Dialect links hedgehog and sea urchin

When trying to cross a busy road, the unfortunate hedgehog’s only defence against injury or death is to roll itself into a tight, spiky ball. This provides absolutely no protection against a motor vehicle.

However, it was the name given to the hedgehog that intrigued me. The letterwriter called it a “pricklyback Hodgson”. For anyone lacking knowledge of the dialect of the North York Moors, this name is meaningless but it was obviously the interpretation used by that correspondent. Undoubtedly, that is how he or she heard the name.

A knowledge of that particular dialect – which I spoke as a child – will tell a reader that the letter-writer was referring to a “prickly-back urchin”. The pronunciation of urchin as otchin could easily be mistaken for a local version of “Hodgson” which it was in this instance.

As a Yorkshire family surname, Hodgson is widespread.

This raises a further question.

Why would anyone refer to a hedgehog as an urchin? The answer lies under the sea. The common sea-urchin, sometimes known as the edible seaurchin, can be found in the seas off our coasts and also off Scotland. They seem to prefer rocky coastlines where young ones can hide in cracks.

A fully grown adult will appear to be a ball of spines rather like a hedgehog and it will grow to some eight inches or so in diameter (200mm); it looks rather like a small spiky football.

When the urchin dies, its skeleton remains, and I can recall these being gathered and sold as trinkets in seaside markets and shops.

They are round, bony objects, coloured red with lighter marks where the spikes have fallen away.

Some species are hunted for food by humans and I am sure others fall prey to aquatic animals and so leave these attractive globes as souvenirs.

However, the Latin name for a sea-urchin is Echinus which is Greek for “hedgehog”.

Indeed, they look like submarine hedgehogs and the Norman French for a hedgehog was herrison while the Latin name for our native species of hedgehog is erinaceus europaeus. All this suggests that our native tongue and our dialects are far more intriguing and interlinked than we might appreciate.

In this case, the sound “ur” as in urchin is spoken in the North Riding dialect as a short and guttural “or”. We can hear similar pronunciations when a church is spoken of as a choch and a birthday is referred to as a “bothday”. The “ir” sound here becomes the shortened and rather guttural “o” sound.

In the North Riding dialect there are other occasions when the “ur” sound within a word becomes a short, guttural “o”. Burden is one example. When spoken of in, say, the North York Moors, it becomes bodden or perhaps boddin. To impose a burden of some kind upon a person was known as boddening; this might be anything from a hard day’s work to a threat of some kind, while to bodden means to bear or suffer the imposition of some responsibility – to make someone endure something unpleasant, perhaps.

Among the literature of the North Riding is a poem entitled “A boddin o’ cowls” which tells of a person gathering cowls from the moor.

Cowls were the half-burnt stems of heather that were left when the moorland was deliberately burned to encourage new growth of heather for the grouse, both as food and shelter.

People would trek to the moors to gather loads of these stems for burning on their own fires at home and they were carried on one’s back, having been tied into a large bundle. They were indeed a heavy burden – a boddin or bodden, in other words.

Burning is spoken of as bonning but whether this is the source of the name bonfire is open to debate. Some authorities believe it derives from bonefire when the surplus bones of cattle, pigs and so forth were burned as a means of disposal.

So bonfire might derive from bonefire, or it might come from our dialect bonfire, literally meaning burnfire.

Another word widely used in the past – albeit in the lifetime of some of today’s grandparents – was churn.

In this instance, however, as the name of that equipment found in a dairy, it has not been shortened to “chon” although when used as a verb, “to churn the milk” might be spoken as “ti chon t’milk” while the equipment itself might be called a kern or even a ken.

Ken milk or kern milk was sometimes known as buttermilk or even bluemilk but the word also cropped up at harvest time, then having a slender link to churning the milk. In this case, one major rural celebration was a kern-supper which followed the completion of the harvest by inviting all the helpers to a celebration.

Kern milk was an important ingredient and “to fetch the kern” also meant to bring home the last sheaf of standing corn. It was widely known that some guests preferred tankards of ale on such occasions!

CONTINUING this week’s theme of old words, a newspaper cutting fell out of my family bible this week. It listed local deaths, one of whom was a distant relative of my grandmother. There is no date on the cutting but the style of print suggests it is from the early 1900s.

The deaths were all within a short distance of Whitby, those within the town bearing only street names while other entries named the respective villages. For this reason, I think the cutting is from an old Whitby Gazette.

In several entries, the word relict is used to describe the link between the deceased and the survivor. One entry records the death of Hannah, the relict of Matthias, and another follows suit with Mary, the relict of George. I have not quoted the surname of these families out of respect for them.

Although some entries in this rather long list make references to widows, the word relict appears to have been used as an alternative.

None of my dialect dictionaries includes the word, but I have discovered it is an archaic word that refers to a widow. Its literal meaning comes from the Latin relictus, which means a woman left behind, but it could also relate to other organisms or things that survived from an earlier period.

This also reminds us that our language is constantly changing. Our current use of computer terms is a good example but so far as I am aware, none has yet found its way into a dialect dictionary – it might think a website is something to do with spiders.