Foreign Perspectives

Or is it?

What I’ve to do is to take a dialect word and analyse how it came to be used. So, I’ve to trace the development of the word that I choose as far back as I can. That’s surprisingly easy as it turns out as the Oxford English Dictionary covers a lot of the history of the words within it which, of course, includes the words used in the various dialects.

Anyway, I’m provisionally running with “wee” which is considered very much a Scottish word these days but it turns out that it’s derived from a very, very old Old English word related to our present-day weigh: essentially meaning a small measure. That’s changed somewhat over time and now we have both the word “weigh” for the weight whilst “wee” is very much a synonym for “small” in Scots and several English dialects too. Not only is it not really a Scottish word but in fact it was only really taken up by Scottish writers from the early 1700s.

Now, of course, the question is whether or not I can write enough about it for the assignment.