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In short, the man who surveyed Rappahannock’s county seat was ambitious and well respected in his time. Yet his speech would sound strange to us. He used such phrases as "I was driven by as triflin’ a bunch of men...” and “Yesterday I went a-hunting and catched a fox.”
Archaic phrases are rife in contemporary Appalachian language for one simple reason: topography. 'In the plainest terms, they were isolated," said Mrs. Dial, referring to the early mountain settlers. Deep in the West Virginia mountains, the evolution of language is "generations behind other areas. It's not because we’re dumb. It’s purely and simply the geography and the tradition.”
As an analogy, she asked us to imagine ourselves on a space mission to establish a colony on a distant planet. 200 years later, if Earth were to send additional colonists, the newcomers would say, "My, don't they talk funny."
The newcomers to West Virginia in the 1600’s “did not come over the mountains, they came behind them,” Mrs. Dial explained. ScotchIrish and Germans (the latter often erroneously called "Dutch" in the records) "did not cross the Blue Ridge, but slipped behind them” from the north. These people
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