SELECTED MINUTES OF COUNCIL, APPOINTING COMMITTEES.

Passed at the Meeting at Seaton,

JULY, 1885.

8. That Rev. Professor Chapman, Rev. W. Harpley, Mr. W. Pengelly, Mr. J. Brooking Rowe, and Rev. T. R. R. Stebbing be a Committee for the purpose of considering at what place the Association shall hold its Meeting in 1887, who shall be invited to be the Officers during the year beginning with that Meeting, and who shall be invited to fill any official vacancy or vacancies which may occur before the Annual Meeting in 1886; that Mr. Pengelly be the Secretary; and that they be requested to report to the next Winter Meeting of the Council, and, if necessary, to the first Meeting of the Council to be held in July, 1886.

9. That Mr. George Doe, Rev. W. Harpley, Mr. H. S. Gill, Mr. E. Parfitt, and Mr. J. Brooking Rowe be a Committee for the purpose of noting the discovery or occurrence of such Facts in any department of scientific inquiry, and connected with Devonshire, as it may be desirable to place on permanent record, but which may not be of sufficient importance in themselves to form the subjects of separate papers; and that Mr. J. Brooking Rowe be the Secretary.

10. That Mr. P. F. S. Amery, Mr. George Doe, Mr. R. Dymond, Rev. W. Harpley, Mr. P. Q. Karkeek, and Mr. J. Brooking Rowe be a Committee for the purpose of collecting notes on Devonshire Folk-Lore; and that Mr. George Doe be the Secretary.

11. That Mr. R. W. Cotton, Mr. R. Dymond, Mr. P. Q. Karkeek, Sir J. H. Kennaway, Mr. E. Windeatt, and Mr. R. N. Worth be a Committee for the purpose of compiling a list of deceased Devonshire Celebrities, as well as an Index of the entire Bibliography having reference to them; and that Mr. R. W. Cotton be the Secretary.

12. That Dr. Brushfield, Mr. A. Champernowne, Lord Clifford, Mr. R. Dymond, Mr. A. H. A. Hamilton, Mr. G. Pycroft, Mr. J. Shelly, and Mr. R. N. Worth be a Committee to prepare a Report on the Public and Private Collections of Works of Art in Devonshire; and that Mr. Dymond be the Secretary.

13. That Mr. J. S. Amery, Mr. G. Doe, Mr. R. Dymond, Mr. F. T. Elworthy, Mr. F. H. Firth, Mr. P. O. Hutchinson, Mr. P. Q. Karkeek, and Dr. W. C. Lake be a Committee for the purpose of noting and recording the existing use of any Verbal Provincialisms in Devonshire, in either written or spoken language; that Mr. F. T. Elworthy be the Editor, and that Mr. F. H. Firth be the Secretary.

14. That Mr. J. S. Amery, Mr. J. B. Davidson, Mr. G. Doe, Mr. R. Dymond, Rev. W. Harpley, Mr. J. S. Hurrell, Mr. P. 0. Hutchinson, Sir John B. Phear, Mr. J. Brooking Rowe, and Mr. R. N. Worth be a Committee for editing and annotating such parts of Domesday Book as relate to Devonshire; and that Mr. J. Brooking Rowe be the Secretary.

15. That Mr. P. F. S. Amery, Mr. G. Doe, Mr. P. O. Hutchinson, Mr. E. Parfitt, Mr. J. Brooking Rowe, and Mr. R. N. Worth be a Committee to collect and record facts relating to Barrows in Devonshire, and to take steps, where possible, for their investigation; and that Mr. R. N. Worth be the Secretary.

16. That Mr. J. S. Amery, Mr. G. Doe, Mr. R. Dymond, Mr. T. C. Kellock, Mr. J. B. Paige-Browne, Mr. J. Brooking Rowe, and Mr. E. Windeatt be a Committee to obtain information as to peculiar tenures of land, and as to customs of Manor Courts, in Devonshire; and that Mr. E. Windeatt be the Secretary.

17. That Mr. Blackler, Mr. F. H. Firth, Rev. W. Harpley, Mr. E. Parfitt, and Mr. R. C. Tucker be a Committee for the purpose of making the arrangements for the Association dinner at St. Mary Church, 1886; and that Mr. R. C. Tucker be the Secretary.

18. That Mr. James Hamlyn, Mr. E. E. Glyde, Mr. E. Parfitt, and Mr. P. F. S. Amery be a Committee to collect and tabulate trustworthy and comparable observations on the climate of Devon; and that Mr. P. F. S. Amery be the Secretary.

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

(Words or letters inserted in square brackets are intended as a guide to the pronunciation of the words preceding.)

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,-It is possible at times for one who has to address an audience upon a subject selected either for him or by himself to approach his task with a degree of enthusiasm that makes him somewhat impatient of prefatory matter he longs to rush at once in medias res. Such is my case this evening. As a Devonshire man, and one who has for many years devoted to philological pursuits such scanty scraps of leisure as could be secured amid the duties and cares of an arduous profession, I have hoped to interest my hearers in a topic that blends and intertwines the fascinations of Devon and Philology-the Devonshire Dialect as illustrating and illustrated by other dialects and languages. And though to the splendid beacon-light which here in the West of England has been kindled and maintained by Members of this Association and former Presidents it is but a yaffle o' ude [laugh and Fr. eu nearly] that I am able to contribute, and that too without any attempt at eloquence, any endeavour to charm the ear with periods polished and rotund, I yet claim and demand that you shall share my enthusiasm in studying the language of our forefathers. For, to judge from the analogy of the northern part of the island, it was not only the peasantry in former days who spoke the special dialect of our county, but more or less it was used by all classes. In our own time indeed even the peasantry are forgetting the local mode of speech; but if in Scotland of old learned clergymen such as William Lauder and Barbour, bishops of noble family like Gawain Douglas, heralds like Sir David Lindesay, Lyon King of Armes, wrote in "braid Scots," which we know our Scottish king James I. familiarly understood, it is at least probable in a very high degree that our ancestors, if they had bequeathed to us a

local literature from early times, would have left it arrayed in some such linguistic costume as the Exmoor Scolding and Courtship, Mrs. Gwatkin's Devonshire Dialogues, or Nathan Hogg's Poems.

Now when we read these little volumes, but especially the clever and humorous productions of the late Mr. Baird, the peculiarity that most forcibly arrests our attention is perhaps the PRONUNCIATION, So widely different from that which is current in good modern society throughout the island. Let us therefore deal first with Pronunciation. And giving precedence to the vowels, we at once notice that notwithstanding our familiarly speaking of the "broad" Devonshire Dialect, changes that have been made-corruptions, if you pleasehave really been in the direction, not of broadening, but of narrowing the sounds.

Take vorrid for example (= forward). The original sound of this word I take to have been foreward [store, hard]. Here the ward, which in current English has undergone a slight narrowing [cord], and in German has become wärts [care], has in the Devonshire Dialect thinned off into wid, from which finally the w has disappeared.

Take the verb would, the past tense of will. This is one of the Mixed Verbs in which besides change of vowel as in the Strong Verbs the Weak Termination d was also added, and wolde [Ger. wollte], or with the u sound [bulldog], as is the usual modern sound, was the result. That the vowel was short as in the German wollte we know from the Ormulum to have been the fact for at least six centuries and a half: it was not long as in told, sold, from tell and sell. But in the Devonshire Dialect this wolde, besides losing the final vowel and the l, has, like the second syllable of forward, dwindled away to wid; nay, it becomes thinner still sometimes-weed, made by Nathan Hogg to rhyme with the participle zeed.

In like manner the O.Fr. juste [dzh, now zh] has given us just [dzh, rust], but is the Dev. Dial. jist; nonsense is nonsins; can, kin; must, miss; from, vrim; that, thit; whoever, uiver; upon, apin; yes, yiss or iss; curious, kuryiss [Fr. queue nearly]; purchase, the second syllable of which was the O.Fr. chacer [tsh], now chasser, is purchis. It is unnecessary to multiply examples, but it is right to add that zich for such is not one. This word preserves the true ancient vowel of the A.S. and E.E. swile, though every other element of the word has been modified or thrown away.

Another thin sound that is very frequent in the Devonshire

Dialect is u as in butes and shuz. The true Devonshire sound of this vowel seems to me to be more nearly the French eu than u. Prince L. L. Bonaparte considers it to lie between the two. Mr. A. J. Ellis affirms that he has heard both sounds in different parts of Devonshire, and as he possesses wonderful accuracy of ear, I suspect he is right, though his observation is not confirmed by my own. Well, this sound in a large number of words is substituted for the fuller oo [Fr. ou, Ital. and Ger. u]. Thus, to quote a few examples only, the A.S. bóc (book), dó (do), móna (moon), nón (noon), gós, lócian (look), eów (you), which I believe to have been sounded as in modern English, except that all of them had a long vowel, have become in Devonshire buk, du, mune, nune, guse, luk, yu; the O.N. tók [cloke], which is our took, has become tuk; the Fr. prouver, mouvoir, coussin, have become pruve, muve, cushin. In words derived from earlier French forms with such as user, cruel, flûte, curieux, the vowel in Devonshire in all probability has remained almost unchanged, as in yuz, cruel, vlut, curyiss; for it was at a very early period that the French changed the full Italian u, with which these words were doubtless sounded in the Latin originals, into the thin u which is now so familiar.

But it may be urged that there is certainly one large class of words in which the Devonshire Dialect gives a broader sound, as in taich, aich, clain, baist, ait yer mait, laive, pursaive, &c. True these are broader sounds, that is, you have to open your mouth wider in sounding them than teach, each, eat your meat, and so on; but it is these latter forms which are the corruptions, though fashion has set her seal upon them, and Devonshire has preserved the genuine older pronunciation. If I may be pardoned for alluding to my own investigations, I may claim to have proved this-and the proof is admitted by some who were very unwilling to accept it-in my work on Early English Pronunciation. It is there shown that though in Chaucer and other early English poets words may be spelt with the same termination, they may yet be sounded differently, just as even now here and there end in the same three letters, but the sound is not the same. In those poets we find queene, kene, grene, bene (part.), sene (part.), wene, bitwene, &c., rhyme together, all of these being spelt with een in modern English, while lene, mene (noun and verb), bene (noun), clene, &c., all of which we now spell with ea, also rhyme together, but as a rule refuse to rhyme with the former class. So it is with words in eke: cheke, leke, seke, biseke (now beseech), weke (noun), meke, are one class yielding