The Bottineau courant. (Bottineau, Bottineau County, N.D.) 1895-1929, 1916-01-13
WHERE SHAkEsPEARE's e
ELIsH Is STILL SPOKEN,

IL l6 SAID that when the Kentucky
m%ountainer begins to read at all, ho
displays so marked a preference for
Shakespeare that 1t is invariably the
works Of that poet that have most
frequently to be rebound in any IL
brary to which he has access. The
reason he himself gives for this pre-
objection is that the things Shape
speare makes his characters do al
ways eem so natural" g..
So also must seem the things ho
makes them say. Words and turns
Of expression employed by Shake
speare and in the King James YER.
sion Of the Bible are of such common
occurrence in the mountain speech
that it is quite possible for a native
student Of his OWL peoples peculiar
characteristics to argue, with no
small show Of reason, that "the pur.
est English on earth is that Of the
Kentucky mountains-however unpol-
ished and crude it may be grammati.
cally. Another asserts that this racy
idiom is the n real literary dialect
as yet produced in America.
Just because the mountaineers are,
for the most part, either illiterate or
able to e few newspapers, they
have st%erotyped forms of expression.
For them the language is in the same
state of f1uidity and flux that it was
for Shakespeare and his contempor-
aries, SO that they are always free
to vary and invent, and are often
forced to feel around, as it were, not
only for the right word, but for their
W word, which, since they have a
natural esthetic instinct for verbal
SHAPES and sounds, gives their speech
"a remarkable ems Of freshness and
+. stylistic distinction. Moreover, the
very fact that their vocabulary is ex-
tremely limited tends to foster a
fanciful and fgurative form of ex-
preston, as in the a Of the old
preacher who, referring to the white
haired among his auditors, called
down a blessing upon those whose
heads were bloomin' for the grave"
But what at first sight appears
most corrupt or %colloquial often
proves on closer acquaintance to pos
sess unexceptionally linguistic Gre
dentia1s. What, for example, could
possibly have a more bucolic or Boeo.
tian flavor than the use. of the verb
ito talk" in the sense OF. ito court" or
ito WOO? Yet, in king Lear" we
lind Regain saying, precisely:
"My lord is dead; Edmund and I
have talked"
In Shakespeare also we find "holp''
for helped" a form of the preterite
common in the mountains, as also
"whup" for whipped" "wrop" for
wrapped" "clomb" for climbed" II
q mountain man becomes suddenly
bereft of his senses, it is said of him
that "he TUX a franzy SPELL and this
rustic pronunciation has the author
ity of no less a poet than Sir Philip
Sidney.
There is also sound logic, if not
literary authority, for "ary" and
mary" which are nothing more or
less than ~contractions of "e'er a" and
.ene'er a"-corruptions, if one chooses
but notably euphonious and conven-
ient-and the forms "farder" and
"furder" for farther" and further
have exactly the same justification
from an chronological point of view
as murder" which used to be writ
ten 'murther'; while the impersonal
pronoun hit is no mere cockneyism
for 1T. but the original Anglo-sax-
on form OF the word.-Harper's Mag.
azine.