Joseph Wright’s done alright for his sen

on Joseph Wright (1855-1930), Philologist and editor of the English Dialect Dictionary.

Philologist Joseph Wright smoking his pipe.

Colleagues were sceptical when Professor Max Müller, the greatest philologist in Europe, invited someone called Joseph Wright to be his Deputy Professor of Philology at Oxford. The chap who turned up, keen to start giving his course of lectures on the grammar of Old Gothic (or whatever it was), had a very distinctive West Yorkshire accent, and turned out to have started his academic career at the age of six, as a donkey boy in a quarry.

Their suspicions that Müller had played a practical joke on them may have been allayed, as Wright was an amiable enough fellow, a keen pipe-smoker, and his lectures were actually very good.

But then his first publication as Oxford’s Deputy Professor was a phonetic grammar of the dialect spoken in a tiny Yorkshire village – A grammar of the dialect of Windhill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire : illustrated by a series of dialect specimens, phonetically rendered; with a glossarial index of the words used in the grammar and specimens (1892) – a book set out like a textbook, in completely serious and highly academic fashion.

Could there be doubt any longer? Every Oxford common-room believed, that this was a monumental spoof, pseudo-nonsense worthy of Lewis Carroll ; it was just incredible what a straight face Wright managed to keep when his colleagues ribbed him about it…

AVS