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Who uses "skeeter hawk," "snake doctor," and "dragonfly" to refer to the same insect? Who says "gum band" instead of "rubber band"? The answers can be found in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), the largest single survey of regional and social differences in spoken American English. It covers the region from New York state to northern Florida and from the coastline to the borders of Ohio and Kentucky. Through interviews with nearly twelve hundred people conducted during the 1930s and 1940s, the LAMSAS mapped regional variations in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation at a time when population movements were more limited than they are today, thus providing a unique look at the correspondence of language and settlement patterns. This handbook is an essential guide to the LAMSAS project, laying out its history and describing its scope and methodology. In addition, the handbook reveals biographical information about the informants and social histories of the communities in which they lived, including primary settlement areas of the original colonies. Dialectologists will rely on it for understanding the LAMSAS, and historians will find it valuable for its original historical research. Since much of the LAMSAS questionnaire concerns rural terms, the data collected from the interviews can pinpoint such language differences as those between areas of plantation and small-farm agriculture. For example, LAMSAS reveals that two waves of settlement through the Appalachians created two distinct speech types. Settlers coming into Georgia and other parts of the Upper South through the Shenandoah Valley and on to the western side of the mountain range had a Pennsylvania-influenced dialect, and were typically small farmers. Those who settled the Deep South in the rich lowlands and plateaus tended to be plantation farmers from Virginia and the Carolinas who retained the vocabulary and speech patterns of coastal areas. With these revealing findings, the LAMSAS represents a benchmark study of the English language, and this handbook is an indispensable guide to its riches.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Kim Mills
reviewed Handbook of the linguistic atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic states on January 03, 2019
Handbook of the linguistic atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic states
As a cartomaniac, a librarian, and a history lover myself, this book seemed to be just the ticket for me. I loved the digressions into the science of maps, notable historic maps, mapmakers, historic map thieves, explorers, map collectors and the map trade.
However, I found the story of the map thief to be about as bland as the thief's own name. In fact, the author takes pains to illustrate that thief is a personification of his own name. His is a story not worthy of telling, except as a cautionary tale for all archivists, librarians, collectors and the like who might fall prey to low life vandals such as Bland. His story becomes even more tedious by the end, and then turns into a sentimental author's introspective.
I grew tired of the way the author always tries to tie the story of maps into the story of the map thief, as if everything about maps is somehow analogous to this repugnant protagnist. I also thought that the author's attempt to make the entire story applicable to himself, even to the point of drawing an analogy between his own life and that of the thief, as if his whole experience of researching the story of the map thief was actually a journey of self disovery, was pretty weak and contrived.
I think I would have rather read this book as two separate works--one a collection of newspaper clippings detailing the arrest of Mr. Bland and the subsequent crime investigation, and another as a brief history of all the varied aspects of the world of maps, including map crimes, of which this map thief's story would merely figure in as one egregious example, rather than as the focus of the entire work.
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