Cumbrian Language in its Cultural Context

An Introduction to Linguistics Because a lot of this book will use quite technical language in order to clearly lay out what I am trying to say, here is an introduction to the linguistic principles that will be mentioned, for the layman. The linguistic portion of this book may well be difficult to understand without reading this section, and it may help to use some online resources as well, although hopefully that will not be necessary.

First, it’s important to recognise that writing and speaking are two very different things. Letters are not the same things as sounds. This is exemplified by the fact that different languages may use the same letters to spell what are, in reality, different sounds. Even if you’ve never learnt a foreign language, you’ll probably know that the letter ‘r’ represents a different sound for an English-speaker than it does for a French-speaker: most English speakers pronounce it with the tongue approaching the little ridge just above the teeth, but not quite touching it, and often involves the lips being nearly closed. A French speaker pronounces it as a gutteral sound at the back of the throat.

Your exact pronunciation of the sound will vary depending on where you were brought up.

Unfortunately, this disconnect between letters and sounds means that we cannot necessarily look at a historical text and know exactly how it’s meant to be pronounced; for all we know, the letters the author uses may have represented different sounds to themselves than they do to a modern reader. Linguists must employ more complicated methods in order to work out how older forms of English were pronounced, a bit like a detective reconstructing a crime scene. This is what I will attempt to do with Cumbrian in the first part of this book, although as you will see, a lot of the work has already been done for me by linguists writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. I will describe some of these forensic methods in this section, but if you’re familiar with them, you can skip it.

Having acknowledged the disconnect between letters and sounds, how can linguists write what they’re talking about in a 11