Page 12 - August 2013 Kettle published

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chipper or we might sometimes find ourselves being

jiggered. In the old Sussex dialect gender is almost

always feminine, indeed there is an old saying in the

Sussex dialect that Everything in Sussex is a she

except a tom cat and she’s a he. In Cold Comfort

Farm that little diamond of a book published in

1932, that has the orphaned Robert Post’s child go

to live with her crazed cousins on their cursed

Sussex farm terrorised by the mad matriarch Aunt

Ada Doom who saw something nasty in the

woodshed. If you’ve never got around to reading it,

treat yourself now that autumn is here. Stella

Gibbons had great fun with the Sussex dialect

mixing authentic words with made up ones like

sukebind, mollocking

and

clettering

.

West Country dialects scooped up into a one-size

fits all

Mummerset

for television and film or the

Oo ahr me ‘earties

pirate accent not only have their

roots in the West-Saxon dialect of King Alfred the

Great but also beyond that into the ancient British

language (Brythonic or Brittonic) that was spoken

here before the West Saxons conquered. Until the

19th century the geographical isolation of the

West Country meant that its dialects were largely

protected from outside influences. Thus the

ooh ar

cap’n - awright my lover - oi’ve got a brand new

combine harvester

parody might actually be the

closest to the way we all once spoke. We’ve taken

the Mickey all these years but we really ought to

have the humility to understand that when the

Somerset man says

‘ark at ee”,

pronounces

warm

exactly as it is written and says

wopse

instead of wasp

he is in fact speaking in the court tongue of King

Alfred the Great whereas the Received Pronounciation

folk are just making it up - they ain’t proper posh none

of ‘em. It’s not like they got a sustificate. Innit.