American Language (72 page)

57
In his Dissertations on the English Language, 1789, Webster said that the English then made the
a
of
patriotism
long and the Americans made it short. How the double reversal came about I don’t know. “In all these cases, where the people are not uniform,” said Webster, “I should prefer the short sound, for it appears to me the most analogous.” He was probably thinking of
cat
and
rat
.

58
Pronunciation, above cited, p. 24.

59
A long list of the vulgarisms of the late 40’s is in the introduction to J. R. Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, 2nd ed.; Boston, 1859. Many of those of a somewhat earlier period are in the glossary attached to The Yankey in England, by David Humphreys; Hartford, 1815. This glossary is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931.

60
The following is from his Dissertations on the English Language, 1789, p. 128.
“Deaf
is generally pronounced
deef
. It is the universal practice in the Eastern States; and it is general in the Middle and Southern; though some have adopted the English pronunciation,
def
. The latter is evidently a corruption; for the word is in analogy with
leaf
and
sheaf
, and has been from time immemorial.” Always his analogies!

61
The Pronunciation of English in America,
Atlantic Monthly
, March, 1915, p. 361.

62
This tendency is not confined to English. The same
e
is encountered in languages as widely differing otherwise as Arabic, French and Swedish. “Its existence,” says Sayce, in The Science of Language, Vol. I, p. 259, “is a sign of age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to understand what is said.”

63
Good English; New York, 1867, pp. 42–43. This book was a reprint of articles contributed to the New York
Evening Post
, then edited by William Cullen Bryant.

64
Language and the Study of Language; New York, 1867, p. 43.

65
The Elements of English Pronunciation, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies; New York, 1874, p. 221.

66
Words and Their Uses; New York, 1876. My quotations are from the revised edition, 1876, pp. 263–4.

67
On the Pronunciation of
Either
and
Neither, American Speech
, June, 1932. A very informing and amusing paper. Dr. Pound quotes the following from The Lady Buyer, by Frances Anne Allen,
American Mercury
, Feb., 1928: “[The department-store lady buyer] may say
Eye-talian
even after having been sent abroad for her firm, she may write
formally
for
formerly
and
shamme
for
chamois
, and may unashamedly flaunt a dozen grammatical errors, but always standing her in good stead, and ready at the tip of her tongue, is her crystal-clear British pronunciation of
either
.… Nothing on earth could make her whisper
ee-ther
in the darkest corner of the stock-room.”

68
The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 225.

69
Pronunciation, above cited, p. 46.

70
Watch, Water, Wash, American Speech
, April, 1929.

71
The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 83.

72
A woman teacher of English, born in Tennessee, tells me that the
y-
sound is much more persistent in the South than in the North. “I have never,” she says, “heard a native Southerner fail to retain the sound in
new
. The same is true of
duke, stew, due, duty
and
Tuesday
. But it is not true of
blue
and
true.
”

73
High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912.

74
Every-Day English; Boston, 1881, p. 243.

75
There is an inconclusive discussion of the question in the Oxford Dictionary, under
lieutenant
.

76
I am indebted here to Dr. H. K. Croessmann, of Du Quoin, Ill.

77
Parts of Speech and Accidence; Boston, 1935, p. 119.

78
“Why a dropped
g
should be considered to be good English,” says St. John Ervine in The Curse of “Refanement,” London
Daily Mail
, Aug. 30, 1926, “when a dropped
h
is considered to be a sign of ill-breeding I cannot imagine; but seemingly if those who drop their final
g’s
took to dropping their initial
h’s
, while those who drop their
h’s
took to dropping their
g’s
instead,
h
-dropping would be ‘the best English’ and
g
-dropping would be damnable. The ‘best people,’ whoever they may be, have fashions of speech that are as vulgar as that of ‘the worst people.’ ” Krapp shows that the change of
ng
to
n
was probably common in early American. John Walker, in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language; London, 1791, argued for dropping the
g
in the final syllables of participles of verbs ending in
g, e.g., singing
and
ringing
.

79
A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; Oxford, 1913.

80
On English Homophones; Oxford, 1919.

81
The Pronunciation of English in America,
Atlantic Monthly
, March, 1915, p. 362.

82
Some Notes on American
R, American Speech
, March, 1926, p. 333.

83
The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905, p. 29.

84
In the New York dialect it is lost between the neutral vowel and a consonant, as in
thoid, boid, goil
, etc., but that is only on the vulgar level.

85
A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 298.

86
The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 220.

87
The English Language in America, p. 231. There is a long and interesting discussion of the variations in the American
r
in Some Notes on American
R
, by John S. Kenyon,
American Speech
, March, 1926. See also The Dog’s Letter, by C. H. Grandgent, in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920; Loss of
R
in English Through Dissimilation, by George Hempl,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. I, Pt. VI, 1893, and The Humorous
R
, by Louise Pound,
American Mercury
, Oct., 1924, p. 233
ff
. Dr. Pound deals with such forms as
dorg, purp, school-marm, orter
and
orf
. She shows that when a
r
is intruded in English humorous writing, as in
larf, gorn
, and
arnswer
it is not intended to be pronounced: it simply indicates that the preceding vowel is to have the sound of
a
in
father
.

88
In Concerning the American Language, which Mark Twain included in The Stolen White Elephant; Hartford, 1882, and described as “part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad,” he represented himself as saying to an Englishman met on a train in Germany: “If the signs are to be trusted even your educated classes used to drop the
h
. They say
humble
now [with the clear
h
], and
heroic
, and
historic
, etc., but I judge that they used to drop those
h’s
because your writers still keep up the fashion of putting an
an
before those words instead of an
a
. This is what Mr. Darwin might call a ‘rudimentary’ sign that
an
was justifiable once, and useful — when your educated classes used to say
’umble
, and
’eroic
, and
’istorical
. Correct writers of the American language do not put
an
before those words.” But a correspondent sends me the following argument for the use of
an:
“My sense of euphony (and, I believe, the genius of the English language) requires something between the
a
and the
h
-sound in all such cases. Witness the absence of English words showing such a combination. I believe that all English words beginning with
a
, in which a syllable beginning with
h
follows, are dissyllables. That is to say, the
h
-syllable is accented. Witness
ahead, ahoy, ahem.
” See Text, Type and Style, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 269, and
A
and
An
Before
H
and Certain Vowels, by Louis Feipel,
American Speech
, Aug., 1929.

89
See Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Pt. VII, 1911, p. 504
ff
.

90
The late Ring Lardner once said: “I used, occasionally, to sit on the players’ bench at baseball games, and it was there that I noted the exceptions made in favor of these two words. A player, returning to the bench after batting, would be asked, ‘Has he got
anything
in there?’ (‘He — in there’ always means the pitcher.) The answer would be ‘He’s got
everything.
’ On the other hand, the player might return and (usually after striking out) say, ’ He ain’t got
nothin
”. And the manager: ‘Looks like he must have
something
’.’ ”

91
This word, when written, often appears as
ornery
, but it is almost always pronounced
on’ry
, with the first syllable rhyming with
don
.

92
Not infrequently such forms are used by the sophisticated, especially in the halls of learning, for humorous effect. See Intentional Mispronunciations, by Margaret Reed,
American Speech
, Feb., 1932. But in a headline in the San Francisco
Chronicle
, June 29, 1931,
mayorality
was printed quite seriously, and in Baltimore there is an
Autogenius
Company which does autogenous welding.

93
Popular Variants of
Yes, American Speech
, Dec., 1926.

94
English — According to American
Skedule
, London
Evening Standard
, Sept. 23, 1929.

95
Quoted from the London
Spectator
in
American Speech
June, 1927, p. 413.

96
The Druid, No. V, May 9, 1781, reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 16. For the testimony of other early observers see British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, July, 1933.

97
Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters, Published in the
Quarterly Review
; Boston, 1815.

98
A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816, prefatory essay. It is reprinted in Mathews, just cited.

99
A Supplement to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language; London, 1832–33.

100
Notions of the Americans; London, 1828, Vol. II, pp. 164–5.

101
Lectures on the English Language; New York, 1860; 4th ed., 1870, Lecture XXX, pp. 666–67 and 674–75.

102
It was set up in London in March, 1919, and ran for about two years.

103
The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, and The English Language in America; New York, 1925, the second volume of which is devoted almost wholly to pronunciation. The quotation is from the former, p. viii.

104
Including not only the London area, but also East Anglia and the Southwestern counties of Devon, Dorset and Somerset — in short, the whole region south of a line drawn from the mouth of the Severn to the Wash, but excluding Cornwall.

105
Dr. Kurath discusses all these points at length in American Pronunciation,
S.P.E. Tracts
, No. XXX, 1928, and The Origin of the Dialectical Differences in Spoken American English,
Modern Philology
, May, 1928. See also The English Language in America, by G. P. Krapp, above cited, Vol. II, pp. 29–30, and Scotland and Americanisms, by William Craigie, an address delivered before the Institute of Medicine, Chicago, Dec. 4, 1928.

106
For example, by Mary N. Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) (1850–1922) and John W. Fox (1863–1919). Miss Murfree’s first book of mountain stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, was published in 1884. Mr. Fox’s Hell For Sartain, 1897, was an immense success in its day.

107
Old Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916. Dr. Combs has also published Early English Slang Survivals in the Mountains of Kentucky,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. IV, 1921, and The Language of the Southern Highlanders,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, Dec., 1931. There is a criticism of some of Combs’s conclusions by J. M. Steadman, Jr., in
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916.

108
A summary of his observations is in The Ozark Dialect, in The Ozarks: an American Survival of Primitive Society; New York, 1931. He has also published A Word-List From the Ozarks,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. IX, 1926; The Ozark Dialect in Fiction,
American Speech
, March, 1927; More Words From the Ozarks,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927; The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect,
American Speech
, Oct., 1927; Pronunciation in the Ozark Dialect (with Anna A. Ingleman), the same, June, 1928; Literary Words in the Ozarks, the same, Oct., 1928; A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms, the same, Dec., 1928; Is There an Ozark Dialect?, the same, Feb., 1929; A Third Ozark Word-List, the same, Oct., 1929; Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks (with Patti Sankee), the same, Feb., April, and June, 1930; Recent Fiction and the Ozark Dialect, the same, Aug., 1931; and A Fourth Ozark Word-List, the same, Feb., 1933.