The American Language
and expensive; a colonist who had made it was a marked man,--as
Hawthorne said, "the /petit-maître/ of the colonies." Nor was there
any very extensive exchange of ideas, for though most of the books
read in the colonies came from England, the great majority of the
colonists, down to the middle of the century, seem to have read little
save the Bible and biblical commentaries, and in the native literature
of the time one seldom comes upon any reference to the English authors
who were glorifying the period of the Restoration and the reign of
Anne. Moreover, after 1760 the colonial eyes were upon France rather
than upon England, and Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the
Encyclopedists began to be familiar names to thousands who were
scarcely aware of Addison and Steele, or even of the great
Elizabethans.[37]
The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation
of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other
hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually became
obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over with them the
English of James I and the Revised [Pg056] Version, and their
descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its
fundamentals to be little changed by the academic overhauling that the
mother tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth
century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in part
they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed from that
of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the Bible, not
only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior
pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when an artificial
prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon /sick/
for the Gothic /ill/, the colonies refused to follow, for /sick/ was
in both the Old Testament and the New;[38] and that refusal remains in
force to this day.
A very large number of words and phrases, many of them now exclusively
American, are similar survivals from the English of the seventeenth
century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in England. Among
nouns Thornton notes /fox-fire/, /flap-jack/, /jeans/, /molasses/,
/beef/ (to designate the live animal), /chinch/, /cord-wood/,
/homespun/, /ice-cream/, /julep/ and /swingle-tree/; Halliwell[39]
adds /andiron/, /bay-window/, /cesspool/, /clodhopper/,
/cross-purposes/, /greenhorn/, /loophole/, /ragamuffin/, /riff-raff/,
/rigmarole/ and /trash/; and other authorities cite /stock/ (for
cattle), /fall/ (for autumn), /offal/, /din/, /underpinning/ and
/adze/. /Bub/, used in addressing a boy, is very old English, but
survives only in American. /Flap-jack/ goes back to Piers Plowman, but
has been obsolete in England for two centuries. /Muss/, in the sense
of a row, is also obsolete over there, but it is to be found in
"Anthony and Cleopatra." /Char/, as a noun, disappeared from English a
long time ago, but it survives in American as /chore/. Among the
adjectives similarly preserved are /to whittle/, /to wilt/ and /to
approbate/. /To guess/, in the American sense of /to suppose/, is to
be found in "Henry VI": [Pg057]
Not all together; better far, I /guess/,
That we do make our entrance several ways.
In "Measure for Measure" Escalus says "I /guess/ not" to Angelo. The
New English Dictionary offers examples much older--from Chaucer,
Wyclif and Gower. /To interview/ is in Dekker. /To loan/, in the
American sense of to lend, is in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but it dropped
out of use in England early in the eighteenth century, and all the
leading dictionaries, both English and American, now call it an
Americanism.[40] /To fellowship/, once in good American use but now
reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer. Even /to hustle/, it
appears, is ancient. Among adjectives, /homely/, which means only
homelike or unadorned in England, was used in its American sense of
plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors
are /burly/, /catty-cornered/, /likely/, /deft/, /copious/, /scant/
and /ornate/. Perhaps /clever/ also belongs to this category, that is,
in the American sense of amiable.
"Our ancestors," said James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring
over no English better than Shakespeare's." Shakespeare died in 1616;
the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607.
As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were
men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech:
soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighborhood
"advanced thinkers," bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and
other such fugitives from culture--in brief, Philistines of the sort
who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and march in parades, and
whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. There was thus a touch
of rhetoric in Lowell's saying that they spoke the English of
Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers of 1885 spoke the
English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said truly, for these men
at least brought with them the vocabulary of Shakespeare--or a part of
it,--even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension,
and they also brought with [Pg058] them that sense of ease in the
language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing
in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan. There were no
grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened
to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most
satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still
direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth
century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from
the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than
anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax
of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.[41]
§ 6
/Colonial Pronunciation/--The debate that long raged over the
pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of
determining with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a
people long departed from earth. The American colonists, of course,
are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have
relatively little difficulty in determining just how they pronounced
this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the
neglect of our philologists, or, perhaps more accurately, our lack of
philologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English
pronunciation,[42] and what Wilhelm Corssen did for Latin, no American
professor has yet thought to attempt for American. The literature is
almost, if not quite a blank. But here and there we may get a hint of
the facts, and though the sum of them is not large, they at least
serve to set at rest a number of popular errors.
One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the
so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad /a/'s (making /last/,
/path/ and /aunt/ almost assonant with /bar/) comes down unbrokenly
from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence
superior in authority to the pronunciation of the [Pg059] rest of the
country, with its flat /a/'s (making the same words assonant with
/ban/). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to
show that the flat /a/ was in use in New England in 1789, for the
pronunciation of such words as /wrath/, /bath/ and /path/, as given by
him, makes them rhyme with /hath/.[43] Moreover, he gives /aunt/ the
same /a/-sound. From other sources come indications that the /a/ was
likewise flattened in such words as /plant/, /basket/, /branch/,
/dance/, /blast/, /command/ and /castle/, and even in /balm/ and
/calm/. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in
English ever since the Middle English period,[44] and according to
Lounsbury[45] they have moved toward the disappearance of the
Continental /a/, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice."
Grandgent, another authority,[46] says that it became flattened "by
the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the
standard language had no broad /a/." Even in such words as /father/,
/car/ and /ask/ the flat /a/ was universally used. Sheridan, in the
dictionary he published in 1780,[47] actually gave no /ah/-sound in
his list of vowels. This habit of flatting the /a/ had been brought
over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in
America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in
England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New
Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no
suspicion that any other /a/ was possible. But between 1780 and 1790,
according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broad /a/ (not the
/aw/-sound, as in /fall/, but the Continental sound as in /far/) arose
in England,[48] and this fashion soon found servile imitation in
Boston. But it was as much an affectation in those [Pg060] days as it
is today, and Webster indicated the fact pretty plainly in his
"Dissertations." How, despite his opposition, the broad /a/ prevailed
East of the Connecticut river, and how, in the end, he himself yielded
to it, and even tried to force it upon the whole nation--this will be
rehearsed in the next chapter.
The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English to
various other vowel-sounds that were facing change in the eighteenth
century, for example, the long /e/-sound in /heard/. Webster says that
the custom of rhyming /heard/ with /bird/ instead of with /feared/
came in at the beginning of the Revolution. "To most people in this
country," he adds, "the English pronunciation appears like
affectation." He also argues for rhyming /deaf/ with /leaf/, and
protests against inserting a /y/-sound before the /u/ in such words as
/nature/. Franklin's authority stands behind /git/ for /get/. This
pronunciation, according to Menner,[49] was correct in seventeenth
century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century.
So was the use of the Continental /i/-sound in /oblige/, making it
/obleege/. It is probable that the colonists clung to these
disappearing usages much longer than the English. The latter,
according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical fashions set
by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames
Garrick, in particular, for many extravagant innovations, most of them
not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible
for the use of a long /i/-sound in such words as /motive/, nor for the
corruption of /mercy/ to /marcy/. Webster denounced both of these
barbarisms. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that
the letter /r/ is called /ar/, and proposed to dispose of it by
changing the /ar/ to /er/.
As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly
that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the
Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound of /l/ in
such words as /would/ and /should/, a usage not met with in England
after the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, the /w/ in
/sword/ was sounded in America "for some time after Englishmen had
abandoned it." The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an unpleasant
/r/-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by the
English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted
gratuitously in innocent words.[50] The obvious slurring of the
consonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator[51] on
the ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II,
and that most of the Southern colonists came to the New World at that
time. The court of Charles, it is argued, was under French influence,
due to the king's long residence in France and his marriage to