Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 7.djvu/206

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NOTES AND QUERIES, no s. vu. MARCH 2, MOT.

Baumberow to Bothombar." The sense is, .throughout the northern district of England. " Baumberow " is, of course, Bamborough. The foot-note says that, in place of " Bothom- bar," other editions have " Bothambar." This gives the solution, for the latter form stands for " Botham Bar," i.e., Bootham Bar, in the city of York.

WALTER W. SKEAT.

H IN SHROPSHIRE AND WORCESTERSHIRE. DR. RANDOLPH at 9 S. viii. 283 inquired what ground there was for saying that some old Shropshire families drop their h's, and rather pride themselves on doing so. As he may not be a subscriber to Berrow's Worcester Journal, the following extract from that paper, dated 17 Nov., 1906, may interest him and your readers generally :

" Mr. Stapleton Martin writes from Norton,

Worcester: 'I have recently read a letter of

F. 0. Morris, the naturalist, who died in 1893, written to the London Time* newspaper in June, 1878, in which, after stating that he was afraid that the beautiful county of Worcester must be held to be the cunabula of the offences of omission and of commission against the letter h, he said that when he was at school at Bromsgrove the following lines-; ajmeared somewhere about that time in one of the Worcester papers :

The Complaint of the letter H to the Inhabitants

of Worcester.

Whereas by you I have been driven From hope, from home, from house, from heaven, And placed by your most learn'd society In exile, anguish, and anxiety, I hereby ask full restitution, And beg you '11 mend your elocution.

' To which the following rejoinder appeared in the next week's paper : Whereas we 've rescued you, ingrate, From hell, from horror, and from hate, From hedgebill, horsepond, and from halter, And consecrated you in altar, We think you need no restitution, And shall not mend our elocution. The writer added that he inclined to think that they had kept to their determination and had been as good as their word. There are now very few old (untitled) families in Worcestershire in existence, but people who have acquired a certain county status in it may be heard, at this clay, to drop the too-rough h, though hardly, I think, would [they] oare to boast that they did.' "

FRANCIS H. RELTON. 9, Broughton Road, Thornton Heath. [MR. JONATHAN BOUCHIKR printed at 5 S. v. 64 (22 Jan., 18/0) a similar 'Remonstrance from the Letter H to the Inhabitants of Shropshire,' with an 4 Answer trom the Inhabitants of Shropshire ' The first two lines of the ' Remonstrance ' run : Whereas by you we have been driven From hearth and home, from hope and heaven, the second line being a decided improvement The -other variations are not important. At 9 S. vi. 85

full particulars are given with respect to the original publication of Catherine Fanshawe's cele- brated lines

'Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell; while at 7 S. vi. 110 is printed in full Horace May- hew's parody, beginning

I dwells in the Herth, and I breathes in the Hair ; If you searches the Hocean, you '11 find that I 'm ' there.]

PANCAKE BELL IN NEWCASTLE. I was rather surprised, as a Londoner, to read in Brockett's ' Glossary of North - Country Words ' that on Shrove Tuesday "it is a general custom in the North to have pancakes served up." This custom is quoted by Dr. Murray in the ' N.E.D.,' but the custom is certainly not peculiar to the North. Brockett goes on to quote from Taylor the Water-Poet a record of a former custom in Newcastle on Shrove Tuesday, which may have been (let us hope was) only local :

"When the clock strikes eleven, which (by the help of a knavish sexton) is commonly before nine, then there is a bell rung, called pancake bell, the sound whereof makes thousands of people dis- tracted and forgetful either of manners or humanity."

W. T. LYNN.

Blackheath.

[For the Pancake Bell at various places see 10 S. iii. '223, 331, and the references appended to MR. RATCLIFFE'S note.]

LANGUAGES IN BURMA. The Indian Daily News of Calcutta, in its issue of 7 January, under the heading ' The Land of Babel,' says that the Lieutenant-Governor of Burma has directed that the groups of languages shall be officially as follows :

I. The Siyin, Tashon, Lai, Chinbok, and Chin me dialects of the Chin language, and the Chin language as spoken on the borders of Arakan Division, and the Thayetmyo, Minbu, and Henzada Districts.

II. The Kami and Mro languages.

III. The Chingpaw dialect of the Kachin lan- guage.

IV. The The Manipuri language.

V. The Karenni, the Bre, the Padoung, and the Zayein languages.

VI. The Taungthu language.

VII. The Palaung, the Pale, and Riang (Yang Lam dialect) languages.

VIII. The Wa language as spoken either in the State of Man"; Lun or in the State of Kentung.

IX. The Lahu or Muhso and the Lisaw languages.

X. The Atsi or Szi and the Maru languages.

XI. The Siamese language.

XII. The Malay language.

The districts in or on the borders of which the several groups of languages above specified will be held to be spoken are :

I. All districts in the Arakan Division, the Hen- zada, Thayetmyo, Pakokku, Minbu, and Upper Chindwin Districts, and the Chin Hills.

II. The Northern Arakan and Akyab Districts.