American Language (134 page)

The Irish in America have made little progress in reacquiring the Goidelic Celtic which passes under the name of Gaelic in Ireland, and is now so busily inculcated by the Free State politicians. Some of the older folk among them make shift to speak it, but certainly not many. A column or so in it is sometimes printed in the Irish weeklies, but few can read it. The Welsh cling more resolutely to their national speech, which belongs to the Brythonic branch of Celtic, and there are two periodicals devoted to it — a monthly called
Cyfaill
and a weekly called
Y Drych
, both published at Utica, N. Y. The circulations of these journals seem to be small, and they contain much English matter. The 1931 Census showed 32,000 Gaelic-speaking persons in Canada, most of them Highland Scots. Of this number, 29,000 had been born west of the Atlantic, and 24,000 lived in Nova Scotia, mostly in Cape Breton. In the counties of Inverness and Victoria 75% of the population is Gaelic-speaking. On the Nova Scotian mainland there are about 2000 in the county of Antigonish who know the language, and perhaps 500 elsewhere. There are also 500 or more on Prince Edward Island.

The only study of this American-Gaelic that I know of has been made by Mr. J. L. Campbell,
¹²⁰
to whom I am indebted for what follows. He remarks that it differs from the French of Quebec and the German of Pennsylvania in that it has had no support, for years past, from a parent-tongue in full vigor at home. Gaelic has been
under official disapproval in Scotland for 400 years, and it was supplanted by English in the schools of Nova Scotia in 1870. In 1918 provision was made for teaching it, but only as a second language, and it has made little if any progress. It is full of English loan-words, most of which it uses unchanged. But others have been Gaelicized,
e.g., factoraidh
(factory),
càball
(cable),
copar
(copper),
dama
(dam),
stòbh
(stove),
fineadh
(fine),
Geancach
(Yankee),
post-mhaighstir
(postmaster),
bangaid
(banquet),
smuglair
(smuggler),
buiseal
(bushel),
bruis
(brush),
feansa
(fence),
mogais
or
mogaisean
(moccasin),
spruis
(spruce),
seudair
(cedar),
squa
(squaw),
staibh
(stave). The plurals are often formed in the Gaelic manner,
e.g., factoraidhean
(factories),
tréineachan
(trains),
càrachean-sràide
(street-cars),
maidseachan
(matches),
sentaichean
(cents),
clirichean
(clearings),
logaichean
(logs). Mixed sentences are very frequent,
e.g.
, “Air son càradh
bhicycles
tha sinn làn-uidheamaichte air son
enamelling, brazing
agus
vulcanizing a
dheanamh” (For repairing bicycles we are fully equipped, and for doing enameling, brazing and vulcanizing). The softening of consonants is common,
e.g., char
(car),
bheat
(beat),
pharty
(party). Loan-verbs are inflected for tense and mood,
e.g.
, gu ’n
callar
(until he is called), ma
phullas
(if we pull). In place of the English
-ing, -adh
is sometimes used,
e.g., driveadh
(driving),
startadh
(starting),
smashadh
(smashing).

The chief speakers of Arabic in the United States are the Syrians, most of them Christians from the Lebanon. There are also some Moslems and Druzes, but not many. These Syrians used to be classified in the Census returns as Turks, but they are now properly segregated. In 1930 the Census Bureau found 137,576 of them in the country — 52,227 who had been born in Syria, 69,034 born here of Syrian parents, and 11,315 born here of mixed parentage. But the leaders of the Syrian colonies believe that these figures were too low. They estimate that there are from 250,000 to 350,000 persons of Syrian blood in the country. The largest colony is in New York City, but there are others from coast to coast. Indeed, the Syrian-Americans,
who are mainly merchants, are so widely dispersed that their historian, Dr. Philip K. Hitti of Princeton University, says that “there is not a State in the Union, and hardly a town of 5000 population or over, in which they are not represented.”
¹²¹
They support many periodicals in Arabic, and also have several daily newspapers. There is also an English weekly in New York, the
Syrian World
, devoted to their interests. I am indebted to its amiable editor, Mr. H. I. Katibah, for notes which I summarize as follows:

American proper names offer some difficulty to the Syrian who has not mastered English. He commonly converts them into nearly related Arabic words, and sometimes the meaning of the latter is amusingly incongruous. Dr. Hitti tells, for example, of an old Syrian in New York who wrote down his own telephone exchange, Adirondack, as
al-qadi ’indak
(the judge is with you).

Classical Greek never begat children which devoured it, as classical Latin begat the Romance languages; nevertheless, it suffered serious injuries as the Hellenic world disintegrated. On the Greek mainland it now has two forms. The first, cultivated by the educated class, is called the
katharevousa
, and is a somewhat artificial imitation of the classical language; the second, called the
demoteke
and spoken by the masses of the people, is a Greek with changed vowels, new stresses, a vocabulary heavy with loan-words (from Latin, Romance, Slavic, Turkish and Arabic sources), and a greatly decayed grammar. In the other regions inhabited by Greeks (for example, the Ægean islands and the Asia Minor littoral) the popular language has proceeded in the same general direction but by different paths, so that some of its dialects are mutually unintelligible. There is a well-known comedy by D. K. Byrantios, “Babylonia” by title, which depicts a group of Greeks from all over the Near East trying in vain to make themselves comprehensible to one another and to “an Athenian scholar who speaks in the language of Plato and Xeno-phon.” I quote from an article by Mr. Sotirios S. Lontos, editor of
Atlantis
, the Greek daily published in New York.
¹²³
“It has often
occurred to me,” adds Mr. Lontos, “that had this play been written today, the author would surely have included among his
dramatis personæ
a Greek from America, who, speaking the Greek lingo he had acquired during his stay in the United States, would have the experience of his lifetime trying to make himself intelligible to his fellow countrymen in Greece.”

This American-Greek is avoided as much as possible by the contributors to
Atlantis
, but it is used freely by the paper’s advertisers and by its readers. Like all the other immigrant languages, it has taken in a great many American words, and more are added constantly. Most of them are given Greek suffixes and respond to such inflections as survive in the popular Greek of the homeland. Others suffer changes in their vowels or consonants, or both. Here are some examples from Mr. Lontos’s list:

Many other words are used without any change,
e.g., flat
and
street
. The Greeks have difficulty with our
ch
and
sh
sounds, and so have to modify words containing them. The sound of
d
becomes
th
or
t
in Modern Greek. Thus
depot
is converted into
typos
. Inasmuch as
typos
is a perfectly good Greek word, signifying printing-office, the latter change offers some inconvenience. In the same way newcomers from Greece are puzzled by
mappa
, which means both
map
and
mop
in American-Greek, but signifies cabbage at home.
Saina
, which is American-Greek for shine, also serves for sign. The American-Greeks, like all the other immigrants, quickly annex the common American expletives and terms of opprobrium.
God damn it
, at their hands, becomes
godamiti
, and
son-of-a-bitch
becomes
sonababitsi
. Even within the bounds of the Greek vocabulary they fall into new usages in this country. Thus, their common word for fire is
photia
, whereas
per
is more often used at home, and they prefer
xenodocheon
to
estiatorion
for restaurant. The numbered streets in America give them some difficulty. They do not translate
Twenty-fifth street
directly, but change the ordinal number to the cardinal, and make
street
plural, thus coming to
Twenty-five streets
. In Greek, proper names take the article, which varies with the gender. Thus the name of every American city, in American-Greek, has its gender.
San Francisco
and
St. Louis
are masculine,
New York
is feminine, and
Chicago
is neuter. “
Boston
and
Milwaukee
,” says Mr. Lontos, “take the feminine article when used in good Greek, but in ordinary American-Greek are neuters.” The Greeks suffer linguistic confusion immediately they attempt English, for in Modern Greek
nay
(spelled
nai
) means
yes, P.M.
indicates the hours
before
noon, and the letter
N
stands for
South
. To make things even worse, the Greek
papoose
means grandfather and
mammie
means grandmother.