From Antiquarianism to Philology: Joseph Hunter’s Hallamshire Glossary (1829)

Abstract

This essay examines Joseph Hunter's Hallamshire Glossary (1829), one of the earliest dialect dictionaries dedicated to a specific area and the first to concentrate on a single conurbation and demonstrates how Hunter bridges antiquarianism and philology. His interest in the former led him to the discovery of local words that he authenticated by proving their historicity. Like many later dialect lexicographers, he is motivated to collect and publish these words by a concern that the social and demographic changes of his time will lead to their loss. He also articulates clearly the difference in attitudes to non-standard English of the philologists of the nineteenth century and the prescriptivists of the eighteenth, referring to the latter as “the mincing and Chesterfieldian age from which we are happily emerging” ([1829] 1983: xxv).