The American Language
at the head of its contents page the following encomium from the /New
York Tribune/: "the /livest/ art in America today is poetry, and the
/livest/ expression of that art is in this little Chicago monthly."
Now and then the spirit of American shows a transient faltering, and
its inventiveness is displaced by a banal extension of meaning, so
that a single noun comes to signify discrete things. Thus /laundry/,
meaning originally a place where linen is washed, has come to mean
also the linen itself. So, again, /gun/ has come to mean fire-arms of
all sorts, and has entered into such compounds as /gun-man/ and
/gun-play/. And in the same way /party/ has been borrowed from the
terminology of the law and made to do colloquial duty as a synonym for
/person/. But such evidences of poverty are rare and abnormal; the
whole movement of the language is toward the multiplication of
substantives. A new object gets a new name, and that new name enters
into the common vocabulary at once. /Sundae/ and /hokum/ are late
examples; their origin is dubious and disputed, but they met genuine
needs and so they seem to be secure. A great many more such
substantives are deliberate inventions, for example, /kodak/,
/protectograph/, /conductorette/, /bevo/, /klaxon/, /vaseline/,
/jap-a-lac/, /resinol/, /autocar/, /postum/, /crisco/, /electrolier/,
/addressograph/, /alabastine/, /orangeade/, /pianola/, /victrola/,
/dictagraph/, /kitchenette/, /crispette/, /cellarette/, /uneeda/,
/triscuit/ and /peptomint/. Some of these indicate attempts at
description: /oleomargarine/, /phonograph/ and /gasoline/ are older
examples of that class. Others represent efforts to devise
designations that will meet the conditions of advertising psychology
and the trade-marks law, to wit, that they [Pg166] be (/a/) new,
(/b/) easily remembered, and (/c/) not directly descriptive. Probably
the most successful invention of this sort is /kodak/, which was
devised by George Eastman, inventor of the portable camera so called.
/Kodak/ has so far won acceptance as a common noun that Eastman is
often forced to assert his proprietary right to it.[67] /Vaseline/ is
in the same position. The annual crop of such inventions in the United
States is enormous.[68] The majority die, but a hearty few always
survive.
Of analogous character are artificial words of the /scalawag/ and
/rambunctious/ class, the formation of which constantly goes on. Some
of them are shortened compounds: /grandificent/ (from /grand/ and
/magnificent/), /sodalicious/ (from /soda/ and /delicious/) and
/warphan/(/age/) (from /war/ and /orphan/(/age/)).[69] Others are made
up of common roots and grotesque affixes: /swelldoodle/,
/splendiferous/ and /peacharino/. Yet others are mere extravagant
inventions: /scallywampus/, /supergobsloptious/ and /floozy/. Most of
these are devised by advertisement writers or college students, and
belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of selected
specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in /-doodle/ hint at
German influences, and those in /-ino/ owe something to Italian, or at
least to popular burlesques of what is conceived to be Italian.
§ 6
/Pronunciation/--"Language," said Sayce, in 1879, "does not consist of
letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to
us our study of it will be little better than an [Pg167] exercise of
memory."[70] The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English
grammarians and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J.
Ellis and the massive lesson of Grimm's law; their labors were largely
wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly
under the influence of Continental philologists, and particularly of
the Dane, J. O. H. Jespersen, they have turned from orthographical
futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and the latest and best
grammar of it, that of Sweet, is frankly based upon the spoken English
of educated Englishmen--not, remember, of conscious purists, but of
the general body of cultivated folk. Unluckily, this new method also
has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write
a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in
their oral speech there are wide variations. "No two persons," says a
leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,[71] "pronounce
exactly alike." Moreover, "even the best speaker commonly uses more
than one style." The result is that it is extremely difficult to
determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of
letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied
pronounce it with minute shades of difference, and admit other
differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring
to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a
great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it,[72] found
himself, in the end, with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters.
Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and Ellis
brought it to 390.[73] Other phonologists, English and Continental,
have gone floundering into the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced
to a far greater economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The
difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable.
It is, as White says, "almost impossible for one person to express to
another by signs the [Pg168] sound of any word." "Only the voice," he
goes on, "is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the
question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words
are the most delicate, fleeting and inapprehensible things in
nature.... Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to
apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose
evidence is given."[74] Certain German orthoepists, despairing of the
printed page, have turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche
Grammophon-Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen
speeches in a great many languages and dialects, including English.
The phonograph has also been put to successful use in language
teaching by various American correspondence schools.
In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in
print the numerous small differences between English and American
pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and
only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and
very careful observer,[75] the most important of them do not lie in
pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this
direction, he says, one must look for the true characters "of the
English accent." I incline to agree with White,[76] that the pitch of
the English voice is somewhat higher than that of the American, and
that it is thus more penetrating. The nasal twang which Englishmen
observe in the /vox Americana/, though it has high overtones, is
itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched, as all constrained
and muffled tones are apt to be. The causes of that twang have long
engaged phonologists, and in the main they agree that there is a
physical basis for it--that our generally dry climate and rapid
changes of temperature produce an actual thickening of the membranes
concerned in the production of sound.[77] We are, in brief, a somewhat
snuffling [Pg169] people, and much more given to catarrhs and coryzas
than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment
to free and easy utterance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible
for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a
word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them; the
American, in giving /extraordinary/ six distinct syllables instead of
the Englishman's grudging four, may be seeking to make up for his
natural disability. Marsh, in his "Lectures on the English
Language,"[78] sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one
hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more
than the English, and were thus much more influenced by the spelling
of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that "our flora shows
that the climate of even our Northern States belongs ... to a more
Southern type than that of England," and that "in Southern latitudes
... articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern
regions." In support of the latter proposition he cited the
pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that
of English, Danish and German--rather unfortunate examples, for the
pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Italian.
Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase
their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than
the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern
peoples to throw the accent back, and that this helped to "bring out
all the syllables." One finds a certain support for this notion in
various American peculiarities of stress. /Advertisement/ offers an
example. The prevailing American pronunciation, despite incessant
pedagogical counterblasts, puts the accent on the penult, whereas the
English pronunciation stresses the second syllable. /Paresis/
illustrates the same tendency. The English accent the first syllable,
but, as Krapp says, American usage clings to the [Pg170] accent on
the second syllable.[79] There are, again, /pianist/, /primarily/ and
/telegrapher/. The English accent the first syllable of each; we
commonly accent the second. In /temporarily/ they also accent the
first; we accent the third. Various other examples might be cited. But
when one had marshalled them their significance would be at once set
at naught by four very familiar words, /mamma/, /papa/, /inquiry/ and
/ally/. Americans almost invariably accent each on the first syllable;
Englishmen stress the second. For months, during 1918, the publishers
of the Standard Dictionary, advertising that work in the street-cars,
explained that /ally/ should be accented on the second syllable, and
pointed out that owners of their dictionary were safeguarded against
the vulgarism of accenting it on the first. Nevertheless, this free
and highly public instruction did not suffice to exterminate /al´ly/.
I made note of the pronunciations overheard, with the word constantly
on all lips. But one man of my acquaintance regularly accented the
second syllable, and he was an eminent scholar, professionally devoted
to the study of language.
Thus it is unsafe, here as elsewhere, to generalize too facilely, and
particularly unsafe to exhibit causes with too much assurance. "Man
frage nicht warum," says Philipp Karl Buttmann. "Der Sprachgebrauch
lässt sich nur beobachten."[80] But the greater distinctness of
American utterance, whatever its genesis and machinery, is palpable
enough in many familiar situations. "The typical American accent,"
says Vizetelly, "is often harsh and unmusical, but it sounds all of
the letters to be sounded, and slurs, but does not distort, the
rest."[81] An American, for example, almost always sounds the first
/l/ in /fulfill/; an Englishman makes the first syllable /foo/. An
American sounds every syllable in /extraordinary/, /literary/,
/military/, /secretary/ and the other words of the /-ary/-group; an
Englishman never pronounces the /a/ of the penultimate syllable.
/Kindness/, with the /d/ silent, would attract notice in the United
States; in England, according to [Pg171] Jones,[82] the /d/ is "very
commonly, if not usually" omitted. /Often/, in America, commonly
retains a full /t/; in England it is actually and officially /offen/.
Let an American and an Englishman pronounce /program/ (/me/). Though
the Englishman retains the long form of the last syllable in writing,
he reduces it in speaking to a thick triple consonant, /grm/; the