[lit-ideas] Re: The King's Mother's Axe
- From: "Judith Evans" <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:35:35 +0100
What we want to know, David, is whether Gaelic is a grue language!!
the great majority of what
> are called 'cockneyisms' are not, as is commonly supposed,
> corruptions of the language, but were formerly in use among good
> writers,
I'd read that somewhere. But I've also read that US English is closer
to Shakespeare than UK English (I suppose it could be true: centuries
of isolation, and all that)
Judy Evans, Cardiff
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ritchie" <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 6:22 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The King's Mother's Axe
> Sorry I was unable to participate in the flurry of exchanges about
> language. I was busy. Here is a belated contribution, a propos of
> nothing.
>
> On Monday I dipped into a bound volume which collected "The Penny
> Magazine" of 1835. On January 17 that magazine published a summary
> of a work by Dr. Samuel Pegge, under the headline, "Anecdotes of the
> English Language." The argument was that, "the great majority of what
> are called 'cockneyisms' are not, as is commonly supposed,
> corruptions of the language, but were formerly in use among good
> writers, and have been retained by the Londoners after the literary
> and the refined have given them up." To me the most interesting
> examples considered in the piece involved what I thought was an
> African-Americanism transposition, "axe" for "ask":
>
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