The American Language
be unaware of it.[71] This relative paucity of adjectives appears to
be common to the more primitive varieties of speech. E. J. [Pg231]
Hills, in his elaborate study of the vocabulary of a child of two,[72]
found that it contained but 23 descriptive adjectives, of which six
were the names of colors, as against 59 verbs and 173 common nouns.
Moreover, most of the 23 minus six were adjectives of all work, such
as /nasty/, /funny/ and /nice/. Colloquial American uses the same
rubber-stamps of speech. /Funny/ connotes the whole range of the
unusual; /hard/ indicates every shade of difficulty; /nice/ is
everything satisfactory; /bully/ is a superlative of almost limitless
scope.
The decay of /one/ to a vague /n/-sound, as in /this'n/, is matched by
a decay of /than/ after comparatives. /Earlier than/ is seldom if ever
heard; composition reduces the two words to /earlier'n/. So with
/better'n/, /faster'n/, /hotter'n/, /deader'n/, etc. Once I overheard
the following dialogue: "I like a belt /more looser'n/ what this one
is." "Well, then, why don't you unloosen it /more'n/ you got it
unloosened?"
§ 7
/The Double Negative/--Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic
of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative. So
freely is it used, indeed, that the simple negative appears to be
almost abandoned. Such phrases as "I see nobody" or "I know nothing
about it" are heard so seldom that they appear to be affectations when
encountered; the well-nigh universal forms are "I /don't/ see nobody"
and "I /don't/ know nothing about it." Charters lists some very
typical examples, among them, "he ain't /never/ coming back /no/
more," "you /don't/ care for nobody but yourself," "couldn't be /no/
more happier" and "I /can't/ see nothing." In Lardner there are
innumerable examples: "they was /not/ no team," "I have /not/ never
thought of that," "I can't write /no/ more," "no chance to get /no/
money from /nowhere/," "we /can't/ have nothing to do," and so on.
Some of his specimens show a considerable complexity, for [Pg232]
example, "Matthewson was /not/ only going as far as the coast,"
meaning, as the context shows, that he was going as far as the coast
and no further. /Only/ gets into many other examples, /e. g./, "he
hadn't /only/ the one pass" and "I don't work nights no more, /only/
except Sunday nights." This latter I got from a car conductor. Many
other curious specimens are in my collectanea, among them: "one
swaller don't make /no/ summer," "I /never/ seen nothing I would of
rather saw," and "once a child gets burnt once it /won't/ never stick
its hand in /no/ fire /no/ more," and so on. The last embodies a
triple negative. In "the more faster you go, the sooner you /don't/
get there" there is an elaborate muddling of negatives that is very
characteristic.
Like most other examples of "bad grammar" encountered in American the
compound negative is of great antiquity and was once quite
respectable. The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it constantly. In
that language the negative of the verb was formed by prefixing a
particle, /ne/. Thus, /singan/ (=/to sing/) became /ne singan/ (=/not
to sing/). In case the verb began with a vowel the /ne/ dropped its
/e/ and was combined with the verb, as in /naefre/ (never), from
/ne-aefre/ (=/not ever/). In case the verb began with an /h/ or a /w/
followed by a vowel, the /h/ or /w/ of the verb and the /e/ of /ne/
were both dropped, as in /naefth/ (=/has not/), from /ne-haefth/
(=/not has/), and /nolde/ (=/would not/), from /ne-wolde/. Finally, in
case the vowel following a /w/ was an /i/, it changed to /y/, as in
/nyste/ (=/knew not/), from /ne-wiste/. But inasmuch as Anglo-Saxon
was a fully inflected language the inflections for the negative did
not stop with the verbs; the indefinite article, the indefinite
pronoun and even some of the nouns were also inflected, and survivors
of those forms appear to this day in such words as /none/ and
/nothing/. Moreover, when an actual inflection was impossible it was
the practise to insert this /ne/ before a word, in the sense of our
/no/ or /not/. Still more, it came to be the practise to reinforce
/ne/, before a vowel, with /nā/ (=/not/) or /naht/ (=/nothing/), which
later degenerated to /nat/ and /not/. As a result, there were fearful
and wonderful combinations of negatives, some of them fully matching
the best efforts of Lardner's baseball player. Sweet [Pg233] gives
several curious examples.[73] "Nān ne dorste nān thing āscian,"
translated literally, becomes "/no/ one dares /not/ ask /nothing/."
"Thaet hus nā ne feoll" becomes "the house did /not/ fall /not/." As
for the Middle English "he /never/ nadde /nothing/," it has too modern
and familiar a ring to need translating at all. Chaucer, at the
beginning of the period of transition to Modern English, used the
double negative with the utmost freedom. In "The Knight's Tale" is
this:
He /nevere/ yet /no/ vileynye /ne/ sayde
In al his lyf unto /no/ maner wight.
By the time of Shakespeare this license was already much restricted,
but a good many double negatives are nevertheless to be found in his
plays, and he was particularly shaky in the use of /nor/. In "Richard
III" one finds "I never was /nor never/ will be"; in "Measure for
Measure," "harp not on that /nor/ do /not/ banish treason," and in
"Romeo and Juliet," "thou expectedst not, /nor/ I looked not for."
This misuse of /nor/ is still very frequent. In other directions, too,
the older forms show a tendency to survive all the assaults of
grammarians. "/No/ it /doesn't/," heard every day and by no means from
the ignorant only, is a sort of double negative. The insertion of
/but/ before that, as in "I doubt /but/ that" and "there is no
question /but/ that," makes a double negative that is probably
full-blown. Nevertheless, as we have seen, it is heard on the floor of
Congress every day, and the Fowlers show that it is also common in
England.[74] Even worse forms get into the /Congressional Record/. Not
long ago, for example, I encountered "without /hardly/ an exception"
in a public paper of the utmost importance.[75] There are, indeed,
situations in which the double negative leaps to the lips or from the
pen almost irresistibly; even such careful writers as Huxley, Robert
Louis Stevenson and Leslie Stephen have [Pg234] occasionally dallied
with it.[76] It is perfectly allowable in the Romance languages, and,
as we have seen, is almost the rule in the American vulgate. Now and
then some anarchistic student of the language boldly defends and even
advocates it. "The double negative," said a writer in the /London
Review/ a long time ago,[77] "has been abandoned to the great injury
of strength of expression." Surely "I won't take nothing" is stronger
than either "I will take nothing" or "I won't take anything."
"Language begins," says Sayce, "with sentences, not with single
words." In a speech in process of rapid development, unrestrained by
critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words to
the needs of the complete sentence is especially marked. One finds it
clearly in American. Already we have examined various assimilation and
composition forms: /that'n/, /use' to/, /would'a/, /them 'ere/ and so
on. Many others are observable. /Off'n/ is a good example; it comes
from /off of/ and shows a preposition decaying to the form of a mere
inflectional particle. One constantly hears "I bought it /off'n/
John." /Sort'a/, /kind'a/ and their like follow in the footsteps of
/would'a/. /Usen't/ follows the analogy of /don't/ and /wouldn't/.
/Would 've/ and /should 've/ are widely used; Lardner commonly hears
them as /would of/ and /should of/. The neutral /a/-particle also
appears in other situations, especially before /way/, as in /that'a
way/ and /this'a way/. It is found again in /a tall/, a liaison form
of /at all/.[78]
§ 8
/Pronunciation/--Before anything approaching a thorough and profitable
study of the sounds of the American common speech is possible, there
must be a careful assembling of the materials, and this, unfortunately,
still awaits a philologist of sufficient enterprise and equipment. Dr.
William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana, has made some
excellent examinations [Pg235] of vowel and consonant sounds in the
South, Dr. Louise Pound has done capital work of the same sort in the
Middle West,[79] and there have been other regional studies of merit.
But most of these become misleading by reason of their lack of scope;
forms practically universal in the nation are discussed as dialectical
variations. This is the central defect in the work of the American
Dialect Society, otherwise very industrious and meritorious. It is
essaying to study localisms before having first platted the
characteristics of the general speech. The dictionaries of Americanisms
deal with pronunciation only casually, and often very inaccurately; the
remaining literature is meagre and unsatisfactory.[80] Until the matter
is gone into at length it will be impossible to discuss any phase of it
with exactness. No single investigator can examine the speech of the
whole country; for that business a pooling of forces is necessary. But
meanwhile it may be of interest to set forth a few provisional ideas.
At the start two streams of influence upon American pronunciation may
be noted, the one an inheritance from the English of the colonists and
the other arising spontaneously within the country, and apparently
much colored by immigration. The first influence, it goes without
saying, is gradually dying out. Consider, for example, the
pronunciation of the diphthong /oi/. In Middle English it was as in
/boy/, but during the early Modern English period it was assimilated
with that of the /i/ in /wine/, and this usage prevailed at the time
of the settlement of America. The colonists thus brought it with them,
and at the same time it lodged in Ireland, where it still prevails.
But in England, during the pedantic eighteenth century, this /i/-sound
was displaced by the original /oi/-sound, not by historical research
but by mere deduction from the spelling, and the new pronunciation
soon extended to the polite speech of America. In the common speech,
however, the /i/-sound persisted, and down to the time of [Pg236] the
Civil War it was constantly heard in such words as /boil/, /hoist/,
/oil/, /join/, /poison/ and /roil/, which thus became /bile/, /hist/,
/ile/, /jine/, /pisen/ and /rile/. Since then the school-marm has
combatted it with such vigor that it has begun to disappear, and such
forms as /pisen/, /jine/, /bile/ and /ile/ are now very seldom heard,
save as dialectic variations. But in certain other words, perhaps
supported by Irish influence, the /i/-sound still persists. Chief
among them are /hoist/ and /roil/. An unlearned American, wishing to
say that he was enraged, never says that he was /roiled/, but always
that he was /riled/. Desiring to examine the hoof of his horse, he
never orders the animal to /hoist/ but always to /hist/. In the form
of /booze-hister/, the latter is almost in good usage. I have seen
/booze-hister/ thus spelled and obviously to be thus pronounced, in an
editorial article in the /American Issue/, organ of the Anti-Saloon
League of America.[81]
Various similar misplaced vowels were brought from England by the
colonists and have persisted in America, while dying out of good
England usage. There is, for example, short /i/ in place of long /e/,
as in /critter/ for /creature/. /Critter/ is common to almost all the
dialects of English, but American has embedded the vowel in a word
that is met with nowhere else and has thus become characteristic, to
wit, /crick/ for /creek/. Nor does any other dialect make such