Education: Dialect Atlas

What does your husband call you—my wife, the missus or my woman? What do you say—a dingle, dale, gulch, dell, vale or gully? Father, pa, pop, popper, pappy, dad or daddy? Has a cherry a seed,.stone or pit? These things you may be asked if you live in New England and if during the next 15 months you do not deliberately snub or elude the inquisitive gentleman who represents the American Council of Learned Societies. Armed with a list of 1,000 questions, he will be combing the countryside, quizzing housewives, laborers, farmers, bankers, fisherfolk. To compile a mighty Linguistic Atlas of the U.S., first of its kind,* he and six other field workers left their base of operations at Yale University, New Haven, Conn, last week. First region whose dialects will be studied and charted on detailed maps, comprises the States of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut.

Leaders in the work are Professor Hans Kurath (German, Linguistics) of Ohio State University and Professor Miles Lawrence Hanley (English) of the University of Wisconsin, also a linguistic worker is Professor William Cabell Greet (English) of Barnard College and Columbia University, who has made many a phonographic recording to preserve in handy form the essential characteristics of U.S. dialects (TIME, Aug. 13, 1928).

* The American Language of Henry Louis Mencken is informative and entertaining, but admittedly far from comprehensive.