- •VI. Etymological Survey of the English Word-Stock
- •§ 2. Semantic Characteristics and Collocability
- •4.Summary and Conclusions
- •§ 5. Causes and Ways of Borrowing
- •6. Criteria of Borrowings
- •§ 12. Influence of Borrowings
- •13 Summary and Conclusion
- •VII. Various aspects of vocabulary units and replenishment of modern english word-stock
- •Interdependence of various aspects
- •Replenishment of modern english vocabulary
- •§ 7. Structural and Semantic Peculiarities of New Vocabulary Units
- •Ways and means of enriching the vocabulary
- •§ 8. Productive Word-Formation
- •§ 9 Various Ways of Word-Creation
- •§10 Borrowing
- •§ 13. Intrinsic Heterogeneity of Modern English
- •§ 14 Number of Vocabulary Items in Actual Use and Number of Vocabulary Units in Modern English
- •§ 15. Summary and Conclusions
- •VIII. Variants and Dialects of the English Language
- •§ 1. General Characteristics of the English Language in Different Parts of the English-Speaking World
- •§ 3. Some Points of History of the Territorial Variants and Lexical Interchange Between Them
- •Local varieties in the british isles and in the usa
- •§ 4. Local Dialects in the British Isles
- •§ 5. The Relationship between the English National Language and British Local Dialects
- •6 Local Dialects in the usa
- •IX Fundamentals of English Lexicography
- •§1 Encyclopaedic and Linguistic Dictionaries
- •§2 Classification of linguistic Dictionaries
- •3. Explanatory Dictionaries
- •§ 4. Translation Dictionaries
- •§ 5. Specialized Dictionaries
- •§6. The selection of Lexical Units for Inclusion.
- •§ 7. Arrangement of Entries
- •§ 11. Choke of Adequate Equivalents.
- •§ 12. Setting of the Entry
- •§ 13. Structure of the Dictionary
- •§ 14. Main Characteristic Features
- •§ 15. Classification of Learners Dictionaries.
- •§ 16.Selection of Entry Words.
- •§ 17. Presentations of Meanings.
- •§ 18. Setting of the Entry
- •§ 19. Summary and Conclusions
- •X. Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis
- •§ 1. Contrastive Analysis
- •§ 2. Statistical Analysis
- •§ 3.Immediate Constituents Analysis
- •§ 4.Distributional Analysis and Co-occurrence
- •§ 5. Transformafional Analysis
- •§ 6. Componenfal Analysis
- •§ 7. Method of Semantic Differential
- •§ 8. Summary and Conclusions
- •I. Introduction
- •II. Semasiology Word-Meaning
- •Types of Meaning
- •Word-Meaning and Meaning in Morphemes
- •Word-Meaning and Motivation
- •Change of Meaning
- •Meaning and Polysemy
- •Polysemy and Homonymy
- •Word-Meaning in Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics
- •Meaning Relations in Paradigmatics and Semantic Classification of Words
- •III. Word-groups and phraseological units Some Basic Features of Word-Croups
- •Meaning of Word-Groups
- •Interdependence of Structure and Meaning in Word-Groups
- •IV. Word-structure
- •V. Word-formation
- •Various Ways of Forming Words
- •Affixation
- •Conversion
- •Word-Composition
- •Etymological survey of the english word-stock
- •Words of Native Origin
- •Borrowings
- •VII. Various aspects of vocabulary units and replenishment of modern english word-stock
- •Interdependence of Various Aspects of the Word
- •VIII. Variants and dialects of the english language
- •Learner's Dictionaries and Some Problems of Their Compilation
- •X. Methods and procedures of lexicological analysis
Local varieties in the british isles and in the usa
§ 4. Local Dialects in the British Isles
In the British Isles there exist many speech varieties confined to particular areas. These local dialects traceable to Old English dialects may be classified into six distinct divisions: 1) Lowland (Scottish or Scotch, North of the river Tweed),1 2) Northern (between the rivers Tweed and Humber), 3) Western, 4) Midland and 5) Eastern (between the river Humber and the Thames), 6) Southern (South of the Thames). Their sphere of application is confined to the oral speech of the rural population in a locality and only the Scottish dialect can be said to have a literature of its own with Robert Burns as its greatest representative.
1 The Scottish dialect of the English language is to be distinguished from the Scottish tongue, which is a Celtic language spoken in the Highlands.
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Offsprings of the English national literary language, the British local dialects are marked off from the former and from each other by some phonetic, grammatical and lexical peculiarities. In this book we are naturally concerned only with the latter.
Careful consideration of the national and the dialect vocabularies discloses that the most marked difference between thehi lies in the limit-^ed character of the dialect vocabularies. The literary language contains many words not to be found in dialects, among them technical and scien-titic terms.
Local lexical peculiarities, as yet the least studied, are most noticeable in specifically dialectal words pertaining to local customs, social life and natural conditions: laird—'landed proprietor in Scotland1,burgh.—'Scottish chartered town1, kirk—'church1, loch—'Scottishlake or landlocked arm of the sea',, etc. There are many names of objects and processes connected with farming, such as the names of agricultural processes, tools, domestic animals and the like, e.g. galloway—'horse of small strong breed from Galloway, Scotland', kyloe—'one of small breed of long-horned Scotch cattle1, shelry—'Shetland pony'. There is also a considerable number of emotionally coloured dialectal words, e.g. Scot. bonny—'beautiful, healthy-looking', braw—'fine, excellent1, daffy—'crazy, silly', cuddy—'fool, ass', loon—'clumsy, stupid person*.
In addition, words may have different meanings in the national language and in the local dialects, e.g. in the Scottish dialect the word to call is. used in the meaning of 'to drive', to set—'to suit1, short—'rude', silly—'weak1, etc.
Dialectal lexical differences also embrace word-building patterns. For instance, some Irish words contain the diminutive suffixes -an, een, -can, as in bohaun—'cabin' (from frish both—'cabin'); bohereen— 'narrow road1 (from Irish bothar—'road'); mearacaun—'thimble' (from Irish mear—'finger'); etc. Some of these suffixes may even be added to English bases, as in girleen, dogeen, squireen (squirrel), etc. Some specifically dialectal derivatives are formed from standard English stems with the help of standard English affixes, e.g. Scot, flesher—'butcher', suddenty—' suddenness'.
A great number of words specifically dialectal appeared as a result of intense borrowing from other languages, others are words that have disappeared from the national literary language or become archaic, poetical, such as gang—'go', OE dsandsan; bairn—'child1, OE beam, etc. Thus, the lexical differences between the English national language and its- dialects are due to the difference in the spheres of application, different tempoes of development, different contacts with other peoples, and deliberate elaboration of literary norms.