George Savary Wasson and the Dialect of Kittery Point, Maine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8728870 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jacob Bennett (0000-0002-2215-5252, corresponding author), B J Irwin |
| Year | 1974 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1/2 |
| Pages | 54-54 |
| Publication date | 1974-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3087918 |
| OpenAlex | W2318326261 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
EORGE SAVARY WASSoN's stories1 consist largely of dialog that attempts to represent later nineteenth-century speech of Kittery Point, small, isolated community in coastal Maine next to New Hampshire border. This paper presents an analysis of phonological, morphological, and lexical characteristics of Wasson's Kittery Point dialect and tries to determine how accurately it represents original. Although his literary language has never been methodically investigated, critics have long insisted that Wasson's folk dialect is true one. Shortly after appearance of his first book, Cap'n Simeon's Store (1903), it was hailed by Thomas Wentworth Higgins as the only book which records faithfully and fully quaint dialect, now passing away, of old New England coast.2 Forty years later Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, who knew flavor of Northeastern speech, called Wasson one of three masters of New England idiom (the other two being Sarah Orne Jewett and Rowland E. Robinson) and expressed surprise that students of dialect had never used his writings as source material for their studies.3 And still later Walter Muir Whitehill, after careful though nonlinguistic research, became convinced that Wasson did have a philologist's ear for language.4 Besides these more or less subjective evaluations, there is some convincing objective evidence, not counting linguistic analysis itself, that Wasson had feel for language and an understanding of its working. In 1929, for example, he published scholarly and well-researched article on history of sea terms.5 Furthermore, I have had good fortune to obtain two of Wasson's personal notebooks, bearing dates from 1899 to 1910, in which he had jotted down words, expressions, and even sounds of Kittery Point talk
Art · Art history · George (robot · Linguistics · Literature · Philology · Sociology · Surprise · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Psychology · Classics · Communication · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,04 |
| Citation span | 1979 - 2007 (29) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |