The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #103911   Message #2126881
Posted By: GUEST,The black belt caterpillar wrestler
16-Aug-07 - 07:43 AM
Thread Name: Accents and Dialect
Subject: RE: Accents and Dialect
I have a book somewhere called "Glowing embers on a Somerset fire" that makes an interesting observation about Somerset words and phrases.
It advances the theory that the local people deliberately avoided the use of these new "Johnny come lately" Latin rooted words brought in by the Romans and mispronounced them where they were unavoidable.

Also it's interesting that the words for cooked meat such as "beef" and "mutton" are French derived, while the words for the animals themselves are not. It's the upper class French speakers who got to eat them while the surfs just looked after them! They were allowed to keep pigs though so we have "pork".