American Language (67 page)

The majority of Americans seem to have early abandoned all effort to sound the
h
in such words as
when
and
where
. It is still supposed to be sounded in England, and its absence is often denounced as an American barbarism, but as a matter of fact few Englishmen actually sound it, save in the most formal discourse. Some time ago the English novelist, Archibald Marshall, published an article in a London newspaper arguing that it was a sheer physical impossibility to sound the
h
correctly. “You cannot pronounce
wh
,” he said, “if you try. You have to turn it into
hw
to make it any different from
w
” Nevertheless, Mr. Marshall argued, with true English orthodoxy, that the effort should be made. “Most words of one syllable beginning with
wh
,” he said, “and many of two syllables have a corresponding word, but of quite different meaning, beginning with
w
alone.
When-wen, whether-weather, while-wile, whither-wither, wheel-weal
. If there is a distinction ready to hand it is of advantage to make use of it.” That is to say, to make use of
hwen, hwether, hwile, hwither
and
hweel
. The Americans do not sound the
h
in
heir, honest, honor, hour
and
humor
and their derivatives, and frequently omit it in
herb, humble
and
humility
. In the vulgar speech
herb
is often
yarb
. In Standard English
h
is openly omitted from
hostler
, even in spelling, and is seldom clearly sounded in
hotel
and
hospital
. Certain English words in which it is now sounded apparently betray its former silence by the fact that not
a
but
an
is commonly put before them. It is still good English usage to write
an hotel
and
an historical
.
⁸⁸
The intrusion of
h
into words
where it doesn’t belong, a familiar characteristic of Cockney English, is unknown in any of the American dialects. The authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation of
schedule
. In England the
sch
is always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound as in
scheme
. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is always
zed
in England, is often made
zee
in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the Eighteenth Century. Americans give
nephew
(following a spelling pronunciation, historically incorrect) a clear
f
-sound instead of the clouded English
v
-sound. They show some tendency to abandon the
ph
(
f
)-sound in
diphtheria, diphthong
and
naphtha
, for a plain
p
-sound.
⁸⁹
English usage prefers a clear
s
-sound in such words as
issue
and
sensual
, but in America the sound is commonly that of
sh
. English usage prefers a clear
tu
-sound in
actual, punctuate, virtue
, and their like, but in America the
tu
tends to become
choo
. On the vulgar level
amateur
is always
amachoor
, and
picture
is
pitchur
or
pitcher. Literature
is
literater
in elegant American and
litrachoor
among the general; in England it is
litrachua
or
litrichua
. The American plain people have some difficulty with
t
and
d
. They add a
t
to
close, wish
and
once
, and displace
d
with
t
in
hold
, which becomes
holt
. In
told
and
old
they abandon the
d
altogether, preferring
tole
and
ole. Didn’t
is pronounced
di’n’t
, and
find
becomes indistinguishable from
fine
. The same letter is often dropped before consonants, as in
bran(d)-new, goo(d)-sized
and
corne(d)-beef
. The old
ax
for
ask
is now confined to a few dialects; in the current vulgate
ast
is substituted for it. The
t
is dropped in
bankrup, kep, slep, crep, quanity
and
les
(let’s). The
l
is omitted from
a’ready
and
gent’man
, and the first
g
from
reco’nize
. As in Standard English, there is a frequent dropping of
g
in the
-ing
words, but it is usually preserved in
anything
and
everything
.
⁹⁰
The
substitution of
th
for
t
in
height
, like the addition of
t
to
once
, seems to be an heirloom from the English of two centuries ago, but the excrescent
b
, as in
chimbley
and
fambly
, is apparently native. There are many parallels for the English butchery of
extraordinary
; for example,
bound’ry, pro’bition, int’res’, gover’ment, chrysanthe’um, Feb’uary, hist’ry, lib’ry
and
prob’ly. Ordinary
is commonly enunciated clearly, but it has bred a degenerated form,
onry
or
onery
, differentiated in meaning.
⁹¹
Consonants are misplaced by metathesis, as in
prespiration, hunderd, brethern, childern, interduce, calvary, govrenment
, and
modren. Ow
is changed to
er
, as in
piller, swaller, beller
and
holler
, or to
a
, as in
fella
, or to
i
as in
minni
(minnow). Words are given new syllables, as in
ellum, fillum, reality
(realty),
lozenger, athaletic, bronichal, blasphemious, mischievious, Cubéan, mountainious, tremendious, mayorality
and
municipal
, or new consonants, as in
overhall
and
larcensy
.
⁹²
In
yes
the terminal consonant is often omitted, leaving the vowel, which is that of
desk
, unchanged. This form is sometimes represented in print by
yeah
, which suggests
yay
and is inaccurate. But there are many other forms of
yes
, and Dr. Louise Pound once gathered no less than 37 in a single group of students at the University of Nebraska.
⁹³
St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish critic, who is ordinarily extremely hospitable to Americanisms, has carried on a crusade against these American
yeses
, and especially against the one which omits the
s
and the one usually represented by
yep
, which last, he says, “can sometimes be heard on English tongues.” He has denounced both as “disgusting.”
⁹⁴
“These variations of a single English word,” he says, “are inevitable in a country with a polyglot population.… When an American immigrant says
yah
or
yep
he is probably trying to say
yes
, just as a baby when it mispronounces a word is trying to pronounce it correctly.”
⁹⁵
He says that the
yes
without the
s
sounds as if the speaker “had started out to say
yes
, but had suddenly contracted a violent pain in his stomach and was unable to sound the sibilant.”
No
sometimes picks up a terminal
p
, and becomes
nope
.

All the early writers on the American language remarked its strange freedom from dialects. The first of them to deal with it at length, the Rev. John Witherspoon, thus sought to account for the fact:

Timothy Dwight and John Pickering took the same line. “In the United States,” said Dwight in 1815, “there is not, I presume, a descendant of English ancestors whose conversation is not easily and perfectly intelligible to every other.”
⁹⁷
“It is agreed,” said Pickering a year later, “that there is a greater uniformity of dialect throughout the United States (in consequence of the frequent removals of people from one part of the country to another) than is to be found in England.”
⁹⁸
The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, whose glossary was published in 1832, was of the same mind. “There is, properly speaking,” he said, “no dialect in America … unless some scanty remains of the croaking, guttural idioms of the Dutch, still observable in New York; the Scotch-Irish, as it used to be called, in some of the back settlers of the Middle States; and the whining, canting drawl brought by some republican, Oliverian and Puritan emigrants from the West of England, and still kept up by their unregenerated
descendants of New England — may be called dialects.”
⁹⁹
J. Fenimore Cooper, already quoted in praise of American speech in Section 1 of this chapter, agreed thoroughly with Witherspoon, Pickering and Boucher. He said in 1828:

Cooper added that such meager dialects as were to be encountered in the United States were fast wearing down to uniformity. The differences between New England, New York and Pennsylvania speech, he said, “were far greater twenty years ago than they are now.” A generation later George P. Marsh reported that this ironing out had been arrested. “I think no Eastern man,” he said, “can hear a native of the Mississippi Valley use the
o
vocative, or observe the Southern pronunciation of ejaculatory or other emphatic phrases, without perceiving a very marked though often indescribable difference between their and our utterance of the same things.” But Marsh was still convinced that American was singularly uniform. He said:

A great many other authorities might be quoted, all supporting the same doctrine. I choose two, both from the year 1919. The first is the anonymous Englishman who edited the monthly called
English
, now defunct.
¹⁰²
In his issue for October he said:

The other authority is the late George Philip Krapp, professor of English at Columbia and the author of two standard works on American pronunciation.
¹⁰³
He said:

Krapp was discussing Standard American, but on the plane of the vulgate the leveling is quite as apparent. That vast uniformity which marks the people of the United States, in political theory, in social habit, in general information, in reaction to new ideas, in deep-lying prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom and dress, is nowhere more marked than in their speech habits. The incessant neologisms of the national dialect sweep the whole country almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular spoken form is constantly undergoing show themselves from coast to coast.

Nevertheless, there
are
dialectical differences in spoken American, and they have been observed and recorded by a multitude of pho-nologists, both professional and lay. The organization of the American Dialect Society in 1889, the continuous, if somewhat infrequent, appearance of
Dialect Notes
ever since, and the preparation of a Linguistic Atlas of the country are sufficient evidences that American dialects really exist. Disregarding local peculiarities, there are three of them. The most important is that which a leading authority, Dr. Hans Kurath, calls Western American: it is the tongue that the overwhelming
majority of Americans speak, and the one that Englishmen always have in mind when they discuss American English. Its territory includes all of New England west of the Connecticut river, the whole of the Middle Atlantic area save the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland and lower Delaware, and all the region west of the Cotton Belts of Texas and Arkansas and north of Central Missouri. In Ohio, Indiana and Illinois it comes down close to the Ohio river, and in the South it includes parts of the mountain country. It is also spoken east of the Connecticut river, in parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine, and by many persons in Boston. No other form of American is so widespread, and none other is still spreading. The so-called New England dialect, once spoken all over the territory east of the Hudson, is now pretty well confined to the Boston area, and even there it is decaying. The Southern form of American occupies the area south of the Potomac and west to the Mississippi river, with extensions into Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, parts of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the lower counties of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Dr. Kurath believes that these divisions in American English were produced by the character of the immigration settling the different parts of the country, and in this theory most other authorities agree with him. The early settlers of Eastern New England and the Tidewater region of the South came chiefly from the Southern parts of England,
¹⁰⁴
and they brought with them those characters of Southern English speech that are still marked today in Standard English and separate the dialects of the Boston area and of the South from the speech of the rest of the United States,
e.g.
, the use of the broad
a
and the elision of
r
before consonants and in the terminal position. But the western parts of New England and the uplands of the South were settled mainly by immigrants speaking Northern varieties of English — many of them the so-called Scotch-Irish — and so were New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. When the movement into the West began there were two streams. The one, starting from the Tidewater South, carried Southern English into the cotton lands of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, into parts of Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, and into all save the mountainous parts of Kentucky; the other, starting from Western New England and
the Middle Atlantic region, carried Northern English into New York State, the Appalachian region down to the North Carolina-Tennessee border, and virtually the whole of the Middle and Far West. Thus the dialect of the Boston area and that of the South are closely allied. Both are forms of Southern English. But there is much less apparent influence of Southern English in the Western American which now dominates the country. It is, in many ways, nearer related to Lowland Scotch.
¹⁰⁵