Harold Orton

Last updated • 3 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Harold Orton
Born(1898-10-23)23 October 1898
Died7 March 1975(1975-03-07) (aged 76)
Leeds, England
Occupation(s) Professor of English language and dialectologist

Harold Orton (23 October 1898 – 7 March 1975) was a British dialectologist and professor of English language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds.

Contents

Early life

Orton was born in Byers Green, County Durham, on 23 October 1898 and was educated at King James I Grammar School, in Bishop Auckland, and at the University of Durham. He left university in 1917 to enrol in the Durham Light Infantry in which he was commissioned as a lieutenant. He was wounded severely in 1918, never regaining full use of his right arm, and was invalided out of the army in 1919. [1] He insisted to army surgeons that his arm not be amputated. [2]

Academic career

After leaving the army, in 1918 Orton went to Merton College, Oxford, [3] where he studied under Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld and Joseph Wright, author of the English Dialect Dictionary (McDavid, 1976). His thesis from Oxford, on the dialect of his native Byers Green, was later published as a book. [2]

He then spent several years on the staff of Uppsala University in Sweden until 1928, when he was appointed to a lectureship at King's College, Newcastle (now the University of Newcastle). Between 1928 and 1939, he surveyed the dialects of 35 sites in Northumberland and north Durham, which became known as the Orton Corpus. It was not published until 1998, when it was edited by Kurt Rydland. [4]

Orton became head of the Department of English Language at the University of Sheffield in 1939 but secondment to the British Council interrupted that work until the end of World War II. [1]

In 1946, he was appointed professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds, succeeding Bruce Dickins, where he taught until his retirement as emeritus professor in 1964. [5]

Orton was a visiting professor at the Universities of Kansas (1965, 1967, 1968), Iowa (1966) and Tennessee (1970, 1972, 1973) and at Belmont University, Nashville (1971). [2] In contrast to the flexible questionnaire of the Dictionary of American Regional English, Orton worked with Nathalia Wright on a fixed questionnaire for all American dialects, but this was not successful. [2]

Orton is best remembered as co-founder of the Survey of English Dialects (SED). He developed the questionnaire for the survey together with Eugen Dieth. He lived to see the publication of the Basic Material from the SED, but died before the publications of The Word Geography of England and The Linguistic Atlas of England. [2] His pupil David Parry went on to apply the same principles used for the SED to Welsh English, founding the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD) at Swansea University in 1968.

Many who met Orton said that he had a driving passion for his subject. In the early part of his career, he was nicknamed "the phonetic fanatic". During the Survey of English Dialects, he worked even on Christmas Day. [6]

Death and legacy

Orton died in Leeds on 7 March 1975 following a stroke. [7]

An overview of Orton's career was published by Craig Fees in 1991 as the first part in a series on dialect and folk studies. [8] In the same year, Fees wrote a strongly-worded defence of Orton against those who had criticised his work. [9]

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pitmatic</span> Dialects spoken in former mining areas of Northumberland and Durham

Pitmatic – originally 'pitmatical' – is a group of traditional Northern English dialects spoken in rural areas of the Great Northern Coalfield in England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Byers Green</span> Human settlement in England

Byers Green is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Spennymoor, in the County Durham district, in the ceremonial county of Durham, England. It is situated to the north of Bishop Auckland, between Willington and Spennymoor, and a short distance from the River Wear. It has a population of 672.

Definite article reduction (DAR), in linguistics, is the use of a vowel-less form of the definite article the in Northern dialects of England English, for example in Yorkshire dialect. DAR is often represented by dialect spelling with an apostrophe: t' or th' .

Dialectology is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.

Clive Upton is an English linguist specializing in dialectology and sociolinguistics. He is also an authority on the pronunciation of English. He has been Emeritus Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Leeds since 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Wright (linguist)</span> English philologist and Oxford professor

Joseph Wright FBA was an English Germanic philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linguistic map</span> Map showing geographic distribution of the speakers of a language

A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas.

Dialect levelling is the means by which dialect differences decrease. For example, in rural areas of Britain, although English is widely spoken, the pronunciation and the grammar have historically varied. During the twentieth century, more people moved into towns and cities, standardising English. Dialect levelling can develop by the influence of various types of media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Survey of English Dialects</span> British dialect survey of England and Wales

The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in social mobility and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Professor Orton and Professor Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a questionnaire containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952.

The English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is the most comprehensive dictionary of English dialects ever published, compiled by the Yorkshire dialectologist Joseph Wright (1855–1930), with strong support by a team and his wife Elizabeth Mary Wright (1863–1958). The time of dialect use covered is, by and large, the Late Modern English period (1700–1903), but given Wright's historical interest, many entries contain information on etymological precursors of dialect words in centuries as far back as Old English and Middle English. Wright had hundreds of informants ("correspondents") and borrowed from thousands of written sources, mainly glossaries published by the English Dialect Society in the later 19th century, but also many literary texts written in dialect. In contrast to most of his sources, Wright pursued a scholarly linguistic method, providing full evidence of his sources and antedating modes of grammatical analysis of the 20th century. The contents of the EDD's nearly 80.000 entries were generally ignored during the 20th century but were made accessible by the interface of EDD Online, the achievement of an Innsbruck University research project first published in 2012 and repeatedly revised since.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lancashire dialect</span> Northern English vernacular native to Lancashire

The Lancashire dialect refers to the Northern English vernacular speech of the English county of Lancashire. The region is notable for its tradition of poetry written in the dialect.

David Parry was a British dialectologist. He received his education from the University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds; working at the latter school for the renowned dialectologist Harold Orton. He then taught dialectology for almost three decades at Swansea University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Northumbrian burr</span> Uvular pronunciation of /r/ in rural far northeast England

The Northumbrian burr is the distinctive uvular pronunciation of R in the traditional dialects of Northumberland, Tyneside ('Geordie'), and northern County Durham, now remaining only among speakers of rural Northumberland, excluding Tyne and Wear. It is one of the few rhotic dialects left in England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugen Dieth</span>

Eugen Dieth was a Swiss linguist, phonetician and dialectologist. He is well known for his work in English and German phonetics, and for co-initiating the Survey of English Dialects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. Nelson Francis</span> American linguist

W. Nelson Francis was an American author, linguist, and university professor. He served as a member of the faculties of Franklin & Marshall College and Brown University, where he specialized in English and corpus linguistics. He is known for his work compiling a text collection entitled the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which he completed with Henry Kučera.

The Linguistic Survey of Scotland was a long-term project at the University of Edinburgh to cover the use of language in Scotland, including Scottish English, Scots and Scottish Gaelic.

Stewart Forson Sanderson (1924–2016) was a Scottish folklorist and linguist.

J.D.A. (John) Widdowson is a British linguist and folklorist.

Manfred Markus, is a German-Austrian linguist and university professor. He has been professor emeritus since 2009.

On early English pronunciation: with especial reference to Shakspere [sic] and Chaucer, containing an investigation of the correspondence of writing with speech in England from the Anglosaxon [sic] period to the present day means of the ordinary printing types is an 1889 book by Alexander John Ellis. Since publication, it has been cited continuously by dialectologists of English and Scots, owing to its survey data on the dialects in the 19th century. The author is regularly cited by linguists as "A.J. Ellis" to distinguish him from Stanley Ellis, a prominent dialectologist of the 20th century.

References

  1. 1 2 Journal of the International Phonetic Association Volume 5, No 2, December 1975
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 McDavid, Raven I (Autumn–Winter 1976). "Harold Orton. 23 October 1898 - 7 March 1975". American Speech. 51 (3–4). Duke University Press: 219–222. JSTOR   454964.
  3. Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 118.
  4. Maguire, Warren (August 2003). ""Mr. A. J. Ellis – the pioneer of scientific phonetics in England" (Sweet 1877, vii): an examination of Ellis's data from the northeast of England" (PDF). University of Edinburgh. pp. 5–6. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  5. "History of the School of English". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016.
  6. Fees, Craig (1991). The imperilled inheritance: dialect and folklife studies at the University of Leeds, 1946–1962, 1: Harold Orton and the English dialect survey. pp. 50–53.
  7. The Guardian, Obituary
  8. Fees, Craig (1991). The imperilled inheritance: dialect and folklife studies at the University of Leeds, 1946–1962, 1: Harold Orton and the English dialect survey.
  9. Frees, Craig (1991). "The Historiography of Dialectology" (PDF). Lore and Language. 10 (2): 67–74. Retrieved 11 February 2018.