collector and the secretary of the Department of English Language and Medieval English Literature, Vera Cracknell, and between the collector and Harold Orton, concerning the re-writing and typing up of the M.A. thesis manuscript. A number of ms. sample pages and typed up versions are included in this file. The correspondence is dated September and December 1958. The re-writing and typing up was in preparation for the publication of the thesis in microfiche form by the company Micro Methods Limited [in 1958]. Further correspondence between this company and Harold Orton, relating to this thesis and the reproduction of a further eight dialect theses, is held amongst Harold Orton's correspondence at LAVC/SED/1/1/6.
The microfiche is in a separate folder on the same shelf.