Western Carolina Democrat and French Broad hustler. [volume] (Hendersonville, N.C.) 1913-1915, 1915-08-12
sHAKEsPEARE's ENGLISH.
1t is Still Spoken by the Mountaineers
of Kentucky.
(From The New York Sum-

| lie NEW sun.
1t is said that when the Kentucky
mountaineer begins to read at all he
displays so marked a preference for
Shakespeare that it is invariably the
works of that poet that have most fire.
quentIy to be rebound in any library to
which he has access. The reason he
himself, gives TO rthis prediction is
that the things Shakespeare makes his
characters do always seem so ma
tural."
So also must seem the things hs
makes them say. Words and turns OF
expression employed by Shakespeare
and in the King James version of the
Bible are, writes William Aspenwall
Bradley in Harper's Magazine. of such
common occurrence in the mountain
speech that it is quite possible for a
| native student of his own peoples De-
culiar characteristics to argue, with no
small show OF reason, that 1.-The purest
English on earth is that of the Ken
lucky mountains unpublished
and crude it may be grammaticalIy.
Another asserts that this racy idiom is
the one real literary dialect as yet pro-
duced in America.
Just because the mountaineers are.
for the most part either illiterate or
able to see few newspapers, they have
no stereotyped forms of expression. For
them the language is in the same state
OF nudity and huX that il was for
Shakespeare and his CONTEMPORARIES.
so that they are always free to vary
and invent, and are often forced to feel
around, as 1t were, not only for the
right word but for their own word
which, since they have a natural aes-
tnetlc instinct for verbal shapes and
sounds, gives their speech a remarka-
pie sense OF freshness and styIistic dis
tlnctlon. Moreover, the very fact that
tnelr vocabulary is extremely limited
tends to foster a fanciful and fisIra-
tive form OF expression, as in the case
OF the old preacher, who, referring tc
the Wh1te-haired among his auditors
called down a blessing upon those
whose heads were bloomin" for the
grave"
But what at first sight appears mos
corrupt or colloquial often proves or
closer acquaintance to possess unex
Iceptionable linguistic credentials
What for example, could possibly hav,
more bucolic or Boeotian flavor thar
the use of the verb ito talk" in tn,
sense of ito court" or ''to WOO? Yet
in King Lear" we find Regan sayinc
precisely:
my lord is dead: Edmund and hav
talked"
In Shakespeare also we find "holp
for helped" form of the preterit
common in the mountains, as are ais
; "Whup" for whipped" ''wrop" TO
, wrapped" "clomb" for climbed
II mountain man becomes suddenl
bereft of his senses it is said of hir
that hes TUX franzy SPELL" and thi
rustic pronunciation ha sthe authorit
I no less poet than Sir Philip Sidne,
There is also sound logic, if not Iii
erary authority, for "ary'' and mary
which are nothing more nor less tina
contraction Of ''e'er a" and ''ne'er q
-corruptions, if one chooses, but not;
bly, euphonious and convenient, and ct
forms "farder" and "furder" for "fartl
er" have exactly the same justifcatic
from an chronological point of view :
murder" which used to be write
"murther": while the impersonal DR.
noun "hit'' is no mere cockneyism fl
1T" but the original Anglo-Saxon for
of the word