The Boundaries beneath the Roads

Professor Halvern’s map assigns the three principal divisions of Caldric speech to two rivers and a considerable quantity of elevated ground. Its colours are handsome, and its argument has consequently enjoyed a reception which a less accomplished lithographer might have prevented. I first objected that his southern boundary crossed a level district where the alleged barrier would scarcely inconvenience a wheeled chair. He replied that the relief had been simplified. Since the simplification appeared to have removed the cause while retaining the effect, I obtained leave from the Collegium and went to examine the ground.

I began with an error of my own. Expecting the inner-bay pronunciation to weaken gradually as I walked inland, I arranged my notebooks in successive belts of distance from the coast. Within four days these divisions had become an impediment. Two villages separated by an afternoon’s easy walking differed consistently in their household speech; a third, considerably farther inland, agreed with the coastal one. Between the first pair stood a disused weighing-house, whose keeper sold onions. I asked whether the road had formerly taken another course. She said that the road had always been there, so far as anyone knew, and asked why learned gentlemen invariably supposed that something must have moved when their books disagreed with it.

My first interviews were also defective. When asked to repeat a printed sentence, several speakers supplied a careful approximation to the speech they associated with education. One cooper corrected his own perfectly ordinary verb form before I had finished recording it. I thereupon put away the book and asked him to explain the construction of a barrel. He recovered his customary speech while demonstrating that I had misunderstood the purpose of a hoop. Thereafter I sought instructions concerning familiar work, and checked the resulting forms in conversation between neighbours. A person who is attending to an incompetent visitor has little attention left for improving his vowels.

For comparison I used several features together. The bay speakers preserve a distinction between two vowel sounds which eastern speakers ordinarily unite; certain common implements have different names; and a small number of helping verbs take locally preferred forms. No single word was allowed to establish a boundary. Words travel readily with the things they name, as every railway fitter knows, although some philologists have yet to make the acquaintance of a fitter. I required repeated agreement among unrelated households, and recorded where the agreement failed. Throughout the journey I encountered no difficulty of mutual understanding. The boundaries were plain enough to measure without obliging anyone to request an interpreter.

At the River Tamber I found the first serious injury to Halvern’s account. Speech agreed on opposite banks for eleven miles. Along that reach the ferry carried children to lessons, flour to households and workers to the same mills; its daily business made frequent intercourse quite evident. Farther upstream the division crossed the river obliquely, continued through two orchards, and passed between neighbouring cottages on an open road. I walked this portion twice, having a professional dislike of observations which flatter my first objection too promptly. The second passage confirmed the first. The river was substantial, navigable and entirely unsuccessful in performing the linguistic office assigned to it.

The upland explanation fared little better. A shepherd took me over a ridge which Halvern had represented as a formidable impediment to intercourse. I arrived breathless and was briefly inclined to agree with him. My guide, who crossed it several times a week, pointed out the worn packway and named the households with which his family exchanged breeding stock. The same speech continued over the crest and down the opposite slope. Its boundary lay beyond, across a broad meadow. I had mistaken my own want of condition for a property of the landscape, an error sufficiently common among travellers to deserve a technical designation, though I shall leave its invention to someone less personally implicated.

The southern division demanded particular care. Its altered vowels could be heard at once; its vocabulary took longer to establish, because eastern dealers had carried many of their own terms into the market towns. I hired a carriage for the longer sandy stretches, then walked the disputed edges with a well-mender whose rounds crossed them. She could predict which household would use either of two names for the leather cup of her lifting apparatus. Her predictions remained accurate where the soil, water supply and cultivation were indistinguishable. When I suggested that the distinction might follow the wells themselves, she took me to a single well used by families on both sides and waited while I asked my questions.

There were ragged portions. A recently enlarged railway settlement contained households from all three districts; one village had adopted an eastern word while retaining southern vowels; and marriages produced a scattering of forms beyond their usual limits. These facts belong on the map. Halvern, receiving my first letter, advised me to disregard such disturbances in order to recover the natural boundary. I replied that he had already disregarded the undisturbed portions whenever they proved inconvenient, and could hardly claim both privileges. The exceptions were especially instructive because several had ascertainable dates and causes. They showed speech crossing an older division under conditions which could be investigated.

By the time I turned towards Tarnis, my lines had acquired a geometry for which the relief afforded no explanation. They crossed easy ground, followed stretches of abandoned lane, and occasionally kept company with a ditch too shallow to detain a goose. They also bent together towards the capital. I had bought every current district map obtainable along my route; none marked the lines I was following. At several points, however, local directions preserved an otherwise puzzling distinction between the near side and the far side, even where the speaker’s house stood equally near both. A carter used these expressions of an empty field and then apologised that they were his grandfather’s directions.

At Tarnis the three approaches delivered their characteristic speech almost to the outskirts. Within the city the neatness ceased. In one lodging-house an eastern landlady accommodated bay railwaymen and a southern clerk whose vowels grew markedly broader when he disputed his bill. The city-born children whom I questioned varied with household and companionship. No one regional variety possessed the ground by an unbroken local inheritance. The respectable public speech of Tarnis stood nearest the eastern interior, as everyone knows; schoolmasters and employers encouraged that resemblance with considerable diligence. I disputed a schoolmaster’s claim that his pupils were thereby recovering the proper speech of their birthplace. He was teaching a preferred usage, and ought to have been quite capable of defending his work on that basis.

All three divisions thus converged upon a city whose present speech had developed through settlement and institutional preference. None could simply be continued through it as the native city dialect without contradicting the households under examination. This mattered because Halvern had treated Tarnis as the centre from which correct speech spread until rivers and hills arrested it. His explanation required the city to precede the arrangement it supposedly produced. The convergence suggested an older organisation of the country, with Tarnis occupying its meeting-point. I could not establish that organisation from pronunciation alone. I returned to the Collegium and requested the land records.

The first useful document was a toll lease; the decisive series concerned disputed pasture. A clerk who had endured my requests with admirable precision noticed that the otherwise unimportant ditch in my notebook appeared in a description of jurisdiction. She brought out the earlier surveys. Their boundaries followed my observations through the orchards, across the Tamber and into the southern well district. At the meadow beyond the ridge, the old line divided the jurisdictions to which neighbouring households had paid their dues. I checked further sites before permitting myself satisfaction. By the completion of the survey in 1828, those divisions had been absent from current maps for seventy years. The documents restored the borders of Calder, Harnwood and Grendon, united in the seventeen-fifties, and their junction stood at Tarnis.

The agreement does not tell us that a customs officer invented a vowel, or that every feature of these varieties arose during the kingdoms’ separate existence. I do not know when several of the sound changes began. It does establish that the persistent limits of their distribution correspond to former political limits where the proposed physical limits fail. Separate administration would have organised habitual journeys, schooling and the choice of market; each of these could favour intercourse within a kingdom. Their relative importance remains to be measured. The union explains why those organising divisions disappeared from public geography while surviving in speech, and why the new capital gathered speakers at their common junction.

I sent Halvern my observations with the archival references and offered to walk any disputed portion with him. His reply conceded that political circumstances might have modified the geographical arrangement. I wrote back that he must first produce a geographical arrangement capable of surviving inspection. The river crossings contradicted his rivers; the packway contradicted his ridge; the meadow and the shared well supplied no physical barrier at all. The old borders accounted for the turns his map had smoothed away, and the union accounted for their subsequent invisibility. It was the only explanation left standing by the survey. I have deposited the notebooks with the Collegium, including the original coastal belts and my unfortunate remarks about wells, so that anyone proposing a better account may have the evidence, together with a useful record of the mistakes already available.