Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English

Description

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.

Sujets

• Inglés estadounidense
• Linguistics
• Western North Carolina
• Joseph Hall
• Culture of the Southern United States
• History of South Carolina
• Appalachian English
• History of the Southern United States
• Etymology
• East Tennessee
• Great Smoky Mountains
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park
• Appalachia
• Appalachian Mountains
• Historical linguistics
• American English
• Parc national des Great Smoky Mountains

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 22 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 11
• EAN13: 9781469662558
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English
Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English

MICHAEL B. MONTGOMERY & JENNIFER K. N. HEINMILLER
Foreword by JOAN HOUSTON HALL
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
Chapel Hill
This book was published in part with the support of the W. L. EURY APPALACHIAN COLLECTION at Appalachian State University; the Department of English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth; and Ricky Cox.
2021 The University of North Carolina Press
Foreword 2021 Joan Houston Hall
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Richard Hendel
Set in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover illustration: Great Smoky Mountains National Park at Oconaluftee Overlook , iStock.com/WerksMedia
Page i illustration by Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Montgomery, Michael, 1950-2019, compiler. | Heinmiller, Jennifer K. N., compiler. | Hall, Joseph S. (Joseph Sargent), 1906-1992. | Montgomery, Michael, 1950-2019, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.
Title: Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English / Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller.
Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051338 | ISBN 9781469662541 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662558 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : English language-Dialects-Appalachian Region, Southern-Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | Americanisms-Appalachian Region, Southern-Dictionaries. | Appalachians (People)-Languages. | Appalachian Region, Southern-Dictionaries. | LCGFT : Dictionaries. | Controlled vocabularies.
Classification: LCC PE 2927. A 6 M 66 2021 | DDC 427/.975-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051338
This book is dedicated to the past, present, and future generations who call the mountains of Appalachia their home. It is intended as a token of the authors appreciation for these communities, who share the beauty of their language, culture, and home with the world.
Contents
Foreword by Joan Houston Hall
Acknowledgments
Authors Note
History of the Dictionary
User s Guide to the Dictionary
Pronunciation Key
Abbreviations Used in the Dictionary
Background and Context of the Dictionary
Scope and Sources of the Dictionary
Index of Joseph Hall Speakers from the Smoky Mountains
Grammar and Syntax of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountain English
Introduction
Sources
1 Nouns
2 Pronouns
3 Articles and Adjectives
4 Verbal Morphology
5 The Verb Be
6 The Verb Have
7 Other Verb Features
8 Modal and Semimodal Auxiliary Verbs
9 a -Prefixing
10 The Infinitive
11 Negation
12 Direct and Indirect Objects
13 Adverbs and Adverbials
14 Prepositions and Particles
15 Conjunctions
16 Existentials
17 Compound and Complex Sentences
18 Other Patterns
19 Prefixes and Suffixes
Notes
DICTIONARY A-Z
Chronological List of Works Cited with Abbreviated Titles
Alphabetical List of Works Cited
Figures and Tables
Figures
Aden Carver, at age ninety-one
John Cable, Sam Sparks, Hubert Cable, and Fonz Cable, 1936
Man in front of herder s cabin built by Frank Oliver, 1935
Pupils of the Little Greenbriar School, 1936
Lenard, Thelma, and Willie Ownby at Cherokee Orchard
Mack Hannah and Hiram Wilburn
Alfred Dowdle cabin on Toe String Creek
Mr. Jones, the miller of Mingus Creek
A ranger on horseback in the 1930s in Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Clementine Enloe
Uncle Silas Messer, Cove Creek, North Carolina, 1937
James and Melissa Hannah at their cabin in Cataloochee, North Carolina
Tables
1 Speakers Joseph Sargent Hall interviewed or observed, 1937-1972
2 Personal pronouns
3 Possessive pronouns
4 Reflexive pronouns
5 Demonstrative pronouns
6 Regular verbs
7 Inflected forms of be in the present tense indicative
8 Past indicative forms of be
Foreword
The publication of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English ( DSME ) in 2004, edited by Michael B. Montgomery and based in large part on the historical collections of Joseph S. Hall, was an eagerly anticipated event in lexicographic, folkloric, and historical circles. It did not disappoint.
Lexicographers (especially my colleagues at the Dictionary of American Regional English ) welcomed the documentation of words, phrases, and grammatical structures for which we often had tantalizingly little evidence; folklorists reveled in the elaboration-through well-chosen and detailed citations-of customs and traditions of a culture they understood and cherished; and historians found that excerpts from the diaries and letters of Civil War soldiers put a very human face on both the tragic and the quotidian aspects of the conflict. The DSME was clearly a landmark work giving serious and professional treatment to the language, culture, and history of a distinctive region.
The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English ( DSAE ), a greatly enlarged, expanded, and augmented work, will be equally well received. The numbers of entry words and senses have been increased by thousands; the geographic range and the chronological scope of the citations have been expanded, with the documentation being increased by nearly 60 percent; and the inclusion of new source materials-many of them rare, in manuscript form, or disseminated only locally-adds extremely valuable evidence that is unavailable elsewhere.
Like the earlier work, the DSAE includes a detailed section explaining the many elements of morphology and syntax of southern mountain speech varieties that characterize them and set them off from other regional dialects. These include such widely recognized features as plural pronouns such as y all, you uns, we uns, us ns ; possessive pronouns hisn, hern, ourn, theirn, yourn ; superlatives like fightingest, workingest ; multiple modals such as may can, might could, might should ought, used to would ; nonstandard verb forms; a- prefixing, as in He come a-runnin and a-shoutin ; postposed one , as in He is in Tennessee or Kentucky, one ; and many other grammatical elements. These features are referenced in the entries themselves, and the Grammar and Syntax of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountain English section provides an overall account, with detailed and useful analysis.
For the DSAE , the decision to define Southern Appalachia as the area established by the Appalachian Regional Commission (encompassing parts of eight states from southern West Virginia to northeastern Alabama) was a pragmatic if not always comfortable one. Because it is much larger than the East Tennessee and western North Carolina region of the DSME , this area is inevitably more varied and less cohesive; but that also allowed an exploration of intraregional differences in language and culture, and it invited a more intensive investigation of traditional pastimes, occupations, and social customs.
Religious practices, such as the camp meeting (which is also called a basket meeting, big meeting, brush meeting, grove meeting , and protracted meeting ) are given detailed treatment, as are the many kinds of workings (such as barn raisings, house raisings, corn shuckings, log rollings , and quilting bees ) that are normally followed by a social event such as an apple butter stirring, candy breaking , or molasses pull . The entries for these traditional practices are accompanied by copious cross-references, making it easy for readers to search the Dictionary topic by topic. Unsurprisingly, entries for farming, fishing, hunting, milling, medicine, plants, and moonshining also receive full treatment. Amid them all are the colorful, innovative, expressive, and sometimes archaic lexical items that make the speech of Southern Appalachia one of the most widely recognized varieties of English in America.
As was true with the DSME , it is the citations that are the heart of the DSAE . Taken not just from novels, newspapers, histories, and biographies but also from diaries, letters, wills, church archives, and recordings such as those in Montgomery s Archive of Traditional Appalachian Speech and Culture, the quotations document the natural, unedited, unselfconscious speech of people throughout the region. A particularly valuable new resource for the DSAE was the ongoing Corpus of American Civil War Letters, which provided nearly two thousand citations.
The research for the expansion of the earlier work was begun shortly after its publication in 2004. As it became clear that the nature, number, and locations of excellent resources greatly exceeded the capacity of any one person to investigate them all, Montgomery invited his former student and research assistant, Jennifer Heinmiller, to be coeditor on the DSAE . Their very productive collaboration over the last decade has resulted in the first comprehensive dictionary of an American region based on historical principles. The DSAE will be valued not only by lexicographers and linguists but also by teachers, historians, oral historians, regional culture enthusiasts, and the many visitors to this distinctive region.
Sadly, Montgomery did not live to see publication of his magnum opus. Readers owe a huge debt to Heinmiller, whose dedication in shepherding it to completion makes it available now and in perpetuity.
JOAN