mee-ade for mead;
mee-olk for milk; &c.


Chaucer gives many of them as dissyllables.

The verb _to be_ retains much of its primitive form: thus
_I be, thou,_ or _thee, beest,_ or _bist, we be, you
be, they be, thA¤ be_, are continually heard for _I am_,
&c., _he be_ is rarely used: but _he is_. In the past
tense, _war_ is used for _was_, and _were_: _I
war, thou_ or _thee wart_, he _war_, &c., we have
besides, _we'm, you'm, they'm_, for _we, you, they,
are_, there is a constant tendency to pleonasm in some cases,
as well as to contraction, and elision in others. Thus we have
_a lost, agone, abought_, &c., for _lost, gone, bought_,
&c., Chaucer has many of these prefixes; but he often uses
_y_ instead of _a_, as _ylost_. The frequent use of
Z and V, the softened musical sounds for S and F, together with
the frequent increase and multiplication of vowel sounds, give the
dialect a by no means inharmonious expression, certainly it would
not be difficult to select many words which may for their
modulation compete with others of French extraction, and, perhaps
be superior to many others which we have borrowed from other
languages, much less analogous to the polished dialect of our own.
I have added, in pursuance of these ideas, some poetical and prose
pieces in the dialect of Somersetshire, in which the idiom is
tolerably well preserved, and the pronunciation is conveyed in
letters, the nearest to the sound of the words, as there are in
truth many sounds for which we have neither letters, nor