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Dialect words
On its own dialect isn't definitive in tying down Anne's 'accent' to anything other than a general area of the country but, combined with other details, it can be persuasive. Today we can say that some dialect words are found in some counties and not others but it's less safe to extrapolate back in time and make the same claim for the same areas in Anne's day. Language is dynamic and with the growth of education in the nineteenth-century we might expect that spelling became more universal. But unusual names for things have persisted.
Anne mentions the incident of the lost 'shuppick', apparently a corruption of the words 'sheaf pike'. How widely this term for a pitch fork was used in the eighteenth-century would, I imagine, be difficult to determine, but today it occurs in Herefordshire, and in Gloucestershire.
The words 'tollet' and 'tallet', two spellings of the same word meaning a hayloft, are both used in the diary version we have today. But the difference, while possibly a genuine one if Anne wrote the word both ways, may also be down to mistranscription or even a modern typing error. Given this uncertainty, even if we proved that different pronunciations were actually used in different localities, we'd be no better off.
We've already mentioned the two pronunciations of the word Ryemeadows. There is also an instance of two similar sounding words both written differently in the book. Anne mentions 'The Ley Farm' and also refers to 'Lower Layes'. Whether Anne actually wrote both as she pronounced them or the difference has arisen for other reasons will remain a mystery unless we can discover other records that affirm Anne's spelling or discover the place names, unchanged, today. The ultimate proof would be to find the original Diary manuscript. The understanding of dialect words is just one more example of how it could illuminate life in the eighteenth-century and just how important a historical find it would be if it did turn up.
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