About
Gorwingel's question of "waggon":
Quote:
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I rather suspect that Tolkien spelled it that way not because it was old and archaic the way that "thees" and "thous" are (that is, nobody uses them anymore), but because it was how the word was spelled in his own childhood in the part of the world he grew up in.
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I think you could well be right about that
Fordim. Particularly since the various county dialects of England have maintained their own unique spellings and pronunciations which have not made it into the canonical OED, which we all know is famous for its omissions of non-canonical works and writers.
For intance, 'kine' as the plural of cow, from Old English no less, was still widely used in Yorkshire at least up until the 1850's. (I can name an 1848 novel it was used in.)
I think Eric Partridge has a dictionary of dialect words, doesn't he? Or is it just Shakespeare's Bawdy and Slang and Unconventional English? I'm sure there must be sources for dialects from Birmingham and the Welsh borders.