390
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. n. NOV. 12, 190*.
sent them back to their own country. The
noses and ears were hung in the fish-market.
"In the middle of the Piazza Maggiore was
raised a column which was called the Vendetta (Vengeance), the lime being mixed with the blood of the slain enemies. This tower, which was later called the Scomunica (Excommunication), still exists to-day."
Could mortar be thus made with the blood of dead enemies, unless that blood was per- fectly fresh ? which would scarcely be the case in this instance. The struggles between town and town in mediaeval Italy were, surely, too serious to allow leisure for collecting and using the blood of the fallen while it was still fluid. X. Z.
H IN COCKNEY, USE OR OMISSION.
(10 th S. ii. 307, 351.)
SWEET in his ' History of English Sounds, Oxford, 1888, 888, says :
" Initial h, which was preserved throughout [the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries], began to be dropt everywhere in colloquial speech towards the end of [the eighteenth century], but has now been restored in refined speech by the influence of the spelling, which has introduced it into many French words where it was originally silent, as in humble."
In a later work (* New English Grammar,' Oxford, 1900, 864) Sweet says that h " has now been restored in Standard English by the combined influence of the spelling and of the speakers of Scotch and Irish English, where it has always been preserved. It is also preserved in American English, while it has been almost com- pletely lost in the dialects of England including Cockney English as also in vulgar Australian."
This last statement must be considered as a correction of 973 of the * History of Eng- lish Sounds ' :
" In Vulgar English as also in most of the Living English dialects (but not in Scotch, Irish, American and Australasian) h is dropt, being, on the other hand, sometimes retained or added before an emphatic vowel."
There has always been a tendency to drop the h in English. Thus we read in Sweet': 'History of English Sounds,' 497, "Thi occasional omission of an initial h occur [in the MSS.] throughout the Old English period," c. 700-1150 A.D., while "A wa regularly dropt in unstrest syllables " ( 500) "The Old English dropping of unstrest } led to its complete loss in the case of the pronoun hit " in the Midland and Norther dialects of Middle English ( 724), whence our modern English it.
According to Ellis, 'Early English Pro nunciation,' v. 227 (1889), the interchange o
as in art, harm, for heart, arm, is one of
he cockneyisms noted by John Walker in his
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary,' 1791.
In Fielding's 'Tom Jones ' (1749), book xv. h. x., there is an illiterate letter written by Sophia Western's maid, Mrs. Honour, in this tyle : "For to bee sur, Sir, you nose very well that evere persun must look furst at ?me." But here, and again when she writes ' I shud ave bin," Mrs. Honour displays the Somersetshire, not the cockney indifference
- o h. She was a parson's grandchild, but
not a Londoner. The gypsy king says 'ave n book xii. ch. xii. of the same work.
Sweet's remarks in his * Handbook of
honetics,' Oxford, 1877, p. 194, are worth quoting in this connexion :
" It is certain that if English had been left to tself the sound h would have been as completely ost in the standard language as it has been in most >f the dialects. But the distinction between house ,nd 'ouse, although in itself a comparatively slight _ne, being easily marked in writing, such spellings as 'ouse came to be used in novels, &c., as an easy way of suggesting a vulgar speaker. The result ,vas to produce a purely artificial reaction against
- he natural tendency to drop the h, its retention
jeing now considered an almost infallible test of education and refinement."
Miss Burney's * Evelina' (1778) might be searched for the cockney h. It certainly records plenty of other contemporary vulgarisms. L. K. M. STRACHAN.
Heidelberg, Germany.
I should like to correct the very common assumption that Shakespeare may have dropped the h in hair merely because he wrote an hair. This is a good example of the persistent manner in which we wholly neglect the history of our language and resolutely abstain from consulting good authorities. The right statement of the case is to be found, of course, in 'H.E.D.,' s.v. 'An.' We there find :
",4?iwas often retained before w and y in the fifteenth century, as an tvood, an woman, an yere, such an one, and was regular before h down to the seventeenth century, as an house, an happy, an hundred, an head (1665). Its history thus shows a gradual suppression of the n before consonants of all kinds, and in all positions. For illustrations, see A, adj. (2)."
The above absurd charge has been brought against Shakespeare for no other reason than because he lived when such usages were customary. It is a hard case, and my sym- pathies are with the bard. Johnson, in 1763, wrote " an yearly pension."
WALTER W. SKEAT.
It is a mistake to characterize the misuse of the h as a cockney peculiarity. It occurs everywhere amongst uneducated people,
