Re: Kench & Para-British, was Re: Missing Listmembers...

On Sun, 15 Oct 2000 12:57:01 +0000, Rik Roots <rikroots@...>
wrote:

>Has any of this been posted on a website or similar?
Unfortunately, no. I have no webpage yet. I will upload something...
some day... I promise!

I've posted something on this list, though.

>Coming from Kent
>(man of kent, not kentish man) I think any conlang based on "home
>territory" would be interesting.
>Although a local, I know almost nothing of the development of the Kent
>dialect, except that it would have been rooted in the language of the
>Jutes rather than the Angles or Saxons, and that it would probably
>have been more receptive to loanwords, given the amount of trade with
>the continent that has always taken place.
Starting from the earliest charters, the Kentish dialect of OE shows
many unique features, both in phonetics  - y(:) > e(:), no long <ae>,
etc. - and morphology (e. g. 1 sg. ending in present tense -o).

It seems that the latest attested stage of this dialect is represented
in Ayenbite of Inwyt written by Dan Michel of Northgate in 14th century:

http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/c/cme/cme-idx?type=header&idno=Ayenbite

AFAIK no modern dialect in Kent descends directly from this
type of language (it would be good if I were wrong. Do you know any
local dialect that doesn't rhyme e. g. _mind_ and _find_? Something
like _mend_, but _vind_?).

>I did read in a local history book (not a clue about its title, sorry)
>that people in Kent were very inventive about words (18-19 century?),
>and would makeup words as a sort of game (well, winters were long in
>those days) - a bit like cockney, but inventing words rather than
>finding rhyming slangs...
>
>Rik
Kent seems to be a good place for conlangers :)


Basilius