The Lost Implicatures of England

Grice, or the Grice if you must, is right.

"Adult" and "adulterer", while bearing the same sense in Rome, no longer ("The fact that they were a monosemously immoral lot does not guarantee that we, English, will").

Horn, who's been to France a couple times, considers

Tu est beau.
Vous etes beau.

---

The distinction, he notes, is not so much of 'power vs. solidarity' but 'sexual impact'. It's an age-thing. It's also a proxemic thing: "A cat may look at a king".

This implicature, which Horn dubs, to annoy us, 'conventional', is lost in the South of England -- and the former colonies.

But P. Trudgill reminds us in the section on 'Thee and thou' of ch. 4 of "The grammar of English dialects', in _The Dialects of England_ (Oxford: Blackwell):

Most languages of the world
make a distinction between singular 'you'
and plural 'you'. Traditional dialects have
never gone the way of Standard English and
have preserved the

old distinction

between
'thou' [or 'thee' in the West Country]
and 'you'".

He goes on:

"Traditional dialects which preserve
'thou'/'thee' normally also have distinctive
verb forms of the type familiar from the
King James version of the Bible, such as
'thou hast', 'thou dost'."

"Traditional working-class Bristol dialect for instance has 'cassn't?'
(< canst thee not) and 'dissn't?' (< didst thee
not)."

Grice probably underheard this as he was at Clifton.

Trudgill notes:

"And then, the Potteries [where Grice almost was from] area has 'ast?' (< hast thou)
and 'thee coost' (< thee couldest)."

which is even _grosser_, he writes.

Trudgill ends the section with two lyrics, which I set to mandoline. The first is in F sharp minor, and I provide the chords just in case:


Thi feyther's noan been wed so long

An' yet tha sees he's middlin' throng

Wi' yo'o.

Besides thi little brother Ted,

We've one upsteers, asleep i'bed,

Wi' eawr Joe.

But tho' we've childer two or three

We'll mak' a bit o'reawm for thee,

Bless thee, lad.

Th'art prattiest brid we have i'th'nest

So hutch up closer to my breast

Aw'm thi dad.


S. Laycock.

The other is a variant on the well-known idiom, Mary has a bee in her bonnet, but she don't mind.


Asta saen aar Mary's bonnet?

It's a stunner, an' no mistak;

It's got red rooses raight on top,

An' tow big ribbons raight dairn t'back.


Dusta know, aar Mary, oh went ter choch on Sundee

An' the praycher

Eh prayched an' prayched an' prayched

Abairt aar Mary's bonnet.


An' aar Mary, oh stood up in choch an' sed:

"Ey up thae! It's bett'n'en thine

Thaa bawd-yedded tonnip --


Tha cossna get n'rooses rairned thy bonnet!"


Derbyshire.

Etc.

So, whaet saithest thee?