The English Dialect Grammar, comprising the dialects of England, of the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and of those parts of Scotland, Ireland & Wales where English is habitually spoken

What it is about

Wright describes the dialects of English as spoken in England, Shetland and Orkney, and the parts of Scotland, Ireland and Wales where English is the usual language. The introduction classifies the dialects and explains the phonetic alphabet. Chapter II covers the vowels of accented syllables, with the normal development of each Old English vowel in each environment and its regional outcomes. Later sections treat consonants, nouns (plural endings such as -n, umlaut plurals, and double plurals), numerals, pronouns and verbs. The data come from fieldwork: the introduction says that over 500,000 slips were collected, each with a standard English word, its dialect pronunciation and its district. The method is descriptive: each form is given with the counties where it occurs, and the sections are numbered (for example § 378 on plurals of nouns ending in a voiceless consonant). The book lists forms by county or district rather than giving statistics.

Ideas

I1. Add a variety tag to the word forms in en/src/dict.rs, drawn from the regional forms in the paper (for example the plural of nouns ending in -th, or the -n plurals). The tag is a closed set, and the parser keeps the standard reading as the default, so a dialect word is labelled and not silently changed.
I2. Write the plural rules of §§ 378 to 383 (including the double plurals) as a small table in en/src/morph.rs. Measure the lemmatiser on a dialect word list from the paper, with a negative control: standard English plurals must not change.
I3. Use the paper's slip method as a model for a small, checkable data set: each row is a word, a form and a district, with a source. This fits the Mova rule that data stays small and traceable.

For Mova

The chapter is 08. National varieties, with 11. Nouns for plurals and 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals for the pronoun forms. The code is en/src/morph.rs and en/src/dict.rs. The measure: accuracy of the plural rules on the dialect list, and no change on standard text (negative control), run twice.

Cite

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

@book{wright1905english,
  title = {{The English Dialect Grammar, comprising the dialects of England, of the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and of those parts of Scotland, Ireland \& Wales where English is habitually spoken}},
  author = {Wright, Joseph},
  year = {1905},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/cu31924026612600}
}

References

11 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Barnes, William. A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, with the history, outspreading, and bearings of South-western English. Trans. Phil. Soc. London, 1863. Darlington, Thomas. The Folk-Speech of South Cheshire. find
E.D.S., 1887. Ellis, Alexander J. On Early English Pronunciation. Part V. Existing dialectal as compared with West Saxon pronunciation. Trans. Phil. Soc. find
London, E.E.T.S., and Chaucer Soc, 1889. Elvoorthy, Frederic Thomas. The Dialect of West Somerset. find
E.D.S., 1875. An Outline of the Grammar of the Dialect of West Somerset. find
E.D.S., 1877. The West Somerset Word-Book. A Glossary of Dialectal and Archaic Words and Phrases used in the West of Somerset and East Devon. find
English Dialect Dictionary. Ed. by Joseph Wright, 1896-1905. Hargreaves, Alex. A Grammar of the Dialect of Adlington (Lancashire). find
Heidelberg, 1904. Horn, Wilhelm. Beitrage zur Geschichte der englischen Guttural-laute. find
Berlin, 1901. Jackson, Georgina F. Shropshire Word-Book, a Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words, &c., used in the County. find
Kjederqvist, John. The Dialect of Pewsey. Trans. Phil. Soc. London, 1902-4. Kruisinga, E. A Grammar of the Dialect of West Somerset, descriptive and historical. find
Bonn, 1905. Luick, K. Untersuchungen zur englischen Lautgeschichte. find
Strassburg, 1896. Murray, James A. H. The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland : its pronunciation, grammar, and historical relations. Trans. Phil. Soc. find

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