The American Language
Henrietta Marie. Charles "objected to the inharmonious contractions
/will'nt/ (or /wolln't/) and /wasn't/ and /weren't/ ... and set the
fashion of using the softly euphonious /won't/ and /wan't/, which are
used in speaking to this day by the best class of Southerners." A more
direct French influence upon Southern pronunciation is also pointed
out. "With full knowledge of his /g's/ and his /r's/, ... [the
Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, ... and he carries over the
consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning the next, just as the
Frenchman does." The political importance of the South, in the years
between the Mecklenburg Declaration and the adoption of the
Constitution, tended to force its provincialisms upon the common
language. Many of the acknowledged leaders of the nascent nation were
Southerners, and their pronunciation, as well as their phrases, must
have become familiar everywhere. Pickering gives us a hint, indeed, at
the process whereby their usage influenced that of the rest of the
people.[52]
The Americans early dropped the /h/-sound in such words as /when/ and
/where/, but so far as I can determine they never elided it at the
beginning of words, save in the case of /herb/, and a few others. This
elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney vulgarism, but it has
extended to the orthodox English speech. In /ostler/ the initial /h/
is openly left off; in /hotel/ and /hospital/ it is [Pg062] seldom
sounded, even by the most careful Englishmen. Certain English words in
/h/, in which the /h/ is now sounded, betray its former silence by the
fact that not /a/ but /an/ is still put before them. It is still good
English usage to write /an hotel/ and /an historical/; it is the
American usage to write /a hotel/ and /a historical/.
The great 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 variance persists to this day. The name of the last
letter of the alphabet, which is always /zed/ in English, is usually
made /zee/ in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism
arose in the eighteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bristed was a grandson of John Jacob Astor and was educated at
Cambridge. He contributed an extremely sagacious essay on The English
Language in America to a volume of Cambridge Essays published by a
group of young Cambridge men; London, 1855.
[2] Vol. i, p. vi.
[3] Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling;
Philadelphia, 1768.
[4] Dec. 26, 1789. The Works of B. Franklin, ed. by A. F. Smyth; New
York, 1905, vol. i, p. 40.
[5] /The Druid/, No. 5; reprinted in Witherspoon's Collected Works,
edited by Ashbel Green, vol. iv; New York, 1800-1.
[6] /Vide/, in addition to the citations in the text, the /British
Critic/, Nov. 1793; Feb. 1810; the /Critical Review/, July 1807; Sept.
1809; the /Monthly Review/, May 1808; the /Eclectic Review/, Aug.
1813.
[7] 1815, pp. 307-14; reprinted in his Remarks on National Literature,
Boston, 1823.
[8] American English, /North American Review/, April, 1883.
[9] A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of
Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an
organization with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing
from the Indians, thus name the months, in order: /Cold Moon/, /Snow/,
/Worm/, /Plant/, /Flower/, /Hot/, /Buck/, /Sturgeon/, /Corn/,
/Travelers'/, /Beaver/ and /Hunting/. They call their officers
/incohonee/, /sachem/, /wampum-keeper/, etc. But such terms, of
course, are not in general use.
[10] A long list of such obsolete Americanisms is given by Clapin in
his Dictionary.
[11] An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian
Nations....; Phila., 1818.
[12] /Cf./ Hans Brinker, by Mary Maples Dodge; New York, 1891.
[13] (/a/) A chest of drawers, (/b/) a government office. In both
senses the word is rare in English, though its use by the French is
familiar. In the United States its use in (/b/) has been extended,
/e. g./, in /employment-bureau/.
[14] From /Sint-Klaas/--/Saint Nicholas/. /Santa Claus/ has also
become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls
the name an Americanism.
[15] The spelling is variously /sauerkraut/, /saurkraut/, /sourkraut/
and /sourkrout/.
[16] /Cf./ The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp.
14 and 22.
[17] The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the
weight of evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from the
/rapides/ of the French Canadians. It is familiar in the United States
and Canada, but seldom met with in England.
[18] /Log-cabin/ came in later. Thornton's first quotation is dated
1818. The /Log-Cabin/ campaign was in 1840.
[19] Theo. Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104.
[20] William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p.
15.
[21] /Vide/ his preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv,
respectively.
[22] /Vide/ Lyell's Travels in North America; London, 1845.
[23] Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866.
[24] Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by
Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17.
[25] A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, /Forum/, Oct., 1886.
[26] Edwin S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language: New
York, 1867; pp. 25-27.
[27] /Cf./ Ch. I, § 5, and Ch. V, § 1.
[28] /Lott/ appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. /Vide/ the
edition of Andrus; Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is "their landes,
/lotts/ and accommodations." On page 46 is "meadow and home /lotts/."
[29] /Vide/ Hutchinson's Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6.
[30] The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current
English (1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906), respectively.
[31] S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: "I lay'd a /Rock/ in the
North-east corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-house."
[32] The Americana, ... /art./ Americanisms: New York, 1903-6.
[33] Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley
says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that
the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the
Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it
barely balanced "the counter-movement of colonists quitting the
colony." Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, vol.
i, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals.
[34] Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319.
[35] /Cf./ Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3
vols.; London, 1770-71.
[36] Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution;
Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of
Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New
York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and
Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.
[37] /Cf./ the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p.
119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the /Edinburgh Review/
for July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had arisen "in a society
where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature."
[38] Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and
even indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings
viii, 7; John xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37.
[39] J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and
Provincialisms, Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which
are Familiar and in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850.
[40] An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in the /New York
Sun/, Nov. 27, 1914.
[41] /Cf./ J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the
Southern Mountains, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.
[42] Henry Sweet: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford,
1888.
[43] P. 124.
[44] /Cf./ /Art./ Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, by
W. Murison, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv,
p. 485.
[45] English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909.
[46] C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the Broad /A/, /Nation/, Jan. 7,
1915.
[47] Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language;
London, 1780.
[48] It first appeared in Robert Nares' Elements of Orthography;
London, 1784. In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker's
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary.
[49] Robert J. Menner; The Pronunciation of English in America,
/Atlantic Monthly/, March, 1915.
[50] The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29.
[51] Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech, /Neale's Monthly/, Nov.,
1913, pp. 606-7.
[52] /Vide/ his remarks on /balance/ in his Vocabulary. See also
Marsh, p. 671.
[Pg063]
III
The Period of Growth
§ 1
/The New Nation/--The American language thus began to be recognizably
differentiated from English in both vocabulary and pronunciation by
the opening of the nineteenth century, but as yet its growth was
hampered by two factors, the first being the lack of a national
literature of any pretentions and the second being an internal
political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the
national consciousness. During the actual Revolution common aims and
common dangers forced the Americans to show a united front, but once
they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting
interests, and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and
hatreds which came near wrecking the new confederation more than once.
Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach
themselves wholly from the struggle for domination still going on in
Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the revolutionary era--estimated by
some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total
population in 1776--were ardently in favor of England, and such
patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France. This
engrossment in the quarrels of foreign nations was what Washington
warned against in his Farewell Address. It was at the bottom of such
bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired
and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect
was to make it difficult for the people of the new nation to think of
themselves, politically, as Americans. Their state of mind,
vacillating, uncertain, alternately timorous and [Pg064] pugnacious,
has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on
"Colonialism in America."[1] Soon after the Treaty of Paris was
signed, someone referred to the late struggle, in Franklin's hearing,
as the War for Independence. "Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,"
said Franklin. "The War for Independence is yet to be fought."
"That struggle," adds Lossing, "occurred, and that independence was
won, by the Americans in the War of 1812."[2] In the interval the new
republic had passed through a period of /Sturm und Drang/ whose
gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget--a period in
which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no less bold and
pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his
fear of "monocrats" to the point of monomania, but under it there was
undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class (including
probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired
by the facile doctrines of the French Revolution to demands which
threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of
property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all
sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and