Spenser has also employed thilk in
his Shepherd's Calendar several times.
"Seest not thilk same hawthorn stud How bragly it begins to bud
And utter his tender head?" "Our blonket leveries been all too sad
For thilk same season, when all is yclad With pleasance."
I cannot conclude without a few observations on three very
remarkable Somersetshire words, namely twordn, wordn, and zino.
They are living evidences of the contractions with which that
dialect very much abounds.
Twordn means it was not; and is composed of three words, namely
it, wor, and not; wor is the past tense, or, as it is sometimes
called, the preterite of the verb to be, in the third person
singular;
[Footnote: It should be observed here that was is rather
uncommon among the Somersetshire peasantry--wor, or war, being
there the synonyms; thus Spenser in his 'Shepherd's Calendar.'"
"The kid,--
Asked the cause of his great distress,
And also who
and whence that he wer
You say he was there, and I say that _a wordn_;
You say that 'twas he, and I tell you that _twordn_;
You ask, will he go? I reply, not as I know;
You say _that_ he _will_, and _I_must _say, no,
Zino_!]
and such is the indistinctness with which the sound of the vowel in
were is commonly expressed in Somersetshire, that wor, wer, or war,
will nearly alike convey it, the sound of the e being rarely if ever
long; twordn is therefore composed, as stated, of three words; but
it will be asked what business has the _d_ in it? To this it
may be replied that _d_ and _t_ are, as is well known,
often converted in our language the one into the other; but by far
the most frequently _d_ is converted into _t_.
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