vocab

[kev67]

I have just started reading this. It has a good opening chapter at least. I am already struggling a bit with some of the vocabulary, despite the explanatory notes. Let me see:

• haggler - itinerant dealer of goods
• lamb's fry - cooked lamb's offal, especially testicles
• black-pot - some sort of peasant dish?
• chitterlings - cooked pig intestines
• ostler - stableman at an inn
• market-nitch - as much alcohol as you can drink after market
• uncabined - unconfined

Nice to have a dialect guide in a book, although "voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR" is not all that helpful.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Good, I'm glad you have started it, I hope you enjoy it.

The vocab is not difficult at all when you get used to it. Don't forget Hardy's writing set in rural 'Wessex' and as a result there are some dialect words/phrases in there but don't let that distract you from the flow of the text.

[cacian]

I have just started reading this. It has a good opening chapter at least. I am already struggling a bit with some of the vocabulary, despite the explanatory notes. Let me see:

• haggler - itinerant dealer of goods
• lamb's fry - cooked lamb's offal, especially testicles
• black-pot - some sort of peasant dish?
• chitterlings - cooked pig intestines
• ostler - stableman at an inn
• market-nitch - as much alcohol as you can drink after market
• uncabined - unconfined

Nice to have a dialect guide in a book, although "voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR" is not all that helpful.

Hi Kev67. I tried to gopass the first page but then thought better of it so good luck
One question if you do not mind:
what do you mean by a syllable UR?

[kev67]

Hi Kev67. I tried to gopass the first page but then thought better of it so good luck
One question if you do not mind:
what do you mean by a syllable UR?

The passage is

"Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school; the characteristic intonation of that dialect, for this district, being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech."

Perhaps he means OOO-AAAHHH. Check this example at 0:55.

[cacian]

The passage is

"Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school; the characteristic intonation of that dialect, for this district, being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech."

Perhaps he means OOO-AAAHHH. Check this example at 0:55.

I think he propably meas EUUUUUR with
try and say
HER without the H.

[kiki1982]

It's sometimes interesting to check out what people ate back then.

An ostler could also be someone renting out horses (and carriages) for a living, I believe, but the denomination stretched from being employed in the stables of an inn to more independent occupations. Or that's what I gathered from Collins Dictionary.

The 'UR' sound is west country, I believe. Is that not the guys of the 'I've got a brandnew combine harvester'-song with a lot of inuendo? It is also called the 'Birmingham bur' and has a strongly vocalised r pretty much like the Americans, Irish, Canadians etc. Not a silent one like the rest of us.

I agree, Hardy uses a lot of dialect, but it's nice in a way. It doesn't really get in the way of the flow. Don't let yourself be distracted by the notes too much. The reason why he is using historical dishes (or what was probably eaten in his time by poor people still) is that he wants to embelish his story as much as possible. As long as you know that they are drinking or eating something it hardly matters what it is exactly.

[kev67]

The 'UR' sound is west country, I believe. Is that not the guys of the 'I've got a brandnew combine harvester'-song with a lot of inuendo? It is also called the 'Birmingham bur' and has a strongly vocalised r pretty much like the Americans, Irish, Canadians etc. Not a silent one like the rest of us.

Yep, that's them, The Wurzels. I can't say I've ever heard of the 'Birmingham bur' before or noticed a strongly vocalised r among the Irish and Americans. I will look it up though. I know Hardy is from Dorset and they used to have quite thick west country accents there. I have difficulty telling one country accent from another. Presumably the Dorset accent was slightly different to Somerset, Wiltshire, Devon and all the other counties around there. I once watched about 20 minutes of Roman Polanski's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Most of the actors seemed to have nailed the accent, except Nasstassja Kinski who played Tess, and whose accent was not spot on.

I got to say, the vocabulary and references are rather more difficult than Dickens' some thirty years earlier. I am not sure whether the reference notes were originally supplied by Thomas Hardy, but if there were then they were meant for contemporary readers. That leaves plenty for his future readers to scratch their heads over. He uses long words, he uses phonetic spelling of accents, and he uses 19th century, peasant vocabulary. He also makes allusions that his contemporary readers may have understood, but which are lost to most of us. It's not holding me up much though.

Some more interesting use of language obervations:

• Numbers are pronounced two-and-twenty, four-and-twenty instead of twenty-two, twenty-four. I noticed Charles Dickens used the same convention. I wonder when that changed. I often thought the German way of counting numbers (e.g. zweiundzwanzig, vierundzwanzig) was rather quaint.
  
• In chapter 5 it says somewhere, "As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers..." That amused me slightly. Whenever I read any book on economics or sustainability, it nearly always refers to Robert Malthus, whose hypothesis was that any population eventually grows to exceed the carrying capacity of its environment.
  
• At the end of chapter 5, after meeting Tess for the first time, Alec d'Urberville says, "Well - I'm damned! What a funny thing! Ha-ha-ha! And what a crumby girl!" Crumby?! That sounds harsh. She's rather a lovely girl. Presumably 'crumby' meant something else then.

[kiki1982]

The Wurzels! That's them!

Apparently it's called the 'Birmingham burr' (two Rs), but there is also a so-called 'Bristol burr' (according to the BBC) which we are talking about here I think. Birmingham does not pronounce its Rs too much where to the west they do.

Never noticed that vocablised r? Maybe it's the place you are used to. I have always wondered whether the sheer amount of Irish who emigrated to America actually had that hideous American accent in some places on their consciousness...

I agree that Dickens is easier, maybe because he doesn't embellish too much, or at least not with things we don't know.

The numbers:
I think it started to change around the second half of the 19th century. I think Trollope already writes in twenty twos and not two-and-twenties. I don't know why this happened. I have tried to Google, but too difficult to find. Maybe it has to do with the country being split into two groups of dialects and eventually they decided only to opt for one. With a very efficient Victorian school system, that will spread like wildfire. Bearing in mind they almost eterminated the Welsh language in a few generations, I think that is well possible.

I think some of the notes are Hardy's for his contemporary public, but some are modern. I think they should be marked as original or not in your edition, though. It stands no doubt that Hardy is slightly more difficult to read than Dickens, but I believe he also wrote with much more love for his world than Dickens. Maybe it's down to the setting (a city is always less intimate than the country), but I feel Hardy loves every one of his characters (but escpecially Tess) where Dickens kind of 'used' them to criticise whatever he felt like. Which he did well, though.

[kev67]

More vocabulary from just after the rape.

propinquity - nearness. Could have guess this from the context.
"rendlewood" (barked-oak). Odd how Hardy felt the need to explain this word and not all the others.
hontish - haughty
flexuous - full of bends or curves
quiescent - inactive. Knew that one as it appeared in a technical manual once.
apotheosized - glorified

[kev67]

Tess is leaving home again to work as a dairymaid over the summer.

kine - cows.
milchers - cows again, but why milchers and not milkers?
gypsy's crock - three legged cooking pot, but cows have four teats, don't they.
steading - a small farm.
barton - a farmyard.
unexpended - not spent.
psalter - a book containing psalms.
precept - commandment, instruction or order.

[kev67]

This reminds me of Call My Bluff (TV panel game where the panelists give three definitions of an obscure word and the other side has to guess which is correct).

patten - wooden-soled shoe
azew - dry up (in reference to cows' udders)
kex - hollow stem or stalk
stave - rung (in this instance)
on the stoop - bent over (I think)
tranters - peddlers

The head dairyman asks Tess if she wants a "dish o' tay or victuals". Funny how Dickens' characters pronounces 'victuals' as 'wittles', but Hardy's characters say it proper. Dish o' tay presumably means cup of tea.

[kev67]

ebullition - violent outpouring
niaiseries - silliness
rozum - ?

'niaiseries' was written in italics so is presumably foreign, French I expect.
'rozum' is presumably not a Polish or Czech loan word but I can't find any other definition. It has a west country sound to it.

[kiki1982]

Niaserie comes from the French 'niais", according to Wikitionary, 1 Oiseau de fauconnerie que l’on prenait dans le nid et qui n’en étaient pas encore sortis. (Falkonry bird which was taken from its nest before leaving it, i.e. still very young); 2 (fig.) Qui, dans ses paroles et ses actions, montre de l’inexpérience et de la sottise. (he who, through his words or actions, shows inexperience and stupidity/foolishness).

Rozum could refer to reason/understanding. From the Polish which expresses the idea of 'I understand' as '(Ja) rozumie'. Could that be helpful at all?

[kev67]

Angel Clare is descibed as "one id the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed" by Dairyman Crick with respect to his views on noble families. I doubt rozum really does derive from Polish or Czech. Maybe it is a west country corruption of another word or the name of some famous rebel now lost in time.

convenances - the social proprieties or conventionalities.

[kev67]

carking - to burden or be burdened with trouble
trowing - to think, believe or trust
love-making - presumably meant something different then.