Page:Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Tolkien and Gordon - 1925.djvu/35

Rh Cheshire dialects; misy, modern missy, restricted to south Lancashire dialcts.

The alliteration: it is notable that in Sir Gawain wh (= OE. hw) alliterates with original w, in contrast to such a poem as The Destruction of Troy, in which wh (= OE. hw) alliterates with qu (= OE. cw). Yet The Destruction of Troy is probably north-west Midland: the general character of its language in the extant copy is confirmed by the occurrence of the west Midland form hom, ’them’, in alliteration. The alliteration of wh and w in Sir Gawain indicates that it was composed further south than The Destruction of Trow. The line between the different developments of OE. hw which made possible these different types of alliteration seems to have been roughly the valley of the Ribble. Thus local names originally beginning with hw- written down in Cockersand or Furness are spelt qu-, whereas such local names written in Lancashire, Whalley, and elsewhere south of the Ribble are spelt wh-, w-. This difference may be followed in the selection of medieval spellings of place-names in Ekwall’s Place-Names of Lancashire, if care is taken to distinguish the place where the forms were written down.

The rhymes. The general character of the dialect forms, as proved by rhymes, is Midland, with an intermixture of northern forms, such as might be expected of a Midland dialect bordering on the norther dialect area. The following forms are characteristically northern or north Midland:

Imper. sg. and pres. indic. sg. in -es, -eȝ. as in slokes, cnokeȝ , rhyming with he strokes.

Pres. indic. pl. in -es: þay hyȝes, rhyming with þyȝes.