The Englishing of French Words; the Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems Part 2

Of the word #levee# the _O.E.D._ says, 'All our verse quotations place the stress on the first syllable. In England this is the court p.r.o.nunciation, and prevails in educated use. The p.r.o.nunciation' with the accent on the second syllable 'which is given by Walker, is occasionally heard in Great Britain, and appears to be generally preferred in the U.S.', but the dictionary does not quote Burns

'Guid-mornin' to your Majesty!

May Heav'n augment your blisses, On ev'ry new birthday ye see, A humble poet wishes!

My bards.h.i.+p here, at your levee, On sic a day as this is, Is sure an uncouth sight to see, Amang thae birthday dresses Sae fine this day.'

So that it would seem that the Scotch and American p.r.o.nunciation of this word is more thoroughly Englished than our own: and the prejudice which opposes straightforward common-sense solutions, however desirable they may be, is brought home to us by the fact that almost all Englishmen would be equally shocked by the notion either of spelling this word as they p.r.o.nounce it, _levay_, or of p.r.o.nouncing it, like Burns, as they spell it, _levee_.

ENGLISH WORDS IN FRENCH

It would be instructive if we could give a parallel account of what the French do when they adopt an English word into their language. _Le Dictionnaire des Anglicismes_, lately published by Delagrave, has two hundred pages, and is much praised by a reviewer in the _Mercure de France_, Feb. 15, p. 246: but it does not give the current French p.r.o.nunciations of the English words. The reviewer writes: 'Ce qui me gene bien davantage, c'est que M. Bonnaffe supprime, partout, avec rigueur, la facon francaise de p.r.o.noncer le mot anglais. etait-il superflu de dire comment nous articulons _shampooing_? Nous n'avons, je crois, qu'une forme orale pour _boy_, pet.i.t domestique, parce qu'il est du a l'oreille; mais nous sommes partages quant a _boy-scout_, qui est arrive par tracts et par journaux. L'anglais donne un mot _high-life_, le francais en fait cinq: _haylayf, alaf, ichlif, ijlif, iglif_.'

p. 247. It would seem from _high-life_ that English words in French sometimes look as strange as French words do when represented in make-s.h.i.+ft English phonetics. On p. 228 of the same _Mercure_ there is notice of 'un pet.i.t manuel de conversation' in which 'Toutes les nuances de la "phonetic p.r.o.nunciation" sont notees, a l'usage des Americains desireux de se faire comprendre en francais. Cette notation (says the reviewer) m'a tellement amuse que je ne puis resister au plaisir d'en citer quelques exemples: Av-nu' day Shawn Zay-lee-zay', Pla.s.s de la Kown-kord' to Pla.s.s der lay-twal. Fown-ten day Zeen-noh-sawn,--Oh-pay-ra k.u.m-meek,--Foh-lee Bair-zhair,--Bool-var day Ka-pu-seen,--Beeb-lee-oh-tech Sant Zhun-vee-ayv',--Lay Zan-va-leed,--May-zown' der Veck-tor' U-goh',--Hub-bay-leesk',--Ru San Tawn-twan, &c., &c....' There would seem to be errors in this 'citation'. Vecktor should be Veektor? and H looks like a misprint for L in Hub-bay-leesk. -tech was probably -teck. Bonnaffe's book is noticed in _The Modern Language Review_ of last January.

ON THE DIALECTAL WORDS IN EDMUND BLUNDEN'S POEMS[3]

[Footnote 3: _The Waggoner and other Poems_, by Edmund Blunden, pp. 70.

Sidgwick and Jackson. London, 1920.]

In the original prospectus of the S.P.E., reprinted in Tract I, and again in III, p. 9, one of the objects of the Society is stated to be the 'enrichment and what is called regeneration of the language from the picturesque vocabularies of local vernaculars'. Since a young poet, Mr.

Edmund Blunden, has lately published a volume in which this particular element of dialectal and obsolescent words is very prominent, it will be suitable to our general purpose to consider it as a practical experiment and examine the results. The poetic diction and high standard of his best work give sufficient importance to this procedure; and though he may seem to be somewhat extravagant in his predilection for unusual terms, yet his poetry cannot be imagined without them, and the strength and beauty of the effects must be estimated in his successes and not in his failures.

In the following remarks no appreciation of the poetry will be attempted: our undertaking is merely to tabulate the 'new' words, and examine their fitness for their employment. The bracketed numbers following the quotations give the page of the book where they occur.

The initials _O.E.D._ and _E.D.D._ stand for the _Oxford English Dictionary_ and the _English Dialect Dictionary_ (Wright).

1. 'And churning owls and goistering daws'. (1)

Here _churning_ is a mistake; we are sorry to begin with an animadversion, but the word should be _churring_. #Churr# is an echo-word, and though there may be examples of echo-words which have been bettered by losing all trace of their simple spontaneous origin, this is not one. It is like _burr, purr,_ and _whirr_; and these words are best spelt with double R and the R should be trilled. The absurdity of not trilling this final R is seen very plainly in _burr_, because that word's definition is 'a rough sounding of the letter R.' This is not represented by the p.r.o.nunciation b[schwa]:. What that 'southern English' p.r.o.nunciation does indicate is the vulgarity and inconvenience of its degradations. _Burr_ occurs in these poems:

'There the live dimness burrs with droning glees'. (23)

#Burr# is, moreover, a bad h.o.m.ophone and cannot neglect possible distinctions: the Oxford Dictionary has eight entries of substantives under _burr._

Our author also uses _whirr_:

'And the bleak garrets' crevices Like whirring distaffs utter dread', (26)

and again of the noise of wind in ivy, on p. 54, and

'The damp gust makes the ivy whir', (48)

_whir_ rhyming here with _executioner_.

Since _churring_ (in the first quotation) would automatically preserve its essential trill, the intruder _churning_ is the more obnoxious; and unless the R can be trilled it would seem better for poets to use only the inflected forms of these words, and prefer _churreth_ to _churrs_.

If _churn_ is anywhere dialectal for _churr_, it must have come from the common mistake of subst.i.tuting a familiar for an unknown word: and this is the worst way of making h.o.m.ophones.

2. 'goistering daws'.

#Goister# or #gauster# is a common dialect verb; the latter form seems the more common and is recognized in the Oxford Dictionary, where it is defined 'to behave in a noisy boisterous fas.h.i.+on ... in some localities to laugh noisily'. If jackdaws are to appropriate a word to describe their behaviour, no word could be better than _goistering_, and we prefer _goister_ to _gauster_. Its likeness to _boisterous_ will a.s.sist it, and we guess that it will be accepted. In the little glossary at the end of the book _goistering_ is explained as _guffawing_. That word is not so descriptive of the jackdaw, since it suggests 'coa.r.s.e bursts of laughter', and the coa.r.s.eness is absent from the fussy vulgarity and mere needless jabber of the daw.

3. 'A dor flew by with crackling cry'. (7)

This to the ear is

'A daw flew by with crackling cry';

and though our poet's glossary tells us that dor = dor-hawk or nightjar, it really is not so. A dor is a beetle so called from its making a _dorring_ noise, and the name, like _churr_ and _burr_, is better with its double R and trill. _Dor-hawk_ may be a name for the _nightjar_, but properly _dorr_ is not; and if it were, it would be forbidden by _daw_ so long as it neglected its trill. Note also the misfortune that four lines below we read

'The pigeons flaunted round his door',

where the full correct p.r.o.nunciation of _door_ (d[open o][schwa]) will not quite protect it. The whole line quoted from p. 7 is obscure, because a nightjar would never be recognized by the description of a bird that utters a crackling cry when flying. That it then makes a sound different from its distinctive whirring note is recorded. T.A. Coward writes 'when on the wing it has a soft call co-ic, and a sharper and repeated alarm quik, quik, quik.' It is doubtful whether _crackling_ can be accepted.

4. 'The grumping miller picked his way'. (8)

#Grumping# is a good word, which appears from the dictionaries to be a common-speech term that is picking its way into literature.

5. 'The golden n.o.bs and pippens swell'. (12)

#n.o.b# is _k.n.o.b_. Golden-n.o.b is 'a variety of apple'; see _E.D.D._: and as a special name, which the pa.s.sage implies, it should be hyphened.

6. 'where the pollards frown, Notched, dumb, surly images of pain'. (13)

#Notched.# This word well describes the appearance of old pollard willows after they have been cropped; but its full propriety may escape notice. A very early use of the verb _to notch_ was to cut or crop the hair roughly, and _notched_ was so used. The Oxford Dictionary quotes Lamb, 'a notched and cropt scrivener'. Then _pollard_ itself is from _poll_, and means an animal that has lost its horns as well as a tree that has been 'pollarded'.

7. 'In elver-peopled crevices'. (19)

We are grateful for #elver#. This form has carefully differentiated itself from _eel-fare_, which means the pa.s.sage of the young eels up the rivers, and has come to mean the _eel-fry_ themselves.

8. 'For Suss.e.x cries from primrose lags and breaks'. (22)