The American Language
nicht, dass er mit der Weiterverbreitung dieses Wortes die deutsche
Industrie zugunsten der amerikanisch-englischen schädigt."
[68] /Cf./ Word-Coinage and Modern Trade Names, by Louise Pound,
/Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. i, 1913, pp. 29-41. Most of these
coinages produce derivatives, /e. g./, /bevo-officer/, /to kodak/,
/kodaker/.
[69] This conscious shortening, of course, is to be distinguished from
the shortening that goes on in words by gradual decay, as in
/Christmas/ (from /Christ's mass/) and /daisy/ (from /day's eye/).
[70] The Science of Language, vol. ii, p. 339.
[71] Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge,
1914, p. 1. Jones is lecturer in phonetics at University College,
London.
[72] /Vide/ his Handbook of Phonetics, p. xv, /et seq./
[73] It is given in Ellis' Early English Pronunciation, p. 1293 /et
seq./ and in Sayce's The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 353 /et seq./
[74] Every-Day English, p. 29.
[75] Robert J. Menner: The Pronunciation of English in America,
/Atlantic Monthly/, March, 1915, p. 366.
[76] Words and Their Uses, p. 58.
[77] The following passage from Kipling's American Notes, ch. i, will
be recalled: "Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm,
the cider and the salt codfish of the Eastern states are responsible
for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from
across the water without paying for 'em, and the snort of delight was
fixed in their nostrils for ever by a just Providence. That is why
they talk a foreign tongue today."
[78] Lecture xxx. The English Language in America.
[79] Modern English, p. 166. /Cf./ A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words
Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly, p. 652.
[80] Lexilogus, 2nd ed.; Berlin, 1860, p. 239. An English translation
was published in London in 1846.
[81] A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, p. xvi.
[82] The Pronunciation of English, p. 17.
[83] The Pronunciation of English in America, /op. cit./, p. 362.
[84] The Question of Our Speech, p. 29 /et seq./
[85] /Cf./ The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p.
487.
[86] Robert Bridges: A Tract on the Present State of English
Pronunciation; Oxford, 1913.
[87] An interesting discussion of this peculiarity is in Some Variant
Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read, /Dialect Notes/,
vol. iii, pt. vii, 1911, p. 504 /et seq./
[88] Hugh Mearns: Our Own, Our Native Speech, /McClure's Magazine/,
Oct., 1916.
[89] The American actor imitates, not only English pronunciation in
all its details, but also English dress and bearing. His struggles
with such words as /extraordinary/ are often very amusing.
[90] /Cf./ Duncan Mackintosh: Essai Raisonné sur la Grammaire et la
Pronunciation Anglais; Boston, 1797.
[91] Fashion and the Broad /A/, /Nation/, Jan 7, 1915.
[92] High School Circular No. 17, June 19, 1912.
[93] Every-Day English, p. 243.
[94] Open Boats, by Alfred Noyes, New York, 1917, pp. 89-91.
[95] P. 30.
[96] The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 259.
[97] B. MacDonald Hastings, /New York Tribune/, Jan. 19, 1913.
[98] Various minor differences between English and American
pronunciation, not noted here, are discussed in British and American
Pronunciation, by Louise Pound, /School Review/, vol. xxiii, no. 6,
June, 1915.
[Pg177]
VI
The Common Speech
§ 1
/Grammarians and Their Ways/--So far, in the main, the language
examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious
variety--the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least
of literate men. Most of the examples of its vocabulary and idiom, in
fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports
of more or less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of
members of Congress and of other public men. The whole of Thornton's
excellent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is
scarcely a locution that is not supported by printed examples.
It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth,
cannot exhibit the methods and tendencies of a living speech with
anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What men
put into writing and what they say when they take sober thought are
very far from what they utter in everyday conversation. All of us, no
matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the belt a bit, so to
speak, when we speak familiarly to our fellows, and pay a good deal
less heed to precedents and proprieties, perhaps, than we ought to. It
was a sure instinct that made Ibsen put "bad grammar" into the mouth
of Nora Helmar in "A Doll's House." She is a general's daughter and
the wife of a professor, but even professor's wives are not above
occasional bogglings of the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of
verbs. The professors themselves, in truth, must have the same habit,
for sometimes they show plain signs of it in print. More than once,
plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and
syntax in [Pg178] preparation for the present work, I have
encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with
contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And
nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the
enchanted purist erring himself.[1] The most funereal of the sciences
is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and
fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if
the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were
always right.
But here we are among the learned; and their sins, when detected and
exposed, are at least punished by conscience. What are of more
importance, to those interested in language as a living thing, are the
offendings of the millions who are not conscious of any wrong. It is
among these millions, ignorant of regulation and eager only to express
their ideas clearly and forcefully, that language undergoes its great
changes and constantly renews its vitality. These are the genuine
makers of grammar, marching miles ahead of the formal grammarians.
Like the Emperor Sigismund, each man among them may well say: "/Ego
sum ... super grammaticam/." It is competent for any individual to
offer his contribution--his new word, his better idiom, his novel
figure of speech, his short cut in grammar or syntax--and it is by the
general vote of the whole body, not by the verdict of a small school,
that the fate of the innovation is decided. As Brander Matthews says,
there is not even representative government in the matter; the /posse
comitatus/ decides directly, and despite the sternest protest,
finally. The ignorant, the rebellious and the daring come forward with
their brilliant barbarisms; the learned and conservative bring up
their objections. "And when both sides have been heard, there is a
show of hands; and by this the irrevocable decision of the community
itself is rendered."[2] Thus it was that the Romance languages were
fashioned out of the wreck of Latin, the vast [Pg179] influence of
the literate minority to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus it was,
too, that English lost its case inflections and many of its old
conjugations, and that our /yes/ came to be substituted for the
/gea-se/ (=/so be it/) of an earlier day, and that we got rid of
/whom/ after /man/ in /the man I saw/, and that our stark pronoun of
the first person was precipitated from the German /ich/. And thus it
is that, in our own day, the language faces forces in America which,
not content with overhauling and greatly enriching its materials, now
threaten to work changes in its very structure.
Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of
the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday speech
departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far from any
recognizable spoken English, but among those lower classes which make
up the great body of the people it gets so far from orthodox English
that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its old bonds
altogether, or, at any rate, all save the loosest of them. Behind it
is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier chapters: the
impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a new order of
life in highly self-conscious freedom, to break a relatively stable
language, long since emerged from its period of growth, to their novel
and multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their experimental and
impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain, would war fiercely
upon any attempt at formal regulation, however prudent and elastic; it
is often rebellious for the mere sake of rebellion. But what it comes
into conflict with, in America, is nothing so politic, and hence
nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. What it actually
encounters here is a formalism that is artificial, illogical and
almost unintelligible--a formalism borrowed from English grammarians,
and by them brought into English, against all fact and reason, from
the Latin. "In most of our grammars, perhaps in all of those issued
earlier than the opening of the twentieth century," says Matthews, "we
find linguistic laws laid down which are in blank contradiction with
the genius of the language."[3] In brief, the American [Pg180]
school-boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be instructed in the
structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, is actually
instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue that he never
hears at all, and seldom reads, and that, in more than one of the
characters thus set before him, does not even exist.
The effects of this are two-fold. On the one hand he conceives an
antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As
one teacher puts it, "pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it,
because there /is/ nothing in it."[4] And on the other hand, the
school-boy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living
language that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and
that he will probably speak all the rest of his life. All he hears in
relation to it is a series of sneers and prohibitions, most of them
grounded, not upon principles deduced from its own nature, but upon
its divergences from the theoretical language that he is so
unsuccessfully taught. The net result is that all the instruction he
receives passes for naught. It is not sufficient to make him a master
of orthodox English and it is not sufficient to rid him of the
speech-habits of his home and daily life. Thus he is thrown back upon
these speech-habits without any helpful restraint or guidance, and
they make him a willing ally of the radical and often extravagant
tendencies which show themselves in the vulgar tongue. In other words,
the very effort to teach him an excessively tight and formal English
promotes his use of a loose and rebellious English. And so the
grammarians, with the traditional fatuity of their order, labor for
the destruction of the grammar they defend, and for the decay of all
those refinements of speech that go with it.
The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the
attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor have they failed to
observe the causes of its failure. "Much of the fruitlessness of the
study of English grammar," says Wilcox,[5] "and many of the obstacles
encountered in its study are due to 'the difficulties created by the
grammarians.' These difficulties arise chiefly from three
sources--excessive classification, multiplication of terms for a
single conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if
it were highly inflected." So long ago as the 60's Richard Grant White
began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He saw clearly