Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. PRONUNCIATION. Few writers ever had a closer acquaintance with the folk-speech of their country than Sir Walter Scott. The frequent illustrations he gives of the Lowland Scottish tongue, so closely allied to our East Yorkshire vernacular, give additional life and interest to his ever-fresh writings. Another Sir Walter Scott there can never be again; still, it may be wished that we had some native Yorkshireman of literary fame who would take up our own folk-talk somewhat in the same spirit at least as the author of Waverley did that of his country. The attempts which authors sometimes make to introduce touches of the Yorkshire tongue into their writings are, it must be confessed, for the most part failures; the older country-folk would, I feel sure, be generally at a loss to know what such-parodies of their parlance were meant for. This failure can only be explained by the fact that it is not altogether an easy thing for those who live at a distance from it to know any country speech well. Even the mighty literary gifts of Sir Walter Scott would have failed him in this particular had he not lived all his life among the people whose language he so often reproduced; nor would that have sufficed had he not besides constantly heldintercourse with the country folk themselves, and so become at first hand thoroughly in touch with their habits of life as well as with their modes of thought and expression ; in short, had he not been perfectly ' at home' with them. In this way, and in this way only, can a folk-talk be really known. Our country people here are in a sense bi-lingual, like the Welsh ; with this difference, that the two varieties of speech which the Yorkshireman makes use of are not so widely dissimilar as in the case of the Welshman. Still, our people h...