The spelling and pronunciation of the modified form of the dialect

Only three years elapsed between the publication of Barnes's second collection of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect in 1859 and his third in 1862, but in those three years he made further changes in spelling beyond those he had already made in the second collection, almost all of them designed to bring the spelling still closer to that of StE. In several instances the StE spelling was itself adopted, as in father, path, half, and last in place of faether, paeth, haef, and laste or laest in 1859; day for 1859 dae; ridge and bridge for rudge and brudge; over for auver or awver; and -ow for -or in disyllabic words with unstressed final syllable, such as fellow, hollow, pillow, and window. In some other instances there was a partial move towards StE spelling, as in drough for 1859 droo (‘through’); in others again, as in woone and woonce for oone and oonce (‘one’ and ‘once’), the change appears to be designed to bring out the similarity with the initial sound of the words in RP rather than with the spelling of StE.

There were a few further changes in spelling in the second edition of the third collection (1869), and yet more (including the restoration of some broad forms that had earlier been abandoned) in the three-in-one collection of 1879, which became the standard edition of Barnes's dialect poems thereafter and from which the text in this book is taken. These individual changes do not concern us here; but I give below, in tabular form, a summary (repeated from Volume 2 of this series) of the chief spellings used in the final version of the modified form of the dialect in 1879, showing how they differ from the spellings of the broad form.

Chief differences in spelling between the broad form of the dialect in 1844 and the modified form in 1879

The table below is arranged alphabetically according to the spellings found in column 2—the spellings used in the poems appearing in this book—with occasional alternative spellings in parentheses.