RECENT EVENTS
29 OCTOBER. IAN STEVENSON: YORKSHIRE DIALECT
Ian, a member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, started his talk by drawing a distinction between accent and dialect: far more people speak with a Yorkshire accent today than use Yorkshire dialect. Dialect is sometimes wrongly viewed as a corruption of Standard English. In fact Yorkshire dialect originated in Old English and Old Norse, both of which were spoken in early medieval Yorkshire. Not surprisingly, many Yorkshire dialect words have parallels in modern Scandinavian languages including Icelandic. Naturally dialect changed over time and its use declined in the 20th century, partly as a result of social and economic changes. Rendering Yorkshire dialect into written text has been a challenge which some authors have met more successfully than others. Some writers have been misguided enough to create a generalised northern dialect using words taken from different parts of the north and even from the south of England. Even the publicity for Yorkshire Tea uses the word ‘brew’ rather than the Yorkshire ‘mash’.
24 SEPTEMBER 2018. DAVID SCRIMGEOUR: THE EVOLUTION OF ASYLUM PATIENT PHOTOGRAPHY.
David pointed out that photography was being used to capture the appearance of asylum residents from the 1850s. Dr Hugh Welch Diamond of the Surrey Lunatic Asylum explained that the advantages of a photographic record were that it helped with the identification and diagnoses of his patients. Dr James Crichton-Browne introduced photography into the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield in the 1860s. He sent many photographs to Charles Darwin while the latter was researching his book on the facial expression of human emotions: Darwin believed that asylum residents were unlikely to disguise or fake their feelings. As a result of Crichton-Browne’s correspondence with Darwin, Cambridge University has a collection of Browne’s photographs, while the West Yorkshire History Centre has another 400. Crichton-Browne stopped commissioning photographs taken in the early 1870s and it was not until twenty years later that the Wakefield Asylum resumed the photographing of residents on a regular basis. David illustrated his talk with a wide selection of asylum photographs, many of them moving records of Victorian mental illness.
Ian, a member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, started his talk by drawing a distinction between accent and dialect: far more people speak with a Yorkshire accent today than use Yorkshire dialect. Dialect is sometimes wrongly viewed as a corruption of Standard English. In fact Yorkshire dialect originated in Old English and Old Norse, both of which were spoken in early medieval Yorkshire. Not surprisingly, many Yorkshire dialect words have parallels in modern Scandinavian languages including Icelandic. Naturally dialect changed over time and its use declined in the 20th century, partly as a result of social and economic changes. Rendering Yorkshire dialect into written text has been a challenge which some authors have met more successfully than others. Some writers have been misguided enough to create a generalised northern dialect using words taken from different parts of the north and even from the south of England. Even the publicity for Yorkshire Tea uses the word ‘brew’ rather than the Yorkshire ‘mash’.
24 SEPTEMBER 2018. DAVID SCRIMGEOUR: THE EVOLUTION OF ASYLUM PATIENT PHOTOGRAPHY.
David pointed out that photography was being used to capture the appearance of asylum residents from the 1850s. Dr Hugh Welch Diamond of the Surrey Lunatic Asylum explained that the advantages of a photographic record were that it helped with the identification and diagnoses of his patients. Dr James Crichton-Browne introduced photography into the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield in the 1860s. He sent many photographs to Charles Darwin while the latter was researching his book on the facial expression of human emotions: Darwin believed that asylum residents were unlikely to disguise or fake their feelings. As a result of Crichton-Browne’s correspondence with Darwin, Cambridge University has a collection of Browne’s photographs, while the West Yorkshire History Centre has another 400. Crichton-Browne stopped commissioning photographs taken in the early 1870s and it was not until twenty years later that the Wakefield Asylum resumed the photographing of residents on a regular basis. David illustrated his talk with a wide selection of asylum photographs, many of them moving records of Victorian mental illness.
