The Adventure of English (19 page)

That was largely how English named what it saw in the New World. “Hum-bird,” “old-wife” and “loon” make their first appearance in print here: turkeys and eagles are unfamiliar birds called by familiar names. America is full of examples of such anglicised birds, beasts, trees and flowers. “Robin” has a red breast but it is a type of thrush; American “rabbits” are English “hares.”

Perhaps it was fear of the unknown which made them reach for the comfort of old familiar names. They certainly did this with place names. Ipswich, Norwich, Boston, Hull, several Londons, Cambridge, Bedford, Falmouth, Plymouth, Dartmouth — there are hundreds in New England. New England, those two simple words, say a very great deal. Insofar as they could, these stern fathers wanted to recreate the place they had left behind, knowing full well it was new but wanting for many reasons to hold on to the old.

Scott Attwood at the Plimouth Plantation had this to say:

They were of course men and women with a mission. Those who see the skull beneath the flesh will conclude that to ignore or virtually to ignore the language of so many peoples, with whom you would eventually fight, over whom you will finally rule, is the first step in plotting their subjugation. Others would say that the zeal of the Christian was such that the word of God and the spreading of the word of God so that souls could be saved and salvation brought to those hitherto outside the Christian fold was a paramount imperative. The Native Americans had to learn English to understand about God and be saved.

Those and other factors feed into the mix of reasons which became the set truth, that English prevailed as often as possible; that English looked at this enormous continent on which it had the merest toehold and claimed it as “my America.”

It seems that from quite early on there was an erosion of original regional accents. Being crammed into a single boat and forced into cramped intimacy might have speeded this up. The central and essential features of life were reading aloud from the Bible and listening to very long sermons. Rhetoric, the delight of Elizabeth I, was not encouraged. As the preface to the
Bay Psalm Book,
the first book published in English in America in 1640, said, “God's altar needs not our polishings.” A standard accent began to appear reasonably quickly.

These people were obsessively aware of the power of words. Improper speech was a crime. Blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, railing, reviling, scolding, swearing and threatening were all offences. Curse God and you were in the stocks for three hours. Deny the scriptures and you would be whipped or you could be hanged. Language was what they lived by: language was what they lived for, provided it was the right language.

They set out to control it, and control began in the schoolroom.

The
New England Primer
sold over three million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including copies to schools, which means that every English-speaking family in America must have worked their way through this clear, well-constructed teaching aid. It was totally grounded in the positive view of the religious life, its duties, its goals, its commandments. This was a society with a very high regard for literacy. Every settlement of fifty people had to provide a teacher to ensure that children could read and write.

The
Primer
— for reading and spelling — was simple and to the point. Every child was to get it by heart.

There will be commentators who might call this religious propaganda, but context is vital. It was the strength of their religious convictions which had led the Pilgrims to take terrible risks in their own country. They valued greatly what they had bought so dearly and it was a prize they were committed, divinely commanded, to pass on.

By the end of the seventeenth century, English was being heard and taught along more than a thousand miles of the eastern coast, and the first colonies in Massachusetts and Virginia had been joined by Maryland (1633), Rhode Island (1636), Connecticut (1636), New Hampshire (1638), North and South Carolina (1663), New Jersey (1664) and Pennsylvania (1682). Georgia came on board in 1732 and all but two of these — Massachusetts and Connecticut — take their names from people and places in England and not from Native American terms.

War brought other colonies under British rule. New Amsterdam was taken and became New York in 1664. New Sweden became New Delaware. Dutch terms remain in Breukelen (Brooklyn) and Haarlem, and in “waffle,” “coleslaw,” “landscape” (as it had done back in England), “caboose,” “sleigh,” “boss” (to become very important as a way in which slaves and servants could address their employers or owners without calling them “master”), “snoop” and “spook.”

There was rivalry with the French of course. Why should that incessant enmity be given up just because they had moved thousands of miles west and to a continent which had room enough for France and England tens of times over? When the New World old-style war ended in 1763, England was given the rights to all the territory between the coast and the Mississippi and took a hold to the north in Canada. Meanwhile, the word-flow from French continued. “Toboggan” and “caribou” came from native to French to English, as did “bayou,” “butte” and “crevasse,” describing landscape features. There was the “depot,” and “cents” and “dimes” were kept in a “cache.” There would be words from French New Orleans — “praline” and “gopher.” “Chowder” from the Breton, and “picayune,” a small coin, came to mean anything small. Borrowings from the Spanish were on a very big scale — Spanish is still the biggest feeder into American English: “barbecue,” “chocolate,” “stampede,” “tornado” and “plaza.”

American English was gathering its own forces although there are those who argue that its vocabulary does not become distinctively American until some decades after the Declaration of Independence. Before this, however, words appeared which are new to the English language and are found during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They derive their popularity from the development of the American political system: “congressional,” “presidential,” “gubernatorial,” “congressman,” “caucus,” “mass meeting,” “state-house,” “land office.” (Again, the English habit of looking to Latin to validate the new.) And steadily, remorselessly, the new way of life was finding its own English: “back country,” “backwoodsman,” “log cabin,” “clapboard,” “cold snap,” “snow-plough,” “bob-sled.”

A more extended mix of accents was now arriving from the old country. William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681, Philadelphia in 1682. It was then a mixed population of English Quakers, Welsh, Scots, Irish and Germans. After 1720 many Ulstermen (about fifty thousand) arrive on the east coast, find the land occupied and go west and south and by 1750 Pennsylvania is one-third English, one-third Scots and one-third German. The Germans too were escaping religious persecution and their hybrid language, Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch), still survives through association with the Amish and the Mennonites. A generation after Culloden (1746), as a result of Scottish landowners evicting their tenants, thousands of Scots go west. The population is coming from different areas of Britain, but the advance of English is uninterrupted.

What gave English primacy over the other languages of Britain besides that sense of mission was the force of numbers and the sense of occupation. What gave it a stronger presence than the other European languages, French and Spanish in particular, came through the ploughshare. On the whole the Spanish had sent armies and priests and taken gold. The French sent fur trappers and looked for trade. The English came to settle and that finally ensured that it was the language of Tyndale and Shakespeare which would be heard in the mid eighteenth century from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains.

As English spread, it began to chafe at the bonds and then to cut loose from the language spoken in England. In some cases meaning had shifted. The English “shop” became the American “store.” “Lumber” was rubbish in London; on the east coast it was and is “cut timber.” An English “biscuit” was an American “cracker.” An American “pond” could be as big as an English “lake”; an American “rock” could be as small as an English “pebble.” In America a piece of land became a “lot,” named after the method of drawing lots to determine which new owner received which new territory.

It was also developing a sound of its own. The blend of dialects started on the ships quickly came to mean that no single accent dominated. The accent today around the north-eastern corner of America is largely uniform and beguiling in its crisp distillation of dialects. And across America, to this day, there is a comparatively small variation of accents compared to the deep differences still rooted in Britain. English upper-class visitors to America noted the absence of regional pronunciation with approval. In 1764 Lord Gordon wrote: “The propriety of language here surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any but the polite part of London.” Another visitor observed: “We hear nothing so bad in America as the Suffolk whine, the Yorkshire clipping or the Newcastle guttural. We never hear the letter ‘h' aspirated improperly, nor omitted to be aspirated where propriety requires it. The common pronunciation approximates to that of the well-educated class in London and its vicinity.”

In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly:

Even
The Last of the Mohicans
author, James Fenimore Cooper, joined in: “The people of the United States speak . . . incomparably better English than the people of the mother country.” This opinion was repeated over and again. The Americans did not just speak good English, they spoke it better than the English back in England. They were delighted, even hubristic, about this: they stood apart and had no need of English tuition on anything.

In 1775, on the bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, a gun was fired. It was, Emerson said, a “shot heard around the world” and the American Revolution began. A year later, thirteen colonies declared their independence. The language for the great moment was at hand. It was perfect classical English, a masterpiece of English prose.

After independence, some Americans it is said were swept away by enthusiasm and agreed that America should cut off completely from Britain and adopt another language altogether — French, Hebrew, even Greek, were suggested. This is most likely a myth. Ninety percent of the white population was of English stock in a population of about four million.