My brother recently did a survey of the large cemetery where our ancestors are buried. He plotted each grave and searched records until he had the names and dates on each of those, if those dates were not already there. My maternal grandfather had kept meticulous records anyway, so there weren't many that had remained unidentified. The cemetery's oldest graves hold the remains of the first settlers in the area, and they are those of our great great greats, etc. who settled the area. The dates go back to the very early 1700s, not long after they arrived in this land, mostly coming from Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
They are the ones who bartered with the Native Americans for this 'dark and bloody ground', Can-tuck-ee, so named by the NAs because it was their hunting ground and they didn't really want to sell it so they called it dark and bloody hoping to scare the foreigners away. That didn't happen, so they settled the land bringing with them the sounds of the Irish, Scots and those from Wales. Some English thrown in for good measure. They also brought with them their music - long, low and mournful sounds - though no musical instruments.
So all this to tell you that the sounds and the unusual pronunciation of words in my area mostly came from those European sounds they brought with them combined with the words of the Native Americans. And in a lot of those hollows between the mountains, you can still hear those sounds, especially in their songs without musical instruments. Mainly it's a habit of softening vowels and leaving off the harsh consonants.
Like 'rooseneers'. Like heah. And theah, and over yon.
The sounds are still there with some of the old folks; young people have flattened them even more, distorted them, so that they don't really resemble their origins.
And rooseneehs? Roasting ears (of corn), say it fast and lose the harsh consonants. (Roos - en- eeahs).
Heah? Hear or here, losing the consonant r.
Same with theah, there; and over yon simply meant over yonder, not a very far distance.
I had to learn fast when I traveled 200 miles away from home for college, so I still switch in and out depending on where I am. I didn't get out of the holler much till then.
Those sounds are old, European and Native American all mixed together; I guess now they are all lumped together and called Hillbilly by some. But we didn't put the 'r' in washer so it didn't become 'warsher', no 'h' in overalls, either. We mostly softened the consonants. I'm not sure where the harsher consonants came from, a different group of settlers maybe, but our words were a little softer.
I became fascinated with languages and sounds long ago; the words of my great aunt and grandmother were like the music they came from and I still think they are beautiful. I go back to visit and that's what my ears pick up, those words. They are fewer now, but many are still there.
My brother is like me in that he adapts his speech patterns to the people he speaks to. But he can read it and write it and speak it just like I can, depending on the audience. When we are together we combine both, and his wife, who is from Ohio and my husband who grew up in Texas, would often just sit back and listen, sometimes just shaking their heads.
We don't find those sounds in W KY, only there in the Appalachians where our ancestors landed and settled. I have to be careful to not use them here if I want to be understood.
Too much info that you didn't ask for, ha!!
That's what happens when you find me on a lazy Sunday afternoon, doing nothing but playing around with memories.
