INTRODUCTION.

EAST CORNWALL WORDS. By THOMAS Q. COUCH.

During a long and intimate acquaintance with the folk of East Cornwall, it has been my habit to make note of such words as are in common use among them, but which have now dropped, or are dropping, out of the talk of cultured society. Many of these good words, obsolete or obsolescent in polite English, hardly deserve their fate, but should be retained as brief, and, and vivid expressions of thought, only to be represented otherwise by verbose and often clumsy pariphrase. Our greatest authors were glad to use them, and their persistent survival, both in sound and sense, in the rustic talk, should be a plea for their restoration to modem English speech. In the' presence of the English Dialect Society, I have shrunk from giving many etymological remarks, and those I have ventured on may be taken as mere surplusage, to be accepted or rejected. I have given such instances of their use by our Middle English and earlier Modem English writers as my memory and scant shelves supply me with. A few of the peculiarities of our speech, common in many parti- culars to the south-western dialects generally, but differing from the spoken English of to-day, are here given :— ^ A. The past participle of verbs has often the aflfix a (the Anglo- Saxon ge), as a-zeed, Orheerd. There are many, but ill-defined, irregularities in the accentuation of this vowel, as slat for slate, taJde for tackle. D Is commonly elided from the termination of words, as hana^ bands ; grown, ground ; e. g. " I owed 'n vorty pouns.'* E. en. This old English mode of ending the acQective is retained  by ua to a larger extent than in our common tongue : elmen tree, eloamen dish, &c, F is sounded as v before vowels and liquids. G. This letter is elided in the present participle, as doin for doing. I has often the sound of d, as ckeldy child ; kenlyy kindly, &c. Of loses its / before a consonant : " the nap o' the hill." R is often transposed, as girts^ groats; afeardy afraid; ajpenif apron. Sy at the beginning of words and when followed by a vowel or liquid, is replaced by its softer kin-letter, z, Th is pronounced d : dresh for thresh, datch for thatch. V and u are interchangeable in a most erratic way. We have helve for bellow, waive for wallow, hauen for haven, etud for eval (see glossary, sub voce). The ancient and knightly family of Beville bore a passant bull in their canting arms. F is occasionally substituted for h, but not so frequently as in the other south-western dialects. We have yaffel for armful, yeffer for heifer ; and the semi-consonantal e in ewe is with us yawe. In most instances the past tense of verbs is weak, as '' I knowed it " for " I knew it ; " and in a few cases where it is weak in national English it is strong with us, as " I gove," for " I gave." The infinitive mood has y often added in termihation, as to mowy, to reapy, to milky. Words ending in a mute consonant undergo metathesis, as haps for hasp, crips for crisp. There is a marked difference between the speech of East and West Cornwall, not only in structure and vocabulary, but in the intonation of sentences. We have none of that indescribable cadence, a sort of sing-song, which marks the patois of the West, and which I judge to be as truly Keltic as the Comu-British words which remain to it. At the beginning of the present century mining adventure, especially in the search for copper, became a furor in East Cornwall, and a passionate enthusiasm brought hither the skilled miners of the West, who flocked to the banks of Tyward- reath Bay, and further east to the central granite ridge about the tors of Caradon. These immigrants brought with them and have left an infusion of their language, especially its technical portion^ but I remember when it was a great mimetic feat, and^ productive of much mirth amongst us, to be able to imitate the talk of Cousin Jacky from Eedruth or St Just. This intermixture of tribes, increased still later by facilities of travel, traffic, telegraphy, &c, has rendered it ahnost impossible to draw any but a very broad and blurred line between the dialects. The comparison can only be made by such glossaries as that furnished by Miss Courtney &om the extreme west^ and mine from the easternmost parts of the shire. If asked to define roughly a boundary, I know none better than the Parlia- mentary line from Crantock Bay, on St. George's Channel, to Yeryan Bay, on the English Channel, which bisects the county. The late John T. Tregellas, who more than any other had the faculty of seizing and vocally representing with minute accuracy the subtlest distinctions of word and tone, even between neighbouring parishes, thought he could plainly trace the limits of the two dialects. Hie opinion of so weU-known an expert may be here given : — " To any one who may be disposed to jeer at the idea as falla- cious or ridiculous, I should be desirous of placing such a one at Mousehole or any village in the neighbourhood of Penzance, and for an hour to enter into easy conversation with its rustic inhabitants, and having well rivetted their sing-song (chant) on his ear, to peiv ceive the lessening and altering of the intonation of the inhabitants as he proceeds eastward, through Towednack, St. Ives, Hayle, and Camborne, Eastward of Camborne, eV^n at Eedruth, the natural chant has died away; nor is it again heard from the more guttural speakers of Eedruth, Gwennap, and St. Agnes. But be it known to the curious in these matters, the miner of Perranzabuloe expresses himself uniformly in a full note higher than his adjoining parish- ioners of St. Agnes, and no sooner have you passed Oranioek and Cvhert and entered the St. Columb's, than you find the people's con- versation partake, in a very small on to a very large degree, of the peculiar "" zalt " for salt, "yeffer" for heifer, &a, of St. Gennys and the whole neighbourhood of Camelford and Boscastle, until you hear in its fullest form the * I zim' for I think, 'spewn' for spoon, &c., of  Bideford, where the peculiarity of Devon is so manifest." ^ The popular tongue of East Cornwall, indeed, resembles that of Devon- shire and of those counties generally which formed the ancient kingdom of Wessex. Carew {temp, Elizabeth), whose loved dwelling-place Anthony, the home of many ancestors, was where the River Lyner " winneth fellowship with the Tamer," gives us in his Survey some account of the language of his tinie. In those days of difficult travel and intercourse, his knowledge of the tongue generally spoken over the county was probably slight, and chiefly drawn from East Cornwall. In his book, admirable for its keenness of observation and felicity of description, often in vernacular phrase, we learn that " most of the inhabitants can speak no word of Cornish, but very few are ignorant of the English." A few did yet so still *^afifect their own" that to an inquiring stranger they would answer, " Meea nauidua 'cowzasa- >vzneck," = I can speak no Saxonage. However, he says of the old Keltic. speech, "The English doth still encroache upon it, and hath driven the same into the uttermost skirts of the shire ; " the fate also of the old Kymric on the opposite shores of Wales and Brittany. Tlie English which the East Cornish speak " is good and pure, as receyuing it from the best hands of their owne gentry, and the Paateme Merchants." There was still, our historian says, " a broad and rude accent, eclipsingy" after the manner of the Somersetshire men. Considering that the Cornish branch of the Keltic was in use down to a late date, it is remarkable how few and unimportant are its remains. Those grand and almost changeless objects of nature, mountains, valleys, headlands, bays, rivers, submarine hills, and dells, with the more mutable territorial divisions into towns, villages, hamlets, farms, and even fields, still keep their old and very descrip- tive names untouched by changeful time. Here and there we meet with a few of the old designations of animals, trees, and herbs. These are the last to part with the old language. " Mountains and rivers," remarks Sir Francis Palgrave, "still murmur the voice of ' Homes and Haunts of the Bural Population of CormoaUy p. 2, by J. T. Tregellas. nations long denationalized or extirpated ; " and, says Canon Farrar, ^' though the glossaries of Gael and Cymry should utterly pass away, the names they gave to the grandest features of many a landscape will still stand upon the map." Many of our ancient names are most happily descriptive of the natural peculiarities of the scenes as they still exist : others lead us back in fancy to the pre-historic condition of the spots, so changed, but still keeping their old designations. Lostwithiel, a town on the banks of the River Fowey, long connected with the earls and dukes of Cornwall, by its name alone takes us far into the past, when it was the place or residence of woodmen, the simple and sylvan habitation of a people leading a wild and venatic Hfe. The Cymro- Keltic tongue, to which, the Cornish being dead, we are fain to appeal, tells us that the word is derived from Ldos, Llys^ or Les^ a place, and Gwddely of the woods. In the near neighbourhood we have a large parish called Withiel, and Cuddle and other variations or corruptions' are to be traced to the same root. Maen, a stone, is nearly as common a prefix as the Tre, Pol, and Pen, "by which you shall know the Comishmen." Mennear, maen-hir, is still a common patronymic, the first bearers of it being dwellers by the long stone. As names of places we have our Menadu, Menacuddle, Menabilly, Menhenniot, and a host of others. In our topographical nomencla- ture here and there occur designations which mark the steps of the intruder, as Tresawsen, the residence of the Saxon. The only traces of the Eoman domination remaining to us are on a few sepulchral stones by moor or wayside, where the old name is disguised by a Latin termination. A typical instance is found on the road to Fowey, near the ancient camp at Castle-dore, and not far from PoUcerris, where a monolith bears an inscription which is read thus : OIRVSIVS Hic JAcrr ovnomori filivs. The similarity between Cirusius and Kerris is fairly evident. Later on, our Teutonic invaders made deeper changes in our language, driving the Keltic into the extreme west, and leaving the speech "of East Cornwall essentially English, with just a sparse Fprinkling of Norman words. This neo-Latin influence is chiefly noticeable on the scutcheons of our ancient gentry, armigers. The  Tremaynes, dwellers by the rock, when French was fashionable took for arms the three hands ; the Trewinnards, their three winnaids or redwings ; and the Trefosises, their three fusils. The Carminows held to their Cornish motto, Cala Rag Whethlow ; and the Polwheles to their Karenza whelaa Karenza. In the compilation of my list I have gleaned from the collection of Jonathan Couch, who, as "Video," contributed it to Notes and Queries (voL x., First Series, 1854). The glossary in the History of Polperro^ commonly attributed to my father, is, with the chapter on folk*lore, entirely my own. I have also had assistance from the Verbal Provincialisms of SouthrWestem Devonshire, by W. Pengelly, F.E.S. In this pamphlet, reprinted from the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science and Art, are many words contributed by Mr. Pengelly from Looe in East Corn- wall, and they are so identical in sound and meaning with those in use at Polperro, that I much doubt the accuracy of Mr. Bond*s informant when he says : — ^^ I have been informed that about a century ago the people of Polperro had such a dialect among them, that even the inhabitants of Looe could scarce understand what they said. Of late years, however, from associating more with strangers, they have nothing particularly striking in their mode of speech, except a few of the old people." ^ Many words have been taken from the comic and burlesque verse of Henry Daniel, a native of Lostwithiel, who has with exquisite humour and true poetic faculty made free use of our vernacular ; and also I am indebted to an interesting series of articles contributed by Dr. F. W. P. Jago, of Plymouth, to the pages of The Comishman, a Penzance weekly paper. I have been much guided in the proper rendering of the words by Mr. Ellis's Pronunciation of English Dialects, and have striven to give them as phonetically as I could in ordinary spelling. ^ Topographical and Historical Sketches of E. and W, Looe,

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Dialect Words used in East Cornwall , Collected by Thomas Q. Couch