A Grammar of the Dialect of West Somerset, Descriptive and Historical

What it is about

This is a dialect grammar of West Somerset English, written as Kruisinga's dissertation. The descriptive part covers the sounds and the accidence (verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns). The historical part traces each present vowel and diphthong back to its Middle English source, and then gives the historical sound changes. Verb gradation is treated by the original strong-verb class. The author separates forms that agree with standard pronunciation, or that are probably literary, from forms that look native, and he explains some new vowel changes as the effect of elementary schooling after the Education Act of 1870. The book has about 65,000 words over 200 pages. The scan is OCR of a phonetic transcription, and many symbols are garbled, so this card does not rely on any example counts. The book reports no measurements; its value is its numbered, example-rich descriptions.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/morph.rs: a table of strong verbs grouped by the original Old English class, as the gradation section does (Class I includes rise, ride, strive, strike, write, drive; Class III includes bind, drink, climb, swim, begin, spin; Class V includes speak, weave, tread). Each row gives present, preterite and participle. Measure how morph inflects these forms, exact match per class, run twice. The classes give a closed test set that is small and checkable by hand.
• I2. Keep Kruisinga's distinction between native-looking forms and forms he calls literary or spread by schooling. Store it as a register flag on the lexicon entry in en/src/dict.rs, so that the flag can say why a form is marked, and use it as an example for the register lessons.
• I3. Negative control for any dialect or class rule: a shuffled set of present and preterite pairs across classes must score worse than the real class table. If it does not, the table is not explaining the data.
• I4. Use only the verb-gradation section (from §419 on) as a source. Check each entry by hand before it goes into a table; do not parse the phonetic OCR text.

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs and 14. Irregular verbs (gradation classes), 08. National varieties (the dialect as a variety), and 37. Register and variation (the literary and native flag). The code is en/src/morph.rs and en/src/dict.rs. The measure is exact match of the class table per class, with the shuffled-pairs control beside it.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{kruisinga1905grammar,
  title = {{A Grammar of the Dialect of West Somerset, Descriptive and Historical}},
  author = {Kruisinga, Etsko},
  year = {1905},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/grammarofdialect00krui}
}

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