R XIII

THE MOUNTAIN DIALECT

One day I handed a volume of John Fox's stories to a neighbor and asked
him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of
mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same
atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, then suddenly stared
at me in amazement.

"What's the matter with it?" I asked, wondering what he could have found
to startle him at the very beginning of a story.

"Why, that feller _don't know how to spell_!"

Gravely I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced, so
far as possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was
of no use. My friend was outraged. "That tale-teller then is jest makin'
fun of the mountain people by misspellin' our talk. You educated folks
don't spell your own words the way you say them."

A most palpable hit; and it gave me a new point of view.

To the mountaineers themselves their speech is natural and proper, of
course, and when they see it bared to the spotlight, all eyes drawn
toward it by an orthography that is as odd to them as it is to us, they
are stirred to wrath, just as we would be if our conversation were
reported by some Josh Billings or Artemas Ward.

The curse of dialect writing is elision. Still, no one can write it
without using the apostrophe more than he likes to; for our highland
speech is excessively clipped. "I'm comin' d'reck'ly" has a quaintness
that should not be lost. We cannot visualize the shambling but eager
mountaineer with a sample of ore in his hand unless the writer reports
him faithfully: "Wisht you'd 'zamine this rock fer me--I heern tell you
was one o' them 'sperts."

Although the hillsmen save some breath in this way, they waste a good
deal by inserting sounds where they do not belong. Sometimes it is only
an added consonant: gyarden, acrost, corkus (caucus); sometimes a
syllable: loaferer, musicianer, suddenty. Occasionally a word is both
added to and clipped from, as cyarn (carrion). They are fond of grace
syllables: "I gotta me a deck o' cyards." "There ain't nary bitty sense
in it."

More interesting are substitutions of one sound for another. In mountain
dialect all vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds of
_a_ are confused with _e_, as hed (had), kem (came), keerful; or with
_i_, grit (grate), rifle (raffle); with _o_, pomper, toper (taper),
wrop; or with _u_, fur, ruther. So any other vowel may serve in place