The ge in nouns is also dropped. Scír-gerefa turns into scirreve, which is not far from sherriff.
But we now come to the great change of all in Verbs, the Shibboleth which is the sure mark of a Midland dialect, and which we should be using at this moment, had the printing-press only come to England thirty years earlier than it did. The Old English Present Plural of verbs ended in að, as wê hŷrað, gê hŷrað, hî hŷrað. It has been thought that, after the common English fashion, an n has been here cast out, which used to follow the a. But the peasants in some of our shires may have kept the older form hŷranð; as we find the peasants on the Rhine using three different forms of the Present Plural; to wit, liebent, liebet, and lieben.[1] Bearing this parallel case in mind, we can understand how the Present Plural of the Mercian Danelagh came to end in en and not in að. The Peterborough Chronicle, in Henry the First's reign, uses liggen, haven, for the Plural of the Present of Verbs; we even find lin for liggen. This is the Midland form. The Southern form would be liggeth, habbeth, a slight alteration of the Old English. The Northern form, spoken beyond the Humber, would be ligges, haves, as we saw in the Northumbrian Gospels. Another Shibboleth of English dialects is the Active Participle. In the North this ended in ande, the Norse form. In the Midland it became ende, the Old English form, though in Lincolnshire and East Anglia this was often supplanted by the Danish ande. In the South, it ended in inde, as we shall soon see. To take an example, we stand singing.
- ↑ Garnett's Essays, p. 142.
