In my class there is a gentleman from the north of England who uses "-sen" instead of "-self" in such words as "himself" ("himsen") and "myself" ("mysen").
As far as I can tell, he always uses "-sen" in speech, it is not occasional.
I have never encountered this before and was wondering about its history/etymology and prevalence.
It appears to be a dialectal variant from East Midlands where:
Reflexive pronouns are characterized by the replacement of "self" with sen (from Middle English seluen):
Y'usen – Yourself, Mesen – Myself, Thisens – Themselves/Yourselves, Ussens – Ourselves
Example:
- We sh'll ay to do it ussens. (We shall have to do it ourselves.)
From (East Midlands English by Natalie Braber, Jonnie Robins)
as well as a Yorkshire variant:
The word self may become sen, e.g. yourself becomes thy sen, tha sen.
From (Petyt, Keith M. (1985), 'Dialect' and 'Accent' in Industrial West Yorkshire, John Benjamins Publishing)
(www.asgbi.org.uk)
