Themes

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive
A written text performs two main functions: it either describes events, or it informs on how to act in a certain set of circumstances. The simplest example of this is a sign post. One sign post may say “Picnic area”, this is descriptive language because it tells the reader about the place where they currently are; another sign post may say “Drive slowly through the village”, this is prescriptive language because it tells the reader how to behave. These are very simplified examples, but they serve as an introduction to this very important aspect of linguistics.

No doubt readers of a certain age will remember being told in English classes not to “split infinitives” or leave “dangling prepositions”. These are classic examples of prescriptive language. The most famous and oft-quoted split infinitive is from the opening lines of Star Trek, “To boldly go”. In this example, the adverb boldly is inserted between the bare verb and its infinitive marker “to”.

These outdated rules of English grammar were prescribed by grammarians in an attempt to teach “good style and grammar”, and they have their roots in Old and Middle English where verbs in their infinite forms comprised only one word:

Modern English (infinitive) 1st person conjugation Imperative
To ask I ask                Ask!

Middle English
Asken I aske        Aske!

Old English
Ascian ascie         Asca!

As we can see, both Middle and Old English have only one word for the infinitive form of the verb. This is the case in many languages where a split infinitive is simply impossible because of the form of the infinitive verb. Here are a few examples of to ask:

French - Demander
Spanish - Preguntar
German - Fragen
Dutch - Vragen
Danish - Bede
Finnish - Kysyä

The fact is, however, that Modern English infinitive verbs are formed with the bare verb and the infinitive marker. Therefore, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to split an infinitive, and indeed is regularly done so in the natural speech of English speakers.

And this is the crucial point, the Wirelect project intends to be descriptive in its approach to the Warrington dialect. We do not intend to tell people how they should say what they say, rather we want to document exactly how people say what they say. We intend to describe the dialect as it is!

Etymology
Words don’t just randomly occur. Like people, words all have a history, and that history is called etymology. When we research our own history, we use a tree structure to make it easier to follow the many branches of an ever-diverging family history. The same methodology is used for languages and the etymologies of the words in those languages. If we take a common English word, such as “house” and look at its etymology, we can see a pattern that suggests that the modern English we speak today is related to other languages in geographical proximity to us. If we extrapolate back, we can infer that there must be a kind of parent language that gave rise to the older word meaning house that has since developed into the “house” that we use today. The following example explains the point:

Modern Language   Translation         Older Language       Translation
(Germanic)
English                        House
German                       Haus
Dutch                          Huis
Swedish                      Hus                       Proto-Germanic         Hus
Norwegian                  Huset
Danish                        Hus
Icelandic                     Hús

This is obviously a very simplified diagram, and there are many subtle changes that occur in the development of any language, but the principle is clear: Proto-Germanic, spoken by Iron Age people around 2500 years ago, very likely had a word called hus that referred to the place where one lived. The word has persisted and spread with the people as they moved, the sounds in the word have changed a little as the separate languages have developed, but essentially the word we use for house today is roughly the same word that our ancestors were using for the places where they lived 2500 years ago.

House is not a dialect word. In fact, it is standard English, which means the spelling has been standardised so that it can be understood anywhere that English is read. But pronunciation is not, and indeed should not be, standardised. And the pronunciation of words in dialects can give us the clues to word etymologies, just as a crooked nose or blue eyes may give us clues to the lineage of a person.

Now, think of how a speaker of Scottish English would pronounce the word house. Do you hear the proto-germanic language speaking to you across the centuries?