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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

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Vif PREFACE

Though American histories of other kinds abound, of politics, of diplomacy, of painting, music, even of furniture, the American language has strangely escaped historical treatment. Perhaps it has generally been assumed that the language of America enjoys the felicity which is said to be the lot of persons and states without a history. But the life of the English language in America has covered three hundred years, and so long a stretch of static happiness cer- tainly could not be expected in any thing human. In truth Ameri- can English extends over just those periods in which the English language, reflecting new and complicated developments in social and economic conditions, has undergone some of its most interesting changes. In these changes the English language in America has shared to as great an extent as the American people have shared in the development of the civilization of the modern world.

In their immediate day and hour the facts of current American English have not infrequently challenged attention. But such studies of American English as have been made reflect for the most part an impressionistic or polemic interest in the speech of the day, and though often animated and amusing, and sometimes the vehicles for a certain amount of valuable information, they have offered very little in the way of systematic elucidation of the English lan- guage in America. Perhaps most attention has been paid in these treatises, both by Britons and by Americans, to the ever-burning question whether American English is as good as British English. Among recent discussions of the relations between British and American English the most elaborate as well as the most independent is contained in Mencken’s American Language. Studies of this kind, however, have usually been more significant as inquiries into social prejudices than into linguistic history.

One may question whether even now the time is ripe for writing a history of the English language in America. If by ripeness one means that the details for the definitive history of the American

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vi PREFACE

language have all been collected, certainly the time is not ripe, but as certainly it never will be so. Historians have frequently lamented that history lags so far behind happenings. The history of an event cannot be written until too late to know about it, until immediate knowledge has been simplified and “interpreted” by viewing the event in the accumulated opinion of tradition. But if this is a necessary condition under which the historian must work, the time for writing a history of the English language in America will never arrive until our speech is a dead language and its history is written by a representative of some new and alien civilization. A less dismal way of approaching the question, however, may be that of asking whether an author who attempts the subject is as ripe for the undertaking as he may well hope to be. In answer all the present author can say is that he has devoted years of interested study to the subject, that he presents such materials as he has col- lected and such conclusions as he has reached not as final, but as salvage from the wastes of time which it seems advisable to tow into a harbor while opportunity permits.

The historical study of English in America has the double effect of bringing the past closer and at the same time enriching it with a distant and strange content. History both deepens and shortens perspective. It relieves a flat chronology by filling it with detail, but by filling it, at the same time it makes the past seem less exten- sive. Nothing is so long as a vacant half hour, and imagination alone can make a distant perspective. It can make even a remote golden age. As one studies detail, however, one realizes that no moment of the past was golden, but every moment was real and human. As historical knowledge grows the remote comes nearer, and humanity is seen not to have been as different one hundred, two hundred or three hundred years ago as it was supposed to be. It is so at least in the historical study of the American language. Perhaps one cannot quite say that there is nothing new under the sun in speech, but one can say that what seems new in American speech will most often be shown on further examination merely to be something old in a new surrounding.

PREFACE vii

It would be quite practicable to take American English as the point of departure for ventures into the general history of the whole past of the English language or even into general psychological lin- guistics. Neither of these purposes has been present in the compo- sition of this book. It would seem that a more limited and immedi- ate field of interest and duty lay before the student of American English. By limiting the treatment one is enabled to present a greater abundance of local detail than otherwise might be appro- priate. But even with this excuse the author has been compelled to ask himself not infrequently if he has not burdened his story with too ample collections of fact. The historical student in one corner of his heart is not altogether unlike the stamp or curio col- lector. He finds it hard to resist the charm of a specimen. A speci- men attracts for various reasons, the situation in which it was found, the shading of value which it acquires from context, or merely be- cause it has never before been put on record. And after all the his- torian has the best right to be something of an antiquary. No one surely has a better opportunity than he to collect for the museums. In the matter of exhaustive citations it has seemed better, therefore, to err on the side of inclusiveness than on that of exclusiveness. In a work of historical reference, it is annoying not to find what one is looking for. The author of this treatise does not hope that he has saved his readers infallibly from this annoyance, but at least he has not neglected his opportunities to be as inclusive as possible. The same may be said with respect to the citation of authorities. It has seemed better to be specific than vaguely general, even at the expense sometimes of being needlessly specific. Examples and illustrations have not been cited therefore without indication of their origin, whether from some other study, from some document, or if no literary source is given, from personal observation.

This history has therefore been made documentary so far as pos- sible by direct quotation of passages. The study of words in the chapter on the American vocabulary treats in detail only words for which documentary citations or direct evidence can be given. The only way to save the treatment of vocabulary from degenerating

vill PREFACE

into a medley of chatty and amusing and doubtfully accurate re- marks about words is by constant reference to actual usage. The great advance of Thornton’s American Glossary over older books on Americanisms lies in the fact that Thornton gives title, page and date for every word he discusses. The method is sound and every one who will study American vocabulary intelligently must start from Thornton and make such additions as his opportunities enable him to make.

A preface is not the place to dwell on these topics at length, but attention may be called to the many glimpses of the changing state of American culture which one gets through the study of the lan- guage. One realizes intimately in this way the early dangers which confronted the Union, the dangers of disintegration which, as many hoped, language and the study of language were to remove. The hope was not vain, for undoubtedly language has been one of the strongest binding forces in American experience.

One sees also the struggles and conflicts in social ideas as they made for uniformity and as they determined values. The notion that usage could be regulated by an authority appealed strongly to the sympathy of Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—unfortunately has not altogether ceased to appeal. But there seems to be a peculiar and pathetic significance in the general acceptance of Walker in the early nineteenth century and in the at- tempts to live up to Walker. This feeling for Walker was different from the earlier respect for Dr. Johnson, and on the whole less intel- higent. Dr. Johnson was accepted as a source of positive informa- tion, as one who could tell you how to spell words and how to define them. But Walker was accepted as a source of social distinction, to be acquired by appropriation if one had it not by nature.

So far as general standards of culture are concerned, it is quite obvious from the study of the language that, since the days of colon- ization, a great change has come over American ways of regarding this particular social activity of speech. This change can be seen to a certain extent still in progress. Among an unschooled older generation of speakers, certain liberties and variabilities of vocabu-

PREFACE 1x

lary, syntax and pronunciation are present which the newer genera- tion, socialized and normalized by experience in the public schools, condemns or charitably overlooks. Standards of speech have become more regular and severer than they formerly were. An educated man who should now assume the pose of rusticity would arouse the suspicion of cheap trickery, for rusticity of speech no longer char- acterizes the average citizen, but only those noticeably below the average. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, even through the first half of the nineteenth century, the conditions must have been different. In a seventeenth or eighteenth century village, or even town, the number of conventionally educated persons would be small, perhaps only the minister and the schoolmaster. This means that the standards of the conventional education could not apply to the general life of the community. Pronunciation, grammar and spelling were not then tests of respectability, of demo- cratic equality, in the degree to which they have since become. What seems now like illiterate speech, the speech of persons who do not reflect how they speak, was then merely the normal speech of the community.

The town records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are doubtless fairly representative of the average cultural level of Ameri- can life of the times. These records were not usually kept by a learned person but by some respectable citizen of the community. They are rich mines of information to be derived both from direct statement and by inference. The conscious struggles of the recorders as well as their inadvertences are instructive, though this evidence must always be treated cautiously, since even the so-called illiterate person may have his highly literary moments. Thus in the Hemp- stead Records, farm acquires a kind of Hellenic look when it is spelled pharme (1664). For home the spelling whome is very frequent in several records, and one at first wonders whether this spelling rep- resents a real pronunciation or is merely a semi-learned extension of the spelling of whole. In this instance other evidence supports the conclusion that whome was really pronounced with the initial con- sonant of whim, the final bit of evidence being the inadvertent spelling

x PREFACE

wome. But these unconventional spellings are not always so deeply significant. In the Hempstead Records for 1659 one finds kow ceeper and cow ceeper, and in 1664, cep and sep for keep. The spellings here mean nothing for pronunciation, though their logic is perfect. If c can have the value of k in cow, and if c can have the value of s in a word like receive, then s can have the value of k in keep. This shows clearness of mind, but sometimes the spellings indicate merely uncertainty, as when in these same records, 1660, 1661, particular is spelled piticler, piticlur, pitucler, pitculler, partickler, the first prob- ably standing nearest to the recorder’s actual pronunciation.

Much of this irregular spelling, syntax and pronunciation of a century or two ago still persists, the important change which has taken place being one of attitude toward it. To regard these and similar unconventionalities as being the genuinely native elements in American speech, the real American language, would be absurd both from the historical as well as the psychological point of view. Good grammar ordinarily has as ancient a history as bad grammar, and popular or illiterate English can be carried back to British sources no more and no less definitely than standard English. The stabilizing of standards which has taken place in American English is by no means peculiar to this country, but the same development has been characteristic of the whole modern period of the English language.

This history was not written to cover a special plea for a dis- tinctive American language, illiterate or otherwise. On the con- trary the author feels, as every disinterested student of American English must feel, that historical study brings American English into a closer relation to the central tradition of the English language than is commonly supposed to exist by those who have not looked at English in America from the historical and comparative angle. At various times of heated sentiment, attempts have been made to manufacture tradition, to construct a peculiar American language when none existed. Thus immediately after the Revolution, many advocates arose of what they were pleased to call a Federal English —an engaging name, though the thing itself was difficult to put down

PREFACE Xl

in black and white. Later Walt Whitman grew eloquent over the notion of a reconstructed language for These States, though he failed to give the prescription for it. Most frequently the genuine American language has been supposed to be a speech markedly different from the standard English of cultivated conversation or the body of English literature—in short a popular and more or less illiterate dialect. But why popular speech should be considered more genuine, more essentially American, than standard speech it is difficult to see. Indeed striving towards standardized forms of speech would seem to have been one of the most constant and char- acteristic of American impulses. The parallel between America in the last one hundred and fifty years and Italy in the time of Dante is more than superficial and accidental. In America as then in Italy, we have been striving to attain an “illustrious vernacular,” an English speech lifted above the level of any local or class dialect. This illustrious vernacular has been a standardized and more or less manipulated speech, to a certain degree an artificial and literary speech. But it has been nevertheless for the last century and more the norm by which other forms of American English have been estimated. Popular life is interesting and popular speech is inter- esting, and both by contrast are also often amusing, but in its usual manifestations, the so-called ‘‘real American language”’ is nothing more than a kind of literary class dialect, made by peppering normal English with a certain number of popular violations of conventional grammar and pronunciation. It is vivacious enough and may be true enough as an element in dramatic characterization, but to say that this is the real American language is equivalent to saying that all persons who are not garage keepers or shopladies or factory hands, all persons who do not disrupt every convention of propriety that occasion offers, are frauds and impostors. But American English is certainly larger than the speech of one class, even than that of the superbly self-satisfied class of the illiterates. Popular American speech is no more the real American language than the speech of the London coster is the genuine speech of England or than Apache Parisian is the only genuine French. Any dialect may of course be

xi PREFACE

genuine when it is genuinely used, but of the many forms of a highly developed language like English, who shall say which is the quin- tessentially genuine? or who shall insist that the crude only may be genuine?

In the matter of bibliography the author’s main endeavor has been to prevent the bibliographical machinery from becoming too burdensome. Books referred to only once or twice are ordinarily treated as casuals, their titles are given in the body of the text where the reference occurs, but are not included in the general bibliography. The names of such authors are of course in the index. The general bibliography consists of titles of books which have been mainly and more or less constantly useful in the composition of the history. Titles frequently referred to in the text are given at such places only in abbreviated form, but fuller details, like dates and places of pub- lication, can easily be found in the alphabetical list of the bibliog- raphy. An exhaustive bibliography of the whole subject of American English would have been extremely bulky and would itself fill a large volume. The bibliography here given can be supplemented by the several bibliographies contained in the volumes of Dialect Notes. Tucker, American English, pp. 332-345, also has a bibliography, and the very useful bibliography of Mencken’s first edition, pp. 323- 339, appears conveniently classified and enlarged in the later edi- tions. Attention may be called likewise to the forthcoming Bzb- liography of the English Language, by Professor Arthur G. Kennedy, of Stanford University. And finally, almost any library or cataloging index will furnish abundant titles on American English, though many of these titles, especially in journalistic and magazine literature, will be found to be of little value. It seems true that many persons are inclined to rush into print on questions of language without an adequate foundation of knowledge. Their comments are often more interesting to the student of human passions and perversities than they are to the historical student of language. In some instances titles of books not specially important in themselves have been included in the bibliography. These have been mentioned for their representative value as titles of types of books which the student

PREFACE xiii

of historical American English is compelled to examine. The author will remark, however, that he has in his own card indexes scores more of such titles of antiquated grammars and spelling books which he has refrained from thrusting upon the attention of his readers. Some time a complete bibliography of American English must be made, but that is a subject for a book in itself.

A word of explanation may be given of the author’s occasional use of the word British in a phrase like British English to contrast with American English. Englishmen themselves do not now com- monly use the adjective British in this way, though they do speak of the British Empire, and certain schools advertise themselves as being conducted exclusively for British boys. Englishmen would not however speak of a certain usage of speech in England as British to distinguish it from Canadian or Australian or American. To them it would be merely English, the thing itself. But if students of Eng- lish in England do not feel the need for distinguishing terms for the several aspects of the language, including their own, students of English in America do feel this need and can scarcely avoid using terms which make these distinctions clear. The word British is an obvious one to use, and it has been employed in this history because it is practically convenient. Others have done the same, and the word has acquired a certain standing as an Americanism. A similar excuse may be made for the word American as an adjective limited in application to the United States. In strict logic such a use is not justifiable, but common practice and understanding have long since put the word beyond the jurisdiction of logic.

Economy and the demands of a moderate degree of exactness have necessitated the use of a phonetic alphabet in the discussion of sounds and pronunciations. The reasons for this necessity have been set forth more at large at the beginning of the second volume, in the chapter which discusses pronunciations, and there also readers unfamiliar with the notation of the International Phonetic Associ- ation will find the symbols briefly described. The system of notation employed is simple and the few minutes devoted to understanding it will be amply repaid by increased ease and swiftness in reading.

CONTENTS

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XV

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

THE MOTHER TONGUE

Long experience in one’s native speech causes it to seem so obvi- ous and natural, like elemental things, wind and rain and sun, like breathing and walking, that it makes no urgent demands for explana- tion. ‘It needes not,” said Sir Philip Sidney, “that a man should be put to schoole to learne his mother tongue.’’ Perhaps not—at least in Sidney’s day. In later times, and especially in America, speech has not been taken for granted quite so easily. On closer examination this familiar activity of speech is seen to be extraor- dinarily complicated and subtle, in the end often inexplicable. A complete account of the American idiom, if one could give it, would go far towards explaining the whole spiritual history of the American people. But this chapter does not pretend to give any such com- plete account. It attempts the more possible task of setting down some of the most significant features of that background of experi- ence, hidden or open, against: which thoughtful Americans project their speech when it becomes for them a matter of conscious reflec- tion. It is true that speech in the main rests upon a foundation of feeling, not of reflection, and these less conscious attitudes cannot be disregarded. That their feeling for a mother tongue and their opinions concerning it have been the same among all Americans at any given moment, it would be folly to suppose. They have been sufficiently present, however, and sufficiently unified for at least two hundred years to permit one to speak of an American mother tongue, of a general and standard American speech. The American people

realize themselves as a nation in part through the possession of a 3

4 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

distinctive speech. This distinctive speech, this mother tongue, the general background of which it is proposed here to examine, is obvi- ously English, but it is, first of all, the English of America.

Immediately the questions arise, however, whether Americans have generally viewed their mother tongue in some relation to older British English, and if they have not, what they have substituted for this pious tradition. But the mere asking of these questions shows that language is not a thing apart. It is an inseparable ele- ment in the whole of a people’s life and has intimate connections with politics and other activities. Before the United States came into being, it would scarcely have occurred to anyone, either on this side the water or on the other, to think of the English language in Amer- ica as anything but an extension of British English, different in its local habitation from the speech of the home country, but not dif- ferent either in present character or future prospects. Does not a son remain a son, wherever he may dwell?

A son, however, may become a man, hungry for personal rights and privileges, and when the colonies began to claim the dignity of manhood, even the gentlest prick served to burst the bubble of this assumption of homogeneity which hitherto had been so comfortably accepted on both sides of the water. Instead of fixing attention upon similarities, both British and Americans now began to notice the differences that separated them from each other. Both were surprised to find these differences so great, and naturally this same discovery of fact, or supposed fact, led to opposite interpretations in theory. The Americans were inclined to see in these differences a mark of their peculiar virtue and claims to consideration, while the Britisher was often moved to look upon them as indications of an unsuspected deterioration and degradation which circumstances had suddenly brought into clear light. So far as the language itself is concerned, both of these extreme views were wrong. Colonial Eng- lish had developed no remarkable gifts or powers, nor had it degen- erated from a purer and more perfect type of speech which was only carefully preserved in England. After the Declaration of Indepen- dence, American English remained as it always has been, a closely

THE MOTHER TONGUE 5

related but differentiated branch of the English language, connected by the most intimate bonds of tradition with the parent speech. The narrow partisanships which were drawn into the consideration of speech arose not from that activity itself, but from entirely dif- ferent occasions for an indulgence in emotions of loyal pride or prejudice.

Though the English language in America did not experience a new birth with the separation of the colonies from Great Britain, that event nevertheless provides a reasonable starting place for the consideration of what we must from that time call American Eng- lish. Deep rooted though it was in the past, this English of eigh- teenth century America came then to be regarded from a new angle, and though the language in itself may not greatly have changed from what it was before, as in all other human social institutions the changing opinions which man held with respect to it must be counted as a part of its essential character. The special history of American English as something consciously separate and distinguishable began, therefore, with the realization of the existence of an American nation. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century Americans began to feel that their mother tongue was something near and intimate, the speech which gave to them a unity upon their own American soil.

National or standard languages have seldom developed under the control of conscious intention, and to this rule the English language in America is no exception. In its present state, apart from what it has inherited from older traditions, which is obviously a great deal, American English is the result of a variety of impulses and tendencies, often crossing each other in a bewildering fashion and never for long uniting into a large and clearly defined purpose which the American people have held before them as an ideal towards which in their language they should aspire. It would have been surprising had it been otherwise. Languages grow and change only as they accompany the daily activities of men and women in the communication of their thoughts to each other. They are, more- over, the least conscious of the social possessions of peoples. Political and ethical ideals may be formulated, even in the earlier stages of

6 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

their development, with a certain degree of definiteness and clear- ness. But a nation as a whole rarely gives thought to the trend of development of its speech, is rarely conscious that there is a trend of development. Its language may be deeply affected by the gen- eral tone of its life and thought, but the language itself is a resultant by-product of these general influences, and only in slight measure does it determine their character or weight. Language in the main is an echo of life, not a motive power in it.

At times, however. theorists and reformers arise who attempt and in some degree are able to give language a more active significance. When the American colonies at the end of the eighteenth century finally detached themselves from their older political associations, the occasion seemed unusually propitious for the formation of a native American speech which should not only be distinctive for American life but should also help the new nation to a realization of those inner purposes and aspirations which were still engaged in the struggle for existence. The beginnings are seen in an article by an unknown author (see Albert Matthews, Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XIV, 263-264), addressed to the Literati of America and published in the Royal American Magazine for January, 1774. In this article the writer proposes a society to be called Fellows of the American Society of Language, ‘‘for perfecting the English language in America.’”’ The author expresses the con- viction that America will soon be ‘‘the seat of science.’’ Perhaps the writer of this address to the literati of America was John Adams, for a few years later, after several very significant events had hap- pened, in a letter to the ‘‘President of Congress,’ dated September 5, 1780, John Adams proposed an academy for “fixing and improv - ing” American English, Works, Boston, 1851, Vol. VII, p. 249. He remarks that the British have occasionally tried a similar project, but have failed: “‘so that to this day there is no grammar nor dic- tionary extant of the English language which has the least public authority.” ‘‘The honor of forming the first public institution for refining, correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English lan- guage,” he continues, “I hope is reserved for congress; they have

THE MOTHER TONGUE 7

every motive that can possibly influence a public assembly to under- take it. It will have a happy effect upon the union of the States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to both for the signification and pronunciation of the lan- guage. The constitutions of all the States in the Union are so democratized that eloquence will become the instrument for rec- ommending men to their fellow-citizens, and the principal means of advancement through the various ranks and offices of society.” The project is described a few weeks later in a letter to Edmund Jenings, September 30, 1780. ‘‘After Congress shall have done it,” that is, shall have established the academy, says Adams, “perhaps the British king and parliament may have the honor of copying the example. This I should admire. England will never more have any honor, excepting now and then that of imitating the Americans. I assure you, Sir, I am not altogether in jest. I see a general in- clination after English in France, Spain and Holland, and it may extend throughout Europe. The population and commerce of America will force their language into general use.””’

Adams returns to the subject later, Works, Vol. IX, p. 509, and again expresses the opinion that ‘‘ English will be the most respectable language in the world,” largely because of the number of people who will be speaking it. A contemporary Frenchman, Roland de la Platiére, addressing the Academy at Lyons in 1789, went as far as Adams and spoke enthusiastically not merely of English, but specifically of the language of the United States, as the possible universal language of the future.?

1See Matthews, ibid., p. 262. Language like this explains why similar state- ments still being made have such a hauntingly familiar sound, as when Walter Hines Page, Letters, I, 144, writes as follows, October, 1913, from the American Embassy in London to President Wilson: ‘‘The future of the world belongs to us. A man needs to live here, with two economic eyes in his head, a very little time to become very sure of this. Everybody will see it presently. These English are spending their capital, and it is their capital that continues to give them their vast power. Now what are we going to do with the leadership of the world presently when it clearly falls into our hands? And how can we use the English for the highest uses of democ- racy?’’

‘See Baldensperger, ‘‘ Une Prédiction Inédite sur l’Avenir de la Langue des Etats- Unis,” in Modern Philology, XV, 475-476.

8 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

A similar high patriotic purpose underlay the ideals with respect to an American language which Noah Webster preached with energy, with as much scholarship as his day afforded, and with not a little common sense. In his earliest utterances, in the Grammatical Institute, Part I, 1783, which later became the American Spelling Book, one observes still a good deal of the heightened feeling of the war just ended. ‘‘The author wishes to promote the honour and prosperity of the confederated republics of America,”’ wrote Webster, p. 14, ‘and chearfully throws his mite into the common treasure of patriotic exertions. This country must in some future time, be as distinguished by the superiority of her literary improvements, as she is already by the liberality of her civil and ecclesiastical constitu- tions. Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny—in that country laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature debased. For America in her infancy to adopt the present maxims of the old world, would be to stamp the wrinkles of decrepid age upon the bloom of youth and to plant the seeds of decay in a vigorous constitution.”

Only rarely, and only after the fervor of the Revolution had some- what cooled, was a milder voice raised in support of the continuity of the ancient traditions of the English language in America. Thus a writer in the Monthly Magazine and American Review, Vol. III, 1+4, July, 1800, in an Essay ‘‘On the Scheme of an American Lan- guage,” protests against the notion that ‘grammars and dictionaries should be compiled by natives of the country, not of the British or English, but of the American tongue.”’ And instead of endeavoring to insulate themselves from their ancestors, he advises Americans to direct all their labors to the opposite purpose. On the whole he sees little difference between American and British English, and prophesies confidently that “‘the future bards of Potowmac and Messouri shall be said to write English.’”’ It is his conviction that the literary tradition will be a sufficiently strong binding force to hold the language of the English and American people together. “Books,” he declares, ‘‘are the only adequate authority for the use of words,” and good American English must be the speech of those

THE MOTHER TONGUE 9

“whose dialect is purified by intimate intercourse with English books.’

On the whole, however, most persons agreed with Webster that the isolation of America from England and from the rest of Europe was bound to result in the development of an entirely new speech in the New World. Webster was convinced that this isolation would produce, “in a course of time, a language in North America, as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another,” Dissertations (1789), p. 22. Thomas Jefferson thought it not im- probable, Writings, ed. Washington, VI, 188, that the changes in American English would in time “‘separate it in name as well as in power, from the mother-tongue.” These prophecies were not un- reasonable. When one considered the great differentiation which had taken place among the Teutonic dialects of Europe, closely related geographically, it must have seemed, from the point of view of the eighteenth century, all the more certain that two countries so widely separated as England and America must diverge widely in their common speech. The forecast has turned out to be false because a student of Webster’s or Jefferson’s day could not foresee the international and highly literary character of American civiliza- tion as it has developed in the century and a quarter since they wrote.

This certainty of the formation of a new language in America, Webster welcomed whole-heartedly. He believed that the language of England had passed the point of its highest development and was already in a state of decline. The life of language seemed to him to be like that of the forms of organic life in the world of nature. A seed after it was planted grew, under favoring conditions, until it reached the limits of its possible growth, the plant then remained stationary for a moment, but immediately it must fall into decay. The stage of improvement or growth in the English language cor- responding to the natural growth of a plant, Webster considers to have commenced with the age of Queen Elizabeth and ended with

1 See also zbid., III, 173, and III, 184-185.

10 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

the reign of George II. “It would have been fortunate for the language,” he adds, “‘had the stile of writing and the pronunciation of words been fixed, as they stood in the reign of Queen Anne and her successor. Few improvements have been made since that time, but innumerable corruptions in pronunciation have been introduced by Garrick, and in stile, by Johnson, Gibbon and their imitators,” Dissertations, p. 30. The taste of her writers ‘‘already corrupted, and her language on the decline,” Webster regards England as no longer providing a worthy model to follow. He would have Ameri- cans take a fresh start in this cyclical process of the life of language. Here was a fresh people, in a new country, with untried ideals, an entirely new life was here to be worked out. It was not only the opportunity, it was the duty of the American people to develop a peculiar language of their own; ‘‘as a nation,” he declares, “‘we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of any plan of uniformity with the British language, even were the plan proposed perfectly unexceptionable,” Dissertations, p. 171. As America was now a self-constituted nation, he considered that American honor required that America should have a system of her own, in language as well as government. Will not the Atlantic Ocean, the pride of an independent nation, he asks, restrain our rage for imitating the errors of foreigners? To Webster, Englishmen were foreigners, and what have we to do, he asks, with the customs of a foreign nation?

The elements from which Webster would construct the new Amer- ican speech he found ready to his hand. The American people, as he viewed them, were a race of simple folk, neither rustics nor peasants on the one hand, nor aristocrats on the other, corrupted by the false refinements of stage and court, in Webster’s phrasing, as these refinements flourished in the effete monarchies of Europe. It was the speech of this folk that Webster would make the basis for his new American English, especially the speech of the New England colonies as the region in which education and literary culture were most highly developed. He presents an engaging picture of the state of culture in New England in his day, which other authorities

THE MOTHER TONGUE 11

confirm as true, showing the wide extent of reading even among village folk, and the vivid interest in all matters of education which has been the great gift of New England to the American nation. It should be remembered that the New England settlers, even those who tilled the soil, tended to congregate in towns where social inter- course was possible, not to be sparsely scattered over vast territories, as were the settlers in other sections of the country.

But Webster was not intent upon advocating a local New England standard as the general model for American English. He insists that the standard shall not be local but national, and that it shall be the standard set by the most enlightened, that is, the educated members of the several communities, not the most ignorant. Here at least, among much spread-eagle patriotism, we find a clear enun- ciation of principles which have ever been active in determining the character of the mother tongue of the American people. The advocacy of a national and literary standard for American speech was a logical response to the novel conditions in the new country. The standard of British English having been rejected, both for patri- otic reasons and also because it was too remote to be applied, as Webster himself was aware, there remained only the choice between the speech of one geographical or social community, to be elevated above all the rest, and the speech of no community at all, that is, a manipulated generalization of speech habits which should cover the nation as a whole. It should be pointed out in passing that Webster understood quite well that this national speech must be to some extent theoretical and unreal, and that his advocacy of it was contrary to his general principle, that it is the duty of the student of the English language “‘to find what the language 7s, and not how it might have been made,’ Dissertations, p. ix. He compromised with his general principle, however, because a certain amount of artificial manipulation seemed necessary before the language could arrive at that ultimate uniformity short of which a democratic society cannot rest. In a passage in his Grammatical Institute, Part I, 1783, p. 6, Webster discusses the local variations in American speech which he thinks should be harmonized, and as this is the

12 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

earliest reference in which the differing details of American speech are described, the passage deserves to be quoted in full:

“Not to mention small differences, I would observe that the in- habitants of New-England and Virginia have a peculiar pronunciation which affords much diversion to their neighbours. On the other hand, the language in the middle States is tinctured with a variety of Irish, Scotch and German dialects which are justly censured as devi- ations from propriety and the standard of elegant pronunciation. The truth is, usus est Norma Loquendi, general custom is the rule of speaking, and every deviation from this must be wrong. The dialect of one State is as ridiculous as that of another; each is author- ized by local custom; and neither is supported by any superior ex- cellence. If in New-England we hear a flat, drawling pronunciation, in the more Southern States we hear the words veal, very, vulgar pronounced weal, wery, wulgar; wine, winter, etc., changed into vine, vinter; soft becomes saft; and raisins and wound, contrary to all rules and propriety, are pronounced reesins, woond. It is the present mode at the Southward, to pronounce u like yu, as virtyue, fortyune, etc., and in a rapid pronunciation these become virchue, forchune, as also duty, duel, are changed into juty, juel.”’

In the Dissertations Webster later desires the New England “yeoman” to alter his ‘‘drawling nasal manner of speaking,” and likewise when he says marcy for mercy, or kiow for cow, he would have him change these pronunciations to accord with the more general custom. ‘‘Vast numbers of people’? who in Boston and Philadel- phia say weal and wessel for veal and vessel are asked to resign their peculiarities for the sake of uniformity. The Virginian is asked to pronounce his final r’s more fully, and all persons who cherish fash- ionable distinctions of pronunciation are told to put away such undemocratic affectations.

Though this kind of compromise which Webster found it neces- sary to advocate in order to establish his standard of national use remains as much a necessity to-day as it ever was, national use based upon. the speech’ of educated speakers abides as the only general standard which has recognized value in American English. The

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bearing of this upon American speech was realized early by those who gave careful thought to American conditions. Cooper, in his Notions of the Americans (1828), analyzed the situation thoroughly and soundly. He declared that in America, ‘‘while there are pro- vincial, or state peculiarities, in tone, and even in pronunciation and use of certain words, there is no patois,”’ Notions, I, 62. An Ameri- can, he avers, might distinguish between a Georgian and a man from New England, but a foreigner could not, and he adds that though Americans pass for natives every day in England, ‘“‘it is next to impossible for an Englishman to escape detection in America.’ The reasons why it is impossible, in Cooper’s opinion, for an Englishman to escape detection are that in England not only are local distinctions more highly developed and fully preserved, but also a “‘slang of society” exists there with a ‘‘fashion of intonation . . . which it is often thought vulgar to omit,’ with the result that speakers who escape the local dialects are likely to fall into this fashionable dialect. Cooper clearly recognized the futility of attempting to estimate American speech by a British standard. ‘‘If it be assumed,” he re- marks, Notions, II, 123, ‘that the higher classes in London are always to set the fashion in pronunciation, and the best living writers in England are to fix the meaning of words, the point is clearly decided in their favour, since one cannot see on what principle they are to be put in the wrong.’’ Cooper acknowledged that for England the standard of speech is to be found in London, since there congregate those “‘whose manners, birth, fortune, and political distinction make them the objects of admiration.”’ So powerful was the authority of the cultivated society of the metropolis of British life, that it seemed to Cooper absurd to suppose that in comparison with this authority, either the church or the stage or education exerted any but a slight influence upon British speech. In other words, Cooper believed that England had a so clearly recognized and admired social aristocracy, an aristocracy of birth, wealth, and wit, centered in London, that it easily provided the standards for all things of the spirit. In America, however, he thought a different state of affairs existed. ‘‘If we had a great capital, like London,’”’ he observed,

14 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

Notions, II, 124, ‘‘where men of leisure, and fortune, and education, periodically assembled to amuse themselves, I think we should estab- lish a fashionable aristocracy, too, which should give the mode to the forms of speech. . . . But we have no such capital, nor are we likely, for a long time to come, to have one of sufficient magnitude to produce any great effect on the language. . . . The habits of polite life, and even the pronunciation of Boston, of New York, of Baltimore, and of Philadelphia, vary in many things, and a prac- tised ear may tell a native of either of these places, by some little peculiarity of speech. There is yet no predominating influence to induce the fashionables of these towns to wish to imitate the fash- ionables of any other. If any place is to possess this influence, it will certainly be New York;” but even this Cooper thinks will not come to pass, and that “an entirely different standard for the lan- guage must be established in the United States, from that which governs so absolutely in England.’’ Where is that standard to be found? Cooper’s answer is that it must be found in the speech of the nation as a whole, that in fact it already is found there. For if the people of America were like the people of any other country on earth, ‘‘we should be speaking at this moment a great variety of nearly unintelligible patois,’ whereas in reality the American people speak the English language ‘‘as a nation better than any other people speak their language.’’ ‘This resemblance in speech can only be ascribed to the great diffusion of intelligence, and to the inexhaustible activity of the population, which, in a manner, destroys space.’ “The distinctions in speech between New England and New York, or Pennsylvania, or any other State,” he continues, ‘‘were far greater twenty years ago than they are now,” a change which cannot simply be explained as due to migration, since migration ‘“‘would often introduce provincialisms without correcting them, did it not also, by bringing acute men together, sharpen wits, provoke comparisons, challenge investigations, and, finally, fix a standard.”

For the last twenty years, concludes Cooper, it has been a matter of hot dispute in which of the large towns in America the best Eng- lish is spoken. ‘‘The result of this discussion has been to convince

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most people who know anything of the matter, that a perfectly pure English is spoken nowhere, and to establish the superiority, on one point in favor of Boston, on another in favor of New York, and so on to the end of the chapter.’ Social standards being thus disposed of, as well as fashionable society, the church, the stage, Congress, the court, ‘‘for there is none but the President,’ and the fashions of speech in England, the only guide to a standard speech which Cooper finds to be left is reason, and he is convinced that ‘‘in another generation or two, far more reasonable English will be used in this country than exists here now.”

These opinions were expressed, it will be remembered, before Cooper’s return to America from his seven year’s residence in Europe. His notions of America expressed after his return are much less optimistic. ‘Without a social capital,’’ so he wrote in the Preface of Home as Found (1838), ‘with twenty or more communities divided by distance and political barriers, her people, who are really more homogeneous than any other of the same numbers in the world per- haps, possess no standard for opinion, manners, social maxims, or even language.”’ The truth lay between these two extremes of state- ment. A national standard is, to be sure, not a perfectly realizable standard, and in that sense the people of America possessed no standard of speech. What they possessed, however, in this concep- tion of a national speech, was a guide to conduct as effectual as any recognized or formal rule could be. Perhaps also Cooper’s opinion of American speech as governed by reason calls for some interpre- tation. What he evidently meant to do was to distinguish between an instinctive social and traditional attitude towards speech, and one in which habits are determined to a greater extent by choice and intention. The latter he regarded as the attitude of Americans towards their speech, and in this sense their language might justly be called a ‘‘reasonable English.”’

In the earlier years of the American republic, this insistence upon the importance of a uniform and independent national speech was a logical result of the fear of disintegration which must always beset

16 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

those interested in maintaining a federation of independent states. “But this I will presume to affirm,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, Works, ed. Lodge, II, 38, “that from New Hampshire to Georgia the people of America are as uniform in their interests and manners as those of any established in Europe.” The frequency with which one comes upon assertions like this is evidence that the fear of the contrary could not have been remote.

One of the few utterances of the Philological Society, which flourished during the first years of the republic, is contained in a letter, dated New York, July 4, 1788, and signed by Josiah Hoffman, president, approving Webster’s American Spelling Book and ‘‘rec- ommending it to the use of schools in the United States, as an accu- rate, well digested system of principles and rules, calculated to destroy the various false dialects in pronunciation in the several States, an object very desirable in a federal republic.” This letter was frequently reprinted by Webster in editions of his spelling book. It may seem a little strange that mature and important citizens should concern themselves about anything so insignificant as an elementary spelling book. But to their minds, the elementary spelling book carried a burden of deep meaning. Anything that might decrease the danger of disruption was eagerly seized upon in those troubled years. Not only the writers, grammarians and dictionary makers of the early years of the republic, but the states- men as well expressed themselves emphatically on the importance of maintaining a uniform national speech in America. With the large increase of migration and the expansion of the country west- ward in the early nineteenth century, the necessity for the cultiva- tion of a national standard seemed to many observers more pressing than ever. Commenting on one of the minor recommendations of his pronouncing speller, the first edition of which appeared in 1819, Cummings remarks, p. x, that “if we consider the great impor- tance of preserving uniformity in our country, and of avoiding what already begins to be called northern and southern pronunciation, no attempt to preserve harmony in the republic of letters will be regarded as too minute.” ‘As we become more extended,” he

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observes, ‘‘the greater is the probability that our language may one day be broken into a variety of provincialisms, as is common with the language of other countries.” To secure uniformity, one must have a “‘system” of pronunciation, and Cummings accepts Walker, because ‘‘at present there can scarcely exist a doubt” that Walker’s system is the best. Rather than be divided among themselves, Americans like Cummings were willing to impose upon themselves inflexible British authority.

“Tt is an important object, in this country,” said Webster, Ele- mentary Spelling Book, New York, 1843, on one of the fly leaves, “to have a uniform national language, to which all fore'gners settling in this country, should conform.” ‘In the early years of our in- dependence,”’ continues Webster with his usual modesty, ‘‘much was done to promote this object by Webster’s Spelling Book .. . and the effects of the general use of Webster’s book, for more than thirty years, are visible at this day, in the remarkable uniformity of pronunciation among the citizens of the United States.’’ One may doubt that this uniformity, if it existed, was so exclusively to be attributed to Webster’s Spelling Book, and Webster himself in this same passage, notes with approval a discovery he made on the occasion of his visit to England, “‘that pronunciation in England is not regulated by books, or by any book, but by the usage of the higher classes of society.”

As time has passed, the claim of any higher class, or any local standard, for example that of New England, has had increasingly less chance of receiving general acceptance in America. Perhaps there is, or at least has been, a tendency for the West to look up to the East in matters of speech, as newer communit es are always inclined to look with respect upon the traditions of older settled regions. But the terms West and East are confessedly vague—no one knows where the West begins—and the respect of the West fox the East is a sentiment which is likely to pass unchallenged only when it is not brought into too close relation to concrete action. The threefold requirement that good American English must be present English, national English, and reputable English, good

18 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

repute being defined in terms of educational standards, has not only passed into a truism of the rhetorics and guide-books which abound for the direction of American students, but it has become, one may say, an element in the sub-conscious life of the language. The prescription was old, as old at least as Campbell’s Rhetoric, and even the phrasing of it which has passed current in America was borrowed from England. ‘That usage,” says Creighton, Dictionary of Scripture Proper Names, p. 21, quoting from Crombie’s Etymology and Syntax (1802), “‘which gives law to language and which is gener- ally denominated good, must be reputable, national, and present.” This was the conventional way of stating the point as it was estab- lished by Campbell. But the difference between this statement as applied to England and as applied to America is that it has meant a great deal more for America than it has for England.

The result in America has not been to destroy existing distinctions in local speeches or to prevent new ones from developing as new conditions have arisen, but rather to put all local distinctions on the same level as compared with the general standard speech. In the latter, because of the definiteness of the standard, an astonishing degree of uniformity has developed, and cultivated speakers who have given any thought to the matter of standards and who have not wilfully retained their local customs of speech, even in their own localities speak and write a language which is but slightly differentiated from that of other regions, whether the locality be on the Atlantic or Pacific coast, whether it border on the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico. As compared with the language of most countries, national uniformity and the striving towards national uniformity may certainly be regarded as one of the notable char- acteristics of the American mother tongue.

The modifications of the ideal of a general national standard which have just been made are, however, far from being unimportant. Though no local dialect presumes to take upon itself the authority of general standard, many local dialects are regarded not without honor in their own communities and are used by many speakers of cultivation without apology and even with pride. This must neces-

THE MOTHER TONGUE 19

sarily be so, since a citizen of a federated nation must first be a member of some local community, and only on special occasions will he be called upon to put aside his local customs and duties in favor of more general and abstract national demands. It results, therefore, that many features of local dialects have what may be called a very high local standard value as the speech of cultivated persons, and that the contentment and satisfaction of the several communities in their local speech has, in each case, a claim to tolera- tion which can be set aside neither by the claims of the national standard nor those of any differing local standard. In a democratic society there is always a tendency towards disintegration, and this tendency has been, and still is plainly exhibited in American speech.

National standards, conscious or sub-conscious, manifestly can- not be manufactured out of whole cloth. They must have a con- siderable foundation in common experience before they can be made to seem effective as general guides to conduct. In spite of the theo- retical rejection of a local culture or a local speech as affording an adequate national standard, it remains true that the culture of New England, and to a less degree, the speech of New England, have most fully represented to Americans, viewing themselves historically, the aspirations of the country at large. It will be interesting to examine the reasons why New England speech should have been exalted to this position of theoretical prominence.

In the first place, the speech of New England started with a strong initial advantage in that the colloquial idiom of the New England colonists was in large measure that of southeastern England and of London. “To prove that the Americans have a corrupt pronunciation,” wrote Webster, Dzssertations, p. 127, note, ‘‘we are often told that our ancestors came from the western counties of England.” “This is but partly true,’”’ he continues, and he main- tained that ‘“‘many of the principal settlers came from London and its vicinity, some from the middle counties ... and a few from the northern counties.”” Other evidence of various kinds confirms Webster’s statement. The New England colonists gladly and

20 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

rightly thought of themselves as a stream issuing from the central fountains of English life.

Narrow patriots might maintain with all the passion they could muster that the new country must detach itself completely from the culture of the mother country, but their contention proved vain. There was something stronger than theories of government, and that was the bond which intimate social tradition establishes, the kin- ship of blood, of speech and of sentiment which cannot be set aside by decree or by intention. In moments of exalted feeling Americans sometimes declared their complete emancipation from British stand- ards, but in reality they had no desire to forego their ancient inherit- ance. Webster himself was proud of the fact that his fellow-New Englanders spoke, as he thought, the language which Britain had established as its approved refined and literary speech. Had the New England colonists come mainly from Yorkshire or from Scot- land, or from the western counties, and had their familiar speech thus been one of the northern dialects of English or of Somerset, it is doubtful if New England speech would ever have been taken into critical favor. But fortunately, it agreed in the main with the generally accepted cultivated standard in Great Britain, and was thus spared the struggle which any contemned local dialect must have undergone in the endeavor to establish itself in opposition to the powerful influence of the speech of London and southern England. Moreover, the speech of the New England colonists thus stood in fairly close relations to that of the southern, especially the tide- water Virginian colonists. To a certain degree the Virginian colon- ists represented a different social class from that of New England. The organizers of this Virginian colony stood in more intimate rela- tions to the higher official life of England than did the founders of the New England colonies. They were perhaps to a greater extent men of the world, gentlemen and younger sons of gentlemen, and as such could not have viewed with favor any speech which deviated widely from the customs of the court speech with which they had been familiar in their own group. For reasons peculiar to its own life, Virginia exerted a less general and less energetic influence than

THE MOTHER TONGUE 21

New England upon American social customs in. their earlier forma- tive and expanding period. But again the character of New Engiand speech saved it from a stronger opposition, than that which it would. |

have been compelled to meet had it been’ a less respectable dia! ect ins

than the one current among the settlers of ‘Virginia. New England standing thus close to Old England: kas. always — held an honored place in American opijion as the transmitter of a

highly prized race tradition. As time has passed, British; anid, Ameri-*

can English, at those points where they: came in contact, which would obviously be mainly in the printed and literary language, have drawn close to each other and have not fulfilled the early proph- ecies that the two languages would drift far apart. ‘Among those who have given any thought to the matter, there has rarely been one who had any desire, whether in New England or elsewhere in America, to make of American English a separate speech. Occa- sional theorists, like Walt Whitman, in his American Primer, written about 1850, have proposed that “the etiquette of saloons” should be ‘‘discharged from that great thing, the renovated English speech in America.” Whitman, however, did scarcely more than express this desire, and few other theorists who have agreed with him have done much more. When it came to the actual use of the language for literary purposes, Whitman could not forget “‘the etiquette of saloons,” the cultivated tradition of the past. There have been undoubtedly extremists in both directions, those who would altogether reject British English, and those who would prescribe it as a refined and inescapable necessity. But the American attitude in the main has stood halfway between these extremes. Though there has been little direct knowledge of British English among Americans, there has been no eager desire to escape from it, no scorn or con- tempt for it. On the contrary, perhaps there has been too much acquiescence on the part of the average American in the opinion that British speech, in some undefined way, is better than American speech, that the Britisher has a native right in the language which the American enjoys only by favor of the original proprietors. This provincial feeling towards England has been stronger in New England

22 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

than 4 in the rest of the country, because in the rest of the country, New England in large degree has taken the place of Old England. The “muscular classes, ” “the young men of These States,” when ‘the 7 turd : their attention from sport and business to culture are much inclined t look elsewhere than at home for what they are seeking. They, look to New England for the remote and perfect English, aE not to practice it; at least to admire it; or if New England is home, even if Boston is: home, a still more perfect perfection may be sought beneath the shadow of St. James. In the quest for cul- ture, it has sometimes been found difficult, even by sensible persons, to draw ‘the line at the right point between sound respect for tradi- tion and abject provincialism. There is consolation, however, in reflecting that only a violent radicalism in American speech could have saved it from any appearance of provincialism.

In general, the relatively compact and highly organized social life which developed early in the northern colonies gave to the ideas prevalent in New England an exceptional carrying power. Several of these ideas, whether we look upon them as spreading from New England or only as typically represented there, have been of very great significance in determining the feeling of Americans for their mother tongue, and these call for further examination.

One of these characteristically American ideas was that of the equality of social rank. Great differences of rank did not exist in ‘New England. Ministers, lawyers, teachers, and doctors stood slightly above the average level, but the learned professions were recruited directly from the populace, who felt themselves inferior to none. Webster bids Englishmen take notice that the ‘‘ American yeomanry” are not to be compared to the “‘illiterate peasantry’ of their own country. ‘The yeomanry of this country consist of sub- stantial independent free-holders, masters of their own persons and lords of their own soil,” Dissertations, p. 288. Among this yeomanry, certain of the finer interests were cultivated with enthusiasm. It is true that the imagination had little play, whether in poetry, or painting, or music, or prose narrative, or drama. ‘The arts cultivated

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were those of a relatively intellectual or practical character, but owing just to this limitation, they were arts within the reach of all members of the community. Whatever culture existed was acces- sible to all. Timothy Dwight, Travels, I, 302, gives an engaging picture of New England, the whole country covered with villages, and every village with its church and “suit of schools.” ‘Nearly every child,” he continues, ‘‘even those of beggars and blacks in considerable numbers, can read, write, and keep accounts. All the people are neighbors; social beings, converse; feel; sympathize; mingle minds; cherish sentiments; and are subjects of at least some degree of refinement.’ In his generous description of the people of New England, Cooper declares, Notions, I, 94, that “beyond a doubt nowhere is to be found a population as well instructed, in elementary knowledge, as the people of these six States.” ‘It is equally true,” he added, ‘that I have nowhere witnessed such an universality of that self-respect which preserves men from moral degradation.” These statements are all the more significant as coming from one who was not a native of the region described, indeed was not an ardent lover of it.

In hill town and valley town, upon the coast and in the interior, a remarkably homogeneous civilization developed. Now that so much of this has passed away, the modern student is constantly sur- prised to find in what out-of-the-way places printing-presses flour- ished in New England, how abundant books once were where now no books are found at all. “I am acquainted,” wrote Webster, Essays, Boston, 1790, p. 339, in the reformed spelling which he at this time affected, ‘‘with parishes, where almost every householder haz red the works of Addison, Sherlock, Atterbury, Watts, Young, and other similar writings; and will converse handsomely on the subjects of which they treet.” If this sounds a little like Yankee self-esteem, it can be confirmed by Cooper, Notions, I, 97, who remembered that copies of standard English authors were repeatedly to be found “‘in retired dwellings where one would not expect to meet any production of a cast higher than an almanac, or a horn-book.” Webster calls attention also to the common custom of establishing

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parish libraries, the progenitors of the later public libraries, which were supported by subscription. He notes as of similar significance the relatively greater extent to which newspapers were circulated in New England as compared with other sections of the country. In the year 1785 he found the number in Connecticut alone ‘‘to be neerly eight thousand; which waz equal to that published in the whole territory, south of Philadelphia.” !

The two binding institutions which most effectively held together the elements of the democratic social life of early New England were the church and the district school. Every village of any size had its own church and its own resident minister or clergyman. Living in direct contact with the people and delivering sermons as they did with unflagging assiduity, the clergy exerted a powerful influence in maintaining the intellectual tone of the life of their respective communities. It was, moreover, not a popular but a learned clergy whose voices were heard in the New England meeting houses. In the earlier years of the colonies, there was some danger that the church might successfully assume a kind of autocratic and Calvinistic authority which would have made of it merely a stern judge and lawgiver, exalted above the familiar life of the people. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the character of the New England ministry had undergone a change. The extremes of early Puritan doctrine and discipline had been modified, the church had been compelled to give up its hold upon civil affairs, and the church as a whole had become a more democratic social institution than the early church promised to be. It would be stretching the point perhaps too far to say that the growth of church life in America has been determined by the church in New England as its origin and point of departure. Too many other elements have entered

‘since the colonial period which found no part in the New England church to permit of so simple a disposition of the matter. But it is true that the general character of the congregations and churches

1 Hssays, p. 338. He refers to weekly papers, and evidently to the number of copies issued, not to different newspapers.

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as they have developed their organizations throughout the country has remained essentially the same. No branch of the church has assumed or even vigorously attempted to assume the position of an authorized or established church. As divisions and sects multiplied, it became manifestly absurd for any one branch of the church to claim authority as the sole accredited conserver of religious truth. The very independence which led to the organization of the early Puritan church led also to separation from it, and in the end to toleration of Quaker, Baptist, Methodist, or any other kind of doc- trine or organization which it might suit the fancy of any group of citizens to support. Here again one may note the powerful disinte- grating tendencies of democracy, if not upon the essential purposes for which the church exists, at least upon the manner of its organi- zation. Differentiation results, however, only from difference of opinion and the discussion which difference of opinion generates. It would be difficult to show in detail that American speech has been directly affected by the popular nature of the American church. One may point out, however, that the various churches in America have never been degraded to a place of social inferiority by contrast to any official church, that they have always been a very direct expression of a general will in the communities which support them and have thus responded to the community’s sense of propriety and dignity. The American public has ever been church-going and has participated actively in the conduct of its churches. The indirect influence which the church has exerted upon speech and the feeling for speech, as upon other social customs, one may suppose to have thus been considerable, and many a community which has had no other means of formulating its ideals of proper convention and refinement has been enabled to do this with more or less effect through its churches. The church has been the guardian of respectability in America, and in matters of speech, if its influence has not been exalted, it has at least tended to counteract the tendency toward the crudely familiar and local which is always likely to become unduly prominent in a mixed and democratic society.

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Still more significant than the church, both for its own local community and as a tradition passed on to other large sections of the country, was the New England interest in education. Though other regions of colonial America did not altogether neglect the subject, nowhere was it a matter of such concern and respectful attention as in the two northern mother colonies, Massachusetts and Connecticut. In this region a complete system of education was provided from the primary school to the university, one which was thus adequate for all the needs of the community. Cooper remarks, Notions, II, 96, that “the gentlemen of the middle and southern States, before the revolution, were very generally educated in Eng- land,’ and that after the Revolution, lacking higher schools of their own, the middle and southern States for a time fared badly in the matter of higher instruction. But in New England the two uni- versities were early established and uninterruptedly met the demand for advanced scholarly and professional training. Elementary in- struction also was an essential part of the New England scheme of things, sometimes grudgingly provided for, but never completely neglected, even in the rough period of the earliest colonization.

At first the school was an appendage of the Puritan church, not of equal rank with it, but a handmaiden to assist the church in pre- serving its stores of knowledge from the attacks of “that old deluder Satan” and from the corruptions which the “false glosses of saint- seeming deceivers” might bring about, Updegraff, The Origin of the Moving School in Massachusetts, p. 52. The Puritan church exerted a minute and strong control over its schools, and wherever the church went, the school went with it. By a law of 1647 it was ordered in the colony of Massachusetts that every township, ‘‘after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty house-holders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.” The records of early New England towns are full of accounts of “visitations” by the select- men of the town on those heads of families in the town who were reputed to be slack in the matter of putting their children to school. And it was further ordered that ‘‘where any town shall increase to

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the number of one hundred families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth, so far as they may be fitted, for the university,” Updegraff, p. 52; Mathews, The Expansion of New England, p. 39. Failure to meet these requirements was punishable by fine. Every child was re- quired by the church to receive at least elementary instruction, either at home or in the elementary schools. Supplementing the lower schools came in time numberless local academies and grammar schools, and at the top the colleges and the two universities. The New England town revolved about its church, its school, and its academy or college. ;

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, however, the hold of the church upon its schools was relaxed, and with the separation of the church from civil affairs, the school ceased to be a function of the church and passed under the control of civil authority. The church school thus became the district school, conducted not in the interests of any ecclesiastical or other group except the community at large. In the period of transition, when the school was passing out of the hands of the church into the hands of the democratic people, there seems to have been a decline of interest in the schools. “The old sanction was gone and a new one had not as yet taken hold of the people with sufficient force to cause them to provide schools of their own initiative,” Updegraff, p. 114. But this state of affairs was of brief duration, and by the end of the seventeenth century interest in the schools revived, and with the expansion of the popu- lation, the number of schools largely increased throughout New England. As colonists from Massachusetts established new com- munities elsewhere in New England, they carried with them their plans for the organization of schools, and always the “civil school of the church-state had become the civil school of the civil state,” p. 117. Yankee education soon became a standard commodity of the country. The Yankee schoolmaster, like the Yankee pedlar, traveled everywhere, and wherever the Yankee pedlar went, the spelling-book went with him. It became as essential a part of the sustenance of all youth as their daily bread. In Woodworth’s

28 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

Forest Rose (1825), Jonathan, a Yankee storekeeper, tells what he has for sale: “Everything: whiskey, molasses, calicoes, spelling- books, and patent gridirons.” Halleck, Poetical Writings, p. 171, describes a typical Connecticut Yankee as “wandering through the Southern countries teaching the A B C from Webster’s spelling book.”

In Connecticut, Webster records that “every town, or parish containing seventy householders, shall keep an English school at leest eleven months in a yeer; and towns containing a less number, at leest six months in a yeer,”’ Essays, p. 337. The district schools were held during the winter, and in the summer, ‘‘a woman iz hired to teech small children, who are not fit for any kind of labor.” In the large towns, schools, either public or private, were kept the whole year, and in every county town, a grammar school was estab- lished by law. The striking thing about these schools is that they were common schools, open to all children of the community on equal terms and supported by public funds. Instruction in them was given in the simpler subjects, reading, writing, arithmetic, history and geography, and the schools were not regarded merely as propxdeutics to colleges or the learned professions. They were devised to give all members of the community a foundation knowledge in their own language and history which might serve as the point of departure for higher studies, but which need not necessarily do so. They were devised to make citizens, not scholars.

Webster notes with disapproval “‘a too general attention to the dead languages, with a neglect of our own,” Hssays, p. 3ff. He advocates little attention even for living languages other than English, for ““men whose business is wholly domestic, have little or no use for any language but their own, much less for languages known only in books.”” The masters in these schools, even of the humbler kind, were often graduates of the colleges who frequently used their teaching positions as stepping-stones towards one of the learned professions. Very many New Englanders of note in American history have been at one stage of their career teachers in the common schools, and the statement remains true even for the country at large.

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The schoolmaster occupied a respected social position in the com- munity, and Webster again comments on an interesting contrast between the state of affairs in New England and in the southern states. He points out that in the South “gentlemen of property, residing on their plantations at a distance from a village,’’ will some- times procure private tutors for the younger members of their families. But these instructors, for the most part, must be “‘vagabonds,”’ as “the gentleman will not admit that a skoolmaster can be a gentle- man, in consequence of which opinion, most or all teechers are ex- cluded from genteel company.” An exception is noted, however, in the case of grammar masters, ‘‘for a man who can teech Latin, they suppose, may be a decent man, and fit for gentlemen’s com- pany,” Essays, p. 362.

To attempt to trace in detail the influence of the New England school upon the system of public school instruction as it has devel- oped throughout the country would be a large and complicated task. As the system has grown, many compromises with the New England system, and additions to it, have been made. But the essentials have not changed. The common school, with English as the basis of its training, is a necessary part of the life of every American community, not only in those regions which were settled by New Englanders, but even in regions remote from such direct influence. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the effect which these schools have had in the gradual process of realizing that ideal of a national speech which the country holds as its standard. English has been for a century and more the backbone of popular instruction in the common schools. At times it may have lost itself in futile exercises in grammar and parsing, but defects of pedagogic method have never obscured the aim of instruction in the native speech, which has been to correct illiteracy and to replace provincial- ism by something approximating general custom in speech. The process still continues, complicated by the presence in the schools, not only of Americans of different social and local origins, but in many schools also by the presence of large numbers of children of foreign birth. Though the results accomplished fall short of the

30 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

ideal, when one measures these results not by the test of the ideal but by the test of what has been practically achieved with the hetero- geneous material that has poured into the schools, the results cer- tainly justify the efforts that have been put forth to attain them. few children leave the public schools without at least a vision of the meaning of standard and literary English. The vision may later become obscured and some students may fall back to the level of provincial and illiterate English, but it does not seem that this is generally or frequently the case. Later habits, in business, in social intercourse, in further academic training for the fortunate few, tend to confirm the habits already formed. It is still possible to compare an older generation in some communities which had but little “schooling,” with a new generation that has passed through the elementary schools, or through both elementary and high school, and the two generations, so far at least as speech is concerned, quite obviously belong to different levels of culture. Whether or not the new generation stands on a higher level of culture altogether than the old may be a matter of opinion affected by a variety of considerations. But the culture of the new generation is at least normalized and socialized to a degree which would have been im- possible if it had not experienced the discipline which the common schools provide. This process has been going on for eight or nine generations. It was the possibility of this kind of discipline which has been the significant contribution of the New England school to the development of American speech. Among all the centrifugal tendencies of democratic American society, none has exerted a more powerful centralizing effect than the public schools.

A third characteristic New England institution, the town meet- ing, has maintained itself with remarkable vitality upon the soil of New England, but so far as it was transmitted to other regions, it has been so completely merged into different customs as largely to have lost its identity. When the early emigrants passed from their old homes in Massachusetts and Connecticut into New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other parts of the Northwest Territory,

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they carried with them their town meeting and for a time this institu- tion flourished in regions where it is now unknown. It was not, however, practically adapted to conditions in the new settlements, where the local political units were larger than they had been in the New England towns and where the settlers were scattered over a wide extent of territory. Moreover, as population increased, the town meeting became unwieldy. A group of fifty or a hundred householders might profitably come together to arrange the local affairs of the towns, but as the number grew from hundreds to thou- sands, representative government of the local communities became a necessity. Wherever it has flourished, however, the town meeting has been a notably democratic institution. The meeting was a place where every householder might freely express his opinion, and it may be noted that even in early New England, the liberties of the town meeting were wider than those of the general govern- ment of the colony. Only members of the church were admitted citizens or ‘“‘freemen”’ of the colony, but every householder had a vote and a voice in his local meeting.

As these town meetings were gatherings of equals, of neighbors and friends, to discuss and pass upon matters of very immediate and practical concern to all, they were not favorable training grounds for orators, and it does not seem that the town meetings were ever much inclined to encourage flights of eloquence. The orator can expand only when he has a large and helpless audience at his mercy. But the New England town community did not provide such an audience, nor was its business profitably to be transacted by means of speechifying. Dwight, Travels, I, 215, notes, in describing the Connecticut town meeting, that ‘‘the sober, busy citizens of Con- necticut are . . . very little inclined to commend, or even to listen to, the eloquence which is intended only for show. He who would be heard with approbation, or mentioned with praise, must speak only because there is occasion to speak, must speak with modesty, with brevity, to forward or improve the measures proposed, or those which he substitutes; and not to show that he can speak, however ingeniously.” The significance of the town meeting for the student

32 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

of language lies in the fact that it provided a common meeting place for members of the community of varying social or local origin, where they might speak their minds as equals, and in the process, inevitably shape their speech, if peculiar, to bring it into conformity with the more or less recognized customs of the group.

It would be an interesting subject of speculation whether or not the ideals represented in the life and social customs of New England would have been so widely influential in America if the population of New England had remained within its narrow geographical con- fines. The interest of the subject must be entirely speculative, however, since migration from New England began as soon as there was any wider America to affect and was itself the most significant single factor in the westward expansion of the country. In his famous account of the Yankees, Irving, Knickerbocker History, Book II, Chapter VIII, points out that to this “Arab of America”’ the notion of settling himself in the world meant “nothing more nor less than to begin his rambles.”’ In fact many of the very earliest settlers seem to have been restless persons, moving from one town to another often four or five times. At first migration within New England, that is from the mother country in Massachusetts to neigh- boring regions, could take place only with the consent of the church and under its constant inspection. These restrictions were soon thrown off, however, and the colonists moved freely, to Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and then out- side New England to New York and Pennsylvania. Commenting on the possibility of the disruption of the American confederation, Timothy Dwight, Travels, IV, 513, remarks that if this should take place, ‘‘New-England and New-York will almost of course, be united in the same political body. The inhabitants are now substantially one people.” From three-fifths to two-thirds of the inhabitants of New York State, he says, Travels, III, 252, originated from New England, and ‘‘the proportion is continually increasing. New York is, therefore, to be ultimately regarded as a colony from New England.” In New York and New England, Dwight found “the

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same interests of every kind inseparably united,’ Travels, IV, 527. These statements will be somewhat qualified when we remember that Dwight’s impressions were derived mainly from travels in Central New York. In the Hudson Valley and in the neighborhood of New York City, New England influence was not so prominent. At the close of the Revolution and with the opening of the North- west Territory, the great tide of westward migration began. In the Western Reserve of Ohio a ‘‘second Connecticut” came into being. At Marietta and at Granville the towns were born as full- fledged New England villages. What happened at these places, happened in scores and hundreds of other places throughout the Middle West. The migrations were not always direct from New England, for a dweller in Ohio may first have sojourned for a few years in New York or Pennsylvania before passing on to a new promised land. Where opportunities were many, it was easy for a settler to pick up his few portable belongings and set out for the better land that seemed always beckoning just a little beyond. On the whole, the New Englander seems to have had little of that feeling for ‘ancestral home”? which was so marked a characteristic among Southerners. But many of the more steady and prosperous members of the new settlements remained after the restless ones had departed and soon established centers of widely radiating influence. Another significant feature of New England migrations, which likewise dis- tinguishes them from the Southerner’s method of seeking new homes, was that of moving in groups: When Granville was settled in Ohio, the church was first organized in its old home in Granville, Massa- chusetts, and was transplanted with pastor, deacons, and members, to its new surroundings. The same thing happened in numberless instances, and to this day one finds communities, not only in the Northwest Territory, but across the Mississippi in Iowa and beyond, which often seem as much like New England as New England itself. The compact organization of these communities, and their skill in institutional administration acquired through long experience, made them exceptionally effective in drawing together and giving direction to the heterogeneous elements of which frontier society was composed.

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When one considers all these various streams of influence which have issued from New England and have irrigated the whole con- tinent of American spiritual life, one may be not unprepared to believe that American speech also is but a child of New England speech. But the respect which America has always had for New England has not carried with it unquestioning acceptance or imi- tation of all New England customs. One may admire without exactly copying, and it must be said with respect to New England that its influence in America has been in determining the tone and aspirations of American life, not in establishing the detailed practices of American social habits and customs. Thus in the matter of speech, ever since students began to take a critical interest in the subject, New England speech in the rest of the country has been felt to be distinctly local, often rustic and provincial.

One of the first local types of character to appear in American literature was the comic New England native, with his numerous and strange but mild expletives, his vocabulary rude and doric, his drawl and twang. With all his respect for New England, Cooper thought, Notions, II, 130, that the best English in America was spoken ‘‘by the natives of the middle States, who are purely the descendants of English parents, without being the descendants of emigrants from New England.” ‘The provincialisms of New England, as Cooper heard them, consisted of intonations, pronun- ciations, and meanings of words, and he mentioned some eight or ten details of this sort. Yet he concluded that with these few exceptions, “the people of New England speak the language more like the people of Old England than any other parts of our coun- try’’—a statement of the case which most persons would agree to even to-day. But this very similarity of the speech of New England to the speech of Old England has been one of the things which has marked New England speech as provincial, or at least as different, when it has been compared with the speech of the rest of the country.

Because of its geographical position, New England from the start tended to become detached from the rest of the country. The

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center neither of American political nor of American commercial activity was ever in New England, and intellectual leadership, always open to doubts and dissensions, was but a poor substitute for these as a practical carrying power. Furthermore it must be remembered that the speech of New England was not itself uniform. When one thinks of the leadership of New England, one usually thinks of Eastern Massachusetts, and it is the speech of this region which cor- responds to the type commonly known as New England speech. Yet none of the distinctive marks of the pronunciation of Eastern Massachusetts has been transferred from that region to the whole country. The pronunciation of a in path, calf, dance, etc. as [at], of o in hot, pod, etc., as [0], of part, heart, etc. as [part], [ha:t], etc., of o in stone, home, etc. as an unrounded shortened vowel, popularly written stun, hum, these have become universal neither in the whole of New England nor in the rest of the country. They are familiar to all persons who take any interest in matters of speech, but this familiarity has not led to an acceptance of them in practice. Even communities which through immigration are mainly of New England origin soon ceased to be distinctively like New England in speech. If one were seeking for what is commonly apprehended as the general type of American speech one would not seek for it in New England, but somewhere between the Alleghanies and the Rockies. Or per- haps one may phrase the point better by saying that if two cultivated speakers, one from Nebraska and one from Eastern Massachusetts were both asked to discard those features in their speech which seemed to them to bear distinctive local color, the speaker from Eastern Massachusetts would in most cases have to yield more than the speaker from Nebraska.

One may say that in America three main types of speech have come to be recognized, a New England local type, a Southern local type, and a general or Western speech covering the rest of the coun- try, and also all speakers in New England and the South at the moments when their speech is not local in character. This general speech has been the result of a great variety of influences, the most important probably being the mixed racial and local origin of the

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people among whom it has arisen. In this mixture of races the foreign element seems not to have affected American speech in any great degree, but the mingling of Scotch and Irish and of English- men from the north as well as the south of England has been of the greatest importance. The resultant speech is one which stands in many significant respects closer to the speech of central and northern England than it does to that of southern England, and by conse- quence, to that of Eastern Massachusetts. This threefold division in American speech is a matter of common though not always of clearly analyzable feeling on the part of Americans. Merely as a fact of pragmatic experience, the average American realizes three large and representative types of speech which he ordinarily desig- nates as Eastern, Western, and Southern. He may realize also a number of other less extensive local types, but there is no other type which he would be inclined to place upon the same level as these three in comprehensiveness and in significance. The geographical terms, Eastern, Western and Southern, are commonly used, to be sure, without any implications of clearly defined geographical bounda- ries between the several types of speech. Neither is it ordinarily implied by this use of terms that all speakers in any community speak uniformly. It is recognized that there may be as much dif- ference between a speaker from Eastern Massachusetts and one from Western Connecticut as between one from Eastern Massachusetts and one from Ohio. The terms Eastern, Southern, and Western are merely used to designate several types of speech which, though not finally and scientifically differentiated either socially or geographically in the popular mind, are nevertheless in practice distinguishable in the experience of every observant American.

The details of speech which occasion this feeling of difference are usually details of pronunciation and intonation, less often details of vocabulary. So far as vocabulary is concerned, the speech of all educated persons in America is remarkably uniform. One may occasionally observe a word which by its meaning reveals a local custom, as when one gives the words evening or gallery the Southern senses of afternoon or porch, or when one calls the enclosure around

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a house, as they do in New England, a door-yard, or calls a farm a ranch, as they do in the Far West. But the occasions for expressing the ideas which may call for the use of peculiarly local words are obviously less frequent and therefore less revealing than pronunci- ations, or cadences, which affect all words, whether they are local or not. Moreover, the conventional spelling of modern English, though it is adequate to universalize vocabulary through the printed pages of books, magazines and newspapers, by the very fact that it is conventional is made powerless to normalize pronunciation or to prevent increasing differentiation in it.

Some of the more distinctive marks of difference in the pronun- ciation of American English may be briefly summarized as providing the clues by which one recognizes the several large types of American speech. These types may be most conveniently designated in the terminology commonly current as the Eastern, the Southern, and the Western, or General types. Further historical and descriptive details concerning the sounds here tabulated will be found under the discussion of the several sounds in a later chapter. They are pre- sented now merely as elements in the general background of feeling for the mother tongue. It is perhaps not necessary to point out that a sound posited as characteristic of a certain type of speech is not necessarily peculiar to that type. The quality of a style of speech is determined by the combination of characteristics which it exhibits as well as by the characteristics in themselves.

The most distinctive and generally recognized marks of the East- ern type of American speech are:

(1) loss of r [r] before consonants and finally

(2) tendency to pronounce a before [f] [s] [@] [ns], ete., as [a:]. Though by no means universal throughout New England and the East, this pronunciation has established itself as one of the com- monly accepted features of the Eastern type of American speech.

(3) tendency to pronounce o as [oa] in closed syllables in which the vowel is followed by a stop consonant, as in hot, rock, drop, etc.

(4) tendency to pronounce 0, ou, as [91] in court, port, more, etc., with the r of course lost in pronunciation.

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(5) tendency to pronounce uw as [u:] in words like duty, tune, mature, etc. This pronunciation is not uniform in Eastern pro- nunciation, but is more frequent there than in Southern or General American English. In earlier periods and in present rustic New England speech, it resulted in the pronunciation of ¢ as [t] instead of [t§] in words like nature, creature, etc., popularly spelled nater, natur, critter, creatur, etc. This latter pronunciation has completely disappeared from cultivated New England speech, but it lingers in popular tradition.

(6) the pronunciation of the vowel of stone, home, whole, etc., shorter and less round than it is elsewhere pronounced, a sound popularly represented by the dialect spellings, stun, hum, hull, etc. This pronunciation is disappearing from cultivated speech and in many words has completely disappeared, though it is still not in- frequent in others. In 1889, Professor Grandgent bore evidence that in his pronunciation whole and hull were very slightly different, much to the surprise of James Russell Lowell, to whom it seemed that “the short o which you get in whole is the rustic pronunciation and that whole is the urban pronunciation,” see Publications of the Modern Language Association, V, XXXVI. Cultivated usage was probably more divided in the pronunciation of this particular word thirty years ago than it is now, but in other words, as in Holmes, colt, coat, etc., a pronunciation with a short and very slightly rounded o remains in cultivated eastern New England speech. In Phyfe, 18,000 Words Often Mispronounced, the o of only, whole, wholly, is marked as being properly halfway between the o of odd and the o of old, and as being frequently, and incorrectly, confounded with this latter sound.

(7) tendency to pronounce final unstressed a in such a way as to produce the acoustic impression of [r] as in zdea, Hannah, etc., rep- resented in popular dialect spelling by zdear, Hanner, etc.

Some distinctive and generally recognized marks of the Southern type of American English are:

(1) loss of [r] before consonants and finally.

(2) a pronounced as [e] before [f], [s], [6], [ns], etc. In Eastern

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Virginia, words of this type have ‘‘two equally authorized standard pronunciations,” one with [z], the other with [a:]; both of these are traditional ‘‘in certain of the best families,’ and they are sharply divided ‘‘on the same lines among the lower classes,’”’ Primer, Pro- nunciation of Fredericksburg, Va., p. 196. But aside from these survivals of [a:] in Eastern Virginia, the normal pronunciation is [e] in the South. Eastern Virginia and Eastern New England both had the pronunciation [a:] by inheritance from the same source, and of course also the pronunciation [se]. Self-conscious New Eng- land speech, however, which we have called the Eastern type of American English, established the pronunciation [a:] as desirable and to be imitated in a way which was not possible in the less highly organized and critical South. The South thus tends toward the pronunciation of the General type in these words, and New England towards the Eastern type. In Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Vir- gina the old-fashioned negro body servant in Marse Chan regu- larly has [a:] as in New England speech, but the author remarks in a prefatory note to the volume that ‘‘the dialect of the ne- groes of Eastern Virginia differs totally from that of the Southern negroes.”

(3) tendency to pronounce o as [a] in hot, got, lot, etc.

(4) tendency to pronounce u as [ju:] in duty, tune, mature, etc.

(5) tendency to preserve in approved local standard use pro- nunciations different from those of general standard American use, for example, the Virginia [’gja:dn] for garden; the Georgian, Ala- bamian, and Mississippian [’trnt1s], [min], for tennis, men; the very general Southern diphthong [zu] for [au] as in down, town, etc.; the pronunciation of words like ear, hear, here, deer, dear, etc., with the same vowel as that which appears in General American hare, dare, tear (verb), etc.; the pronunciation of aw in words like haunt, jaunt, gaunt, as [x], [ge:], see Primer, Pronunciation of Fredericksburg, Va., p. 196. These pronunciations are all survivals from older more general pronunciations, and though perhaps none of them can be taken as universally characteristic of Southern American, taken to- gether they establish the position that Southern American speech is

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likely to be more archaic, and to the uncritical observer to seem more peculiar, than any other type of American speech.

(6) tendency toward a lax articulation, especially of final con- sonants after continuants, as in land, first, pest, soft, etc. With this may perhaps be connected in general a soft and low timbre of voice and a relatively slow tempo in speech.

(7) certain characteristic cadences, for example stressing the final instead of the second word in the phrase I think so.

The distinctive and commonly accepted marks of the Western or General type of pronunciation are:

(1) retention of r before consonants and finally, either as an audible [r], as in far, part, lord, etc., pronounced [far], [part], [Lord]; or as the reverted vowel [9] with the consonantal quality of the r sometimes remaining, sometimes disappearing, as in first, herd, hurt, ete., pronounced [forst], [herd], [hort], or [forst], [he:d], [hart].

(2) a pronounced as [sx] before [f], [s], [6], [ns], etc.; and as [a:] only under Eastern influence.

(3) o pronounced as [a] in hot, got, lot, ete.

(4) a pronounced as [a] after [w], as in water, watch, etc., pro- nounced [’water], [wat{], ete.

(5) uw pronounced either as [u:] or [ju:], perhaps equally divided, in words like duty, tube, new, etc.

(6) a greater amount of nasalization of vowels in the Western General type as contrasted with typically Eastern or Southern American speech.

(7) a “hard” and ‘‘unmusical” quality of voice.

It is obviously much easier for an American to call up in his mind a kind of image of the Eastern and Southern types of American speech than of the Western or General type. The reason for this is that the Western or General type is a composite type, more or less an abstraction of generalized national habits, whereas the Eastern and Southern types, in their most tangible and recognizable forms, developed at the first as the speech of definitely localized and highly characteristic social communities, and have remained so. The New England type of speech had for its center that life of Eastern Massa-

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chusetts and Connecticut which by the end of the seventeenth cen- tury had passed out of experimental uncertainties into an organic social unity such as could have been found at no other place in the North at that time. The striking characteristic of the New England of the early colonists was its unity, but as soon as one stepped beyond the bounds of the original settlements, the striking characteristic of all communities was their heterogeneity.

The same thing was true in the South. The earliest seventeenth- century settlers of tidewater Virginia were in general of the same kind. They all came at about the same time and with the same pur- poses. They developed their own civilization within their own limits and they gave to this civilization, by reason of its appreciable local color and social unity, a typical quality which to this day is the best expression of a kind of life in America which both the historical and the practical imagination love to dwell upon. The eastern Massa- chusetts towns and villages and the plantations of the James and Rappahannock established themselves as fixed but radiating centers for cultural influence before the great movements westward began and before the great tides of European immigration set in. The population of these two communities was relatively small, but their social significance has been great. This it is which has given to the speech of eastern Massachusetts its representative quality for the Eastern type of American speech, and to the speech of tidewater Virginia its representative quality for the Southern type of American speech. No other locality can be fixed upon as standing as. indis- putably for the Western or General type of speech, as these two regions do for their own types. The reason is that the Western or General type did not assume its form in one locality. It does not belong to one locality, but to the nation as a whole. Manifestly what belongs to so heterogeneous a thing as the American nation as a whole must itself be heterogeneous. Such unity as it has is not slight, but it is not a unity which resulted from generations of life upon a circumscribed native soil, such as was the life of colonial Massachusetts and Virginia. The General type of American speech is therefore not racy of the soil of a particular locality, but if one may

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be permitted the tautology, it is racy of the life of the race. It has grown, and is growing, in a thousand different places, by mixture, by compromise, by imitation, by adaptation, by all the devices by which a changing people in changing circumstances adapt themselves to each other and to their new conditions.

The provincialism or localism of New England, which was men- tioned above, affected the speech of New England itself in several ways. As a clearly defined local dialect developed in New England, the natives of this region, if their self-confidence had been sufficient, might have exalted their local dialect to a position of standard or literary authority. They might have rested content in it, or even have become proud of it, and as Dante established the dialect of Florence as a literary speech by writing in it, so some early New Englander of genius might have established the familiar speech of that community as the literary language of America by composing in it a great work expressive of the feeling for nationality in the new country. Some such aspiration was present in Webster’s mind in his endeavors to put on record what he called the American language. But like all educated persons, Webster did not really conceive the possibility of resting contentedly on the practices of popular speech as it existed among his own townsmen and neighbors. Before his eyes there always shone the ideal of a remote literary language, which was to be modified and perhaps enriched by incorporation within it of cer- tain local practices in speech, but which was not to be replaced by a new idiom. In consequence, the local speech tended to take on more and more the position of a homely dialect, and wherever sophis- tication flourished, an artificial speech tended to assume greater importance.

Now it is characteristic of New England that it is to-day, and formerly was much more, a region of one city. Boston has always been so much more important than any other city of New England that it has been the preeminent leader in the expression of all urban refinements. Boston has been, so far as New England is concerned, the center of culture, and to the extent that New England may be

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taken for America as a whole, the center of American culture. This central position, however, has obviously been more important for New England than it has for the country as a whole. As cultural aspirations tended to become localized in Boston, the rest of the New England region tended to become more and more provincial. On the other hand, to save itself from being swallowed up by the surrounding ocean of provinciality, Boston was driven to cultivate the more strenuously those marks of distinction which glorified it as being different from the native simplicity by which it was sur- rounded. This was the light in which Boston and New England in their inter-actions appeared to Henry James, viewing them from the angle of New York and Europe in the sixth decade of the nine- teenth century. Here and there, says James, Notes of a Son and Brother, p. 350, were found personalities which exhibited ‘‘a state of provincialism rounded and compact, quite self-supporting, which gave it serenity and quality, something comparatively rich and urban.”’ But such personalities were comparatively rare. One gazed usually ‘‘straight into those depths of rusticity which more and more unmistakably underlay the social order at large and out of which one felt it to have emerged in any degree but at scattered points.” ‘‘Where it did emerge, I seemed to see,” the analysis continues, ‘‘it held itself as high as possible, conscious, panting, a little elate with the fact of having cleared its skirts, saved its life, consolidated its Boston, yet as with wastes unredeemed, roundabout it, propping up and pushing in—all so insistently that the light in which one for the most part considered the scene was strongly coloured by their action.”

To save itself from the invading barbarism of provincial New England, Boston made a cult of culture itself, and in nothing more strenuously than in speech. The American schools of elocution, oratory and vocal expression, now abundant and ubiquitous in the land, are a gift from Boston to the rest of the country. But as soon as one stepped out of this magic circle of cultivated Boston speech nto what one may perhaps call natural and familiar New England speech, one immediately descended to the regions of the rustic and provincial. How tantalizingly near this rustic native speech lay to

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the cultivated speech is evidenced by the use of the native speech which was made by writers like Holmes, Lowell, and others, who endeavored to express homespun character in homespun speech. Though this native speech was felt to be vigorously expressive, may even have been felt to be the real speech of New England, yet it was always used with a reluctant admission that the reality was not good enough for the highest purposes. It is doubtful, however, if Lowell ever expressed himself more sincerely than he did in the Biglow Papers, and time and again in Holmes, when he good-humoredly permits himself to forget the literary pose, glimpses of the essentially local, provincial New Englander, wise, kindly, and simple, show in the language he uses. This sense for double personality has existed nowhere else in the country so completely as in New England. Local dialects of course exist everywhere, but supplementing the General or Western type of speech there is no dialect speech which expresses familiar reality as the rustic dialect of New England supplements the refined dialect of Boston. In fact when writers elsewhere have written in dialect, they have always written in what is but a very slightly modified form of rustic New England dialect.

To detach itself more effectively from the hinterland of rustic New England, it was natural for Boston to strengthen the bonds which united Boston and England. The relatively close connection between the speech of Boston and the speech of England was noted as early as the latter eighteenth century, when Dwight, Travels, I, 465, remarked that the people of Boston ‘‘with a very small number of exceptions . . . speak the English language in the English man- ner.” Since then many others have made similar observations. Boston is the only city in America in which boots is a common equiv- alent for shoes, calico for unbleached muslin, and shop a common name for store. In the mid-nineteenth century, according to many competent observers, the respect for things British in Boston might fairly be called a craze. It was Boston which in the sixties of the nineteenth century introduced to Americans ‘‘a new and romantic possibility” in afternoon tea. ‘The tone of Boston society,” says Henry Adams, Education of Henry Adams, p. 19, speaking of this

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same period, ‘was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty of English standards; far from conceding it as a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength.” Adams declares that almost alone among his Boston contempo- raries, he was not English in feeling or in sympathies.

It will be readily understood that when Adams speaks of his Boston contemporaries, he by no means signifies all Boston. ‘True Bostonians” constituted an inner and upper circle, entry into which was jealously guarded and rarely effected. Surrounding the “true Bostonians” there dwelt the world of ‘“blackguard Boston,” pre- sumably made up of all those ordinary citizens who might not aspire to be called true. By the middle of the nineteenth century, great numbers of Irish dwelt within the geographical limits of Boston, who assuredly did not kneel in self-abasement before the majesty of English standards. Boston, in the narrow sense, has come to be to the American a name for a state of mind, not for a civil organiza- tion or a local region. As a city, Boston was never entirely homo- geneous. But as an ideal, it realized itself in parts with remarkable clearness in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The effect of all this tradition and endeavor has been to place Boston in a peculiar position as compared with other seats of culture in the country. A community which claims for itself special dis- tinctions is likely in many instances to have these claims recognized, but is just as likely to arouse hostility and to have such claims denied. Perhaps most Americans interested in the criticism of American speech would agree, however, in regarding what is com- monly known as Bostonian English as exemplifying a special tech- nique in language, as skilled virtuosity rather than natural habit. The influence of this ideal has been for good in showing that speech may be cultivated as a fine art, but on the other hand not for good in deflecting attention and respect from native idiom to the acquire- ment of remote and artificial practices in speech.

As a result of the circumstances under which it arose, the Ameri- can mother tongue, especially in its General type, has attained an

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unusual degree of currency. No American popular dialect, except perhaps that of some backward negro community or the speech of some geographically isolated groups of people, differs widely from cultivated speech. An unsophisticated native of no community in America would have much difficulty in understanding a native of any other, such, for example, as an unsophisticated native of York- shire might have in understanding one from Somerset. After noting that ‘‘educated American English is now almost entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects—American English and British English—mutually unintelligible,” Sweet, New English Grammar, I, 224 (1892), adds that ‘“‘American English itself is beginning to split up into dialects.” But this latter statement shows a misunder- standing of the situation. The splitting up of American dialects is an ancient inheritance from British dialects, and the rifts have not increased, but have grown fewer and smaller on American soil.

This tendency towards uniformity in American speech has long been noticed. President Witherspoon of Princeton, writing in 1784, Works, IV, 459, says that ‘‘the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain, for a very obvious reason, viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities, either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain, than there is between one state and another in America.”” Describing the state of New Jersey, Works, IV, 407, he remarks that “people from all the other states are con- tinually moving into and out of this state, so that there is little peculiarity of manner”; and commenting on local phrases and terms in general, Works, IV, 469, he observes that ‘there is a much greater variety of these in Britain than in America,” and adds the more pen- etrating observation that “‘if there is a much greater number of local vulgarisms in Britain than America, there is also for this very rea- son, much less danger of their being used by gentlemen or scholars. It is implied in the very nature of the thing, that a local phrase will not be used by any but the inhabitants or natives of that part of the

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country where it prevails. However, I am of the opinion that even local vulgarisms find admission into the discourse of people of better rank more easily here than in England.” In other words, though Witherspoon would agree that speech was more uniform in America than in England, he believed also that the general level was lower. The question whether or not American speech would continue to be estimated by the British standard was one that Witherspoon left open, though he was inclined to think, Works, IV, 459, that “being entirely separated from Britain, we shall find some center or standard of our own, and not be subject to the inhabitants of that island, either in receiving new ways of speaking, or rejecting the old.”’ It is interesting to find opinions somewhat similar to these of Wither- spoon repeated by Marsh, Lectures (1860), p. 666, who remarks that “it is a trite observation that, though very few Americans speak as well as the educated classes of Englishmen, yet not only is the average of English used here, both in speaking and writing, better than that of the great mass of the English people; but there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, English is more emphatically one in America than in its native land, and if we have engrafted on our mother-speech some widespread corruptions, we have very nearly freed the language, in our use of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable peculiarities exceedingly common in England.”

Webster also bears witness to this uniformity in American speech, though this happy state he fears has been endangered by the publi- cation of conflicting but supposedly authoritative statements in dictionaries. ‘‘Before the publication of Sheridan’s Dictionary,” he remarks, Compendious Dictionary (1806), p. xvi, “‘the pronunciation of words in the northern states of the United States was so uniform, that it:is doubtful whether the gentlemen of education differed in fifty words; and this uniformity still exists, among those who have made no use of any standard author [by standard authors Webster means the standard dictionaries]. Yet the standard authors them- selves and those who follow them, differ in some thousands of words.

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It is further to be remarked that the common unadulterated pro- nunciation of the New England gentlemen is almost uniformly the pronunciation which prevailed in England anterior to Sheridan’s time, and which, I am assured by English gentlemen, is still the pronunciation of the body of the English nation: the pronunciation recommended by Sheridan and Walker being there called the London dialect, and considered as a corruption.”” Here as ever, Webster takes an exaggerated view of the effect of dictionaries upon the prac- tice of speech. The truth is that in this matter of uniformity in speech, very much depends upon the direction in which one turns the head. If one is looking for uniformity, one finds it easily, but if one looks for diversity, diversity will never be lacking.

The question of the relative excellence of American English as compared with British English is also much dependent upon point of view, certainly is not susceptible of a positive and absolute answer. Expressions of opinion on this question have always been much colored by patriotic fervor or by prejudice. Early boasts on the part of Americans that the English language was spoken in a purer form in America than in England were numerous, though not more numerous than the scornful denials of this statement by Englishmen. When Sam Slick, Sayings and Doings (1886), Chapter XI, says that ‘it’s generally allowed we [the Americans] speak English better than the British,” this is to be put down merely as humorous spread- eagleism. But when one meets in serious writing with a bald state- ment like this by Clapin, A New Dictionary of Americanisms, p. vi, that ‘‘as a matter of fact and as regards the great bulk of the people of the United States, there can be no question but that they speak purer and more idiomatic English than do the masses in the Old Country,” one can only faintly hope that there may have been some truth in it. Tucker’s American English (1921) defends the same thesis. On the other hand, Mrs. Trollope, the first edition of whose Domestic Manners of the Americans appeared in 1882, is illustrative of those who went much too far in the other direction. She declared, Domestic Manners (New York, 1901), I, 65, that very seldom during

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her whole stay in America had she heard ‘‘a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American. There is always something either in the expression or the accent that jars the feelings and shocks the taste.’ On another occasion, Vol. II, p. 31, she remarks, with presumably the same degree of penetra- tion, a peculiarity ‘“‘in the male physiognomy of Americans”—that their lips are almost uniformly thin and compressed, an acquired trait which she thinks came from the necessity of keeping the quid of tobacco in the mouth. And again, Vol. II, p. 170, she informs her readers that Americans are convinced that “one of their exclusive privileges is that of speaking English elegantly.” She gives two rea- sons to explain this conviction: “‘the one is, that the great majority have never heard any English but their own, except from the very lowest of the Irish; and the other, that those who have chanced to find themselves in the society of the few educated English who have visited America, have discovered that there is a marked difference between their phrases and accents and those to which they have been accustomed, wherefore they have, of course, decided that no Englishman can speak English.”

Ii is obvious that any one attempting to estimate the relative values of British and American English must go at the matter in a different spirit from that exhibited by the writers from whom quo- tation has been made. It is obvious also that any such estimate will have to do with questions of profit and loss in details and will not lead either to general condemnation or to general approval of either type of English speech.

Another popular and erroneous notion not infrequently expressed with reference to English in America is that American English being by origin provincial is unusually archaic. Stated more compactly, this notion often takes the form that American English is the English of Shakspere. The supposed explanation of this supposed fact is best given in the language of quotation:

“The colloquial speech of the educated class in America is to some extent archaic, compared with that of the similar class in Eng-

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land. This is due to the operation of certain causes, which are well known to students of language. A tongue carried from one land to another, and keeping up no communication with the tongue of the mother country, undergoes what is technically called an arrest of development. The words and phrases and meanings in use at the time of separation remain fixed in the language which has been transported. On the other hand, changes are constantly taking place in the language which has been left behind. It abandons words and phrases once widely employed; it introduces words and phrases hitherto unknown. In this development the transported speech does not share. It clings to the vocabulary with which it started; and as regards the terms constituting it, and the meanings given them, it is apt to remain stationary.’’!

The main statement of this paragraph, that transplanted lan- guages undergo an arrest of development, that is, tend to remain as they were at the time of transplanting, if true at all, could be true only metaphorically. For languages are not like trees or plants, objects of the external world. A language does not exist apart from the mental activities of individuals. One cannot transplant lan- guages, therefore, but only individuals who use languages. The ques- tion then widens, and one must ask, do transplanted groups of indi- viduals undergo an arrest of intellectual development? In the main, obviously they do not. The history of language, as of other social institutions, shows conclusively that periods of migration, during which traditions are naturally unsettled and new combinations of individuals with new influences upon each other are constantly being formed, are just the periods in which extensive changes are likely to take place. It is true, of course, that a transplanted group may in its new home become completely separated from its old home, or may become isolated from all contact with what to it is the outside world, and thus like any other isolated community, may tend to transmit without modification its speech and other social traditions

1J. F. Lonnsbury, in The International Magazine, May, 1880, quoted by C. F. Smith, The Southern Bivouac, I, 344. The source of most expressions of this opinion is Ellis, Early English Pronunciation, Part I, p. 19 (1869); see Bryant, On the Con- servation of Language in a New Country, p. 277 ff.

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from generation to generation. Such communities in America are found in the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, and in other out- lying regions. The speech of these communities is archaic, however, not because it is transplanted speech but because the communities in their general social life have had few social contacts. Thus the speech of Iceland is archaic as compared with that of Norway. But the same cannot be said of America as a whole, or of the English language in America. In very many respects the language has changed, in pronunciation and in vocabulary, since the arrival of the early settlers. Perhaps it has not changed more than British English, for both have been the expression of a vigorous and developing civilization. Neither can be said to have undergone an arrest of development. If certain archaisms appear only in American speech, this merely means that these features of speech, through the acci- dents of circumstances, have chanced to survive in America and not in England. On the other hand, the speech of England also has its peculiar archaic survivals, preserved through the force of their own circumstances, which do not appear in America. And if one might hazard a guess on a point not established by statistical evidence, one would say that there are vastly more archaic survivals, for example in heraldry, in official and institutional life, in England than there are in America. American survivals, being peculiar to America, are merely by this fact brought into exceptional prominence by the critic who is looking for things peculiar to America.

But though neither the spirit nor the form of American English may be said to be a continuation of English in Elizabethan England, there exists nevertheless an extraordinary resemblance in some respects between the two. The explanation is to be found in the fact that the conditions of life in America during the past hundred years have been not unlike those in England in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Life in America has been a great adventure. A spirit of freedom, of independence, of experimentation has been

1 Bryant, pp. 286-287, discusses a few British archaic survivals, fruiterer, draper, mercer, costermonger, poulterer, beetle (in a generalized sense like American bug), biscuit, coverlet, autumn, casket, squash, creek (an inlet in the seacoast), hustings, luggage, copse, _cony, close (as in a cathedral close), goloshes.

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in the air ever since the astonishing expansion of the country in population, in territory, in practical and intellectual interests began early in the nineteenth century. In this exuberant development the English language in America has shared. The language has been treated playfully, sportingly, violently, in all the strange medley of manners which Americans have exhibited in their attitudes towards the changing circumstances of life by which they were surrounded. American vivacity and picturesqueness of expression have resulted in a rich vocabulary of slang to match which in the English language one must go back to the days of Shakspere and Ben Jonson. In- genuity and inventiveness in speech have not been held in check in America by the restraining sense of conventional propriety to the extent that they may have been in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, where the conventions of speech were established by a respected and obeyed upper class. In America speech has taken form more directly in response to immediate impulse. Every American citizen has felt that the language is as much his property as it is that of anybody else. He has considered himself free to treat the lan- guage as he felt inclined, even to the extent of taking liberties with it. Dithyrambic orators, inspired ‘‘inkslingers” with nothing to say but with iridescent language to say it in, writers of journalistic extrava- ganzas, sporting editors, punsters, rimesters, slangsters of every description, all these have flourished in the wild jungle of free Ameri- can expression. Side by side with this license there has to be sure always existed in America a strong sense of authority, a strong feeling of respect for classical and traditional standards which has kept the language in its more serious uses from deviating too far from the ancient and honorable models of English expression. When English has been extravagantly used in America, it has been so with full real- ization of the difference between free and traditional, between normal and eccentric expression. The Elizabethan quality in American English is not an inheritance but a development on American soil.

Not as much light is thrown upon the causes of dialectal diver- gences in America by the comparative study of American pronuncia-

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tions as might be desired. It is abundantly clear that many local dialectal differences are traceable directly to local dialectal differences in England which were transferred from England to America. Much more detailed study of dialects from this comparative point of view is necessary, however, before one can make many generalizations with assurance. It will probably be found in almost every instance that American dialects are very mixed, especially those dialects which have enjoyed any wide extent of use. It may be possible to discover here and there in American speech islands of limited extent which because of their isolation have maintained a homogeneous existence. Charleston, South Carolina, and certain groups dwelling in the Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky mountains are supposed to be communities of this kind. Special historical studies of these several communities are much to be desired, and it is only after such studies have been made that one could assert that their speech is or is not homogeneous, or could hope to discover the precise origins of the several types of speech represented by them. When one passes from the consideration of such restricted local communities to larger groups, it immediately becomes evident that all American dialects are so mixed that a parallelism between any single British dialect and any single American dialect becomes impossible.

The statements of the earlier students of American speech on this question of the local origins of American speech in England are contradictory and often the merest guesses. Webster was inclined to connect the speech of New England more closely with the speech of the south than with that of the north of England. In this he was probably right in the main, though he made no collection of details to support his conclusion. Bartlett, p. xxxviil, however, seems con- vinced that New England English was derived from northern British. ‘‘The numerous words employed in New England,’ he declares, ‘‘which are not heard in other parts of the country are mostly genuine old words still provincial in the north of England: very few are of indigenous growth.’’ Now and then in the body of his dictionary, Bartlett speaks of New England idioms as being

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derived from “Northern British,” but he gives no further reasons why he thought they were thus derived.

A similar vagueness of statement appears in De Vere’s Ameri- canisms. ‘All the provincialisms,’’ he declares, p. 427, ‘‘of the Northern and Western counties of England have been naturalized in the New England States, thanks to the Pilgrim Fathers, who had left the banks of the Trent and Humber, and subsequently by the new colonists, who followed from Norfolk and Suffolk.” “They brought not only their words,” continues De Vere, ‘‘which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of the voice and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved, and are now spoken of as the ‘New England drawl,’ and the high metallic ring of the New England voice (Charles Wentworth Dilke). The former is nothing but the well-known Norfolk ‘whine,’ the proverbial annoy- ance of visitors from the ‘shires.’ ’’ Elsewhere, p. 627, speaking of the southern loss of rin America, De Vere declares that this sin ought to be laid ‘‘upon the shoulders of the guilty forefathers, the first English settlers, many of whom came from Suffolk, and the districts belonging to the East Anglians, and, no doubt, brought over with them this disregard of the letter r.”

Senator Hoar, ‘The Obligations of New England to the County of Kent,” in the Proceedings of the American Archaeological Society, New Series, III, 344-871 (1885), discusses mainly the political and legislational debt of New England to Kent, a debt which he finds to be definitely provable in several instances. With respect to language, he merely takes Holloway’s Provincial Dictionary (1888), and notes a number of instances in which Kentish speech agrees with New England speech; but the inference of New England indebted- ness to Kent is somewhat invalidated by the looseness of the method employed to establish it. The same criticism must be made of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s study, ‘“‘English Sources of American Dialect,”’ in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, IV, 159-166 (1886). Higginson examined Grose’s Provincial Glossary (Ist ed., 1787, 2nd ed. 1790) and Pegge’s supplement to Grose in his Anecdotes of the English Language (1814), noting the

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characteristic words of New England as they were localized in these lists. ‘On the whole,” he concluded, ‘‘the vast balance of numbers seems to me an indication, so far as it goes, that the strain of our New England ancestry came more largely from the North of England than from Kent.”

The chief conclusion to be drawn from such studies as these is the need of a stricter scientific method of investigating the question than has hitherto been employed. The English Dialect Dictionary has now made available a great body of material concerning contem- porary British dialects, and it may be that an exact comparative study of American vocabulary in relation to British vocabulary as here recorded would yield results of value. A comparative study of con- temporary dialects, however, would not provide a safe basis for con- clusions concerning the relations of British and American dialects three hundred years ago. It would seem that the best beginning in such a comparative historical study could be made by approaching the question from the side of ethnology, of the local origins of the families which settled in various parts of America. ‘No list has yet been made,” says Senator Hoar, p. 368, ‘‘which shows, by shires, the origin of the emigrants who came to New England in the first thirty years of the settlement, even so far as the knowledge we have might enable it to be done.’”’ Until such lists are made, covering all the available sources of information, it would be futile to attempt to determine racial origins by the study of dialectal differences. Dia- lect may confirm conclusions drawn from documentary genealogical studies, but it cannot take the place of them. English and American dialects have always been so mixed that they can be used as circum- stantial evidence, often in a strikingly confirmatory way, but with little or no independent value.

An excellent beginning in this method of genealogical investiga- tion is made in the admirable study by Orbeck, Early New England Pronunciation, Chapter V, ‘‘The Sources of New England Speech.”’ In a total of 1652 pioneers in the towns of Plymouth, Watertown and Dedham, pioneers being settlers who came from England in the first wave of migration, Orbeck has been able to trace 685, or 41.47

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per cent to their English homes. There is no reason to think that the persons thus traced are in any way peculiar, or that inferences based upon them would not apply to greater numbers, if information con- cerning the origins of greater numbers were available. The place of origin of these pioneers is given in the following table:

TABLE A Norkahine snr sacs tae ne ere ee OLITCY: 5 Nottinghamshire . . . . . 7 Berkshire or te rd, | en ee Lincolnshire Sy Elampshireyen eee eee eco Leicestershire wm =P % Meee 647 Wiltshire? 8 Rutland ber ies helen eee LDorsetshire ue 7 Northamptonshire . 4 Devonshire . 2 Cambridgeshire . . . 9 Somersetshire . 12 Went 5 -- 6 5 io o o o Wer NON SIS 5 Suto] keene nnn OOLEEEVV an wackshine 3 (ESSe Xe ee sn /e =e TOD Share 2 Hertfordshire . . . . . . 4 . Lancashire 4 ibeoliosciwe 5 6 » 56 6 o 4 JEG O@E Mb - 1 Buckinghamshire . . . . . 38 _ Seotland 1 Middlesex . . . . . = =. & £Wales 1 Iwaver a BAe eo oe Oe See Bei Albis! 3 IKenteere bone 1 ee ee ee oe ee tolandar 9

The first observation one would make in reviewing this table is that the origin of the early New England settlers is extraordinarily diverse, but the second is just the opposite, that the larger part of the settlers came from a small number of closely related localities. “The center of the exodus,” says Orbeck, ‘‘was certainly Suffolk, and omitting London, the two adjoining counties, Norfolk to the north, and Essex to the south, come next. Indeed 67.73 per cent came from the coast counties from (and including) London to the Wash (i.e., Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and London). ‘There were twice as many,” continues Orbeck, ‘‘from the counties south of the Suffolk line as from the territory north of the line. It is interest- ing to note also that 599 came from the coast counties as against 72 from the inland counties. There were very few from the middle western counties, only four from Lancashire, and none whatever from the four northernmost counties. From the Scrooby region—

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southern Yorkshire, northern Nottingham and Lincolnshire—there were not a great many besides those who came to Plymouth by way of Holland.” The obvious inference to be made from this tabula-. tion, as Orbeck points out, is that “‘we are to look for the roots of Eastern Massachusetts speech in the eastern dialects of England.”

The distribution of place names may also provide some evidence concerning the local origins in England of groups of early colonists in America. The value of this evidence may be estimated from the summary of Dexter’s essay on ‘‘The History of Connecticut as Illustrated by the Names of Her Towns,” in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, III, 437. To the question whether the study of place names helps one to know from what parts of England Connecticut was peopled, his answer is that this evidence corroborates other sources of information concerning Con- necticut stock. ‘‘What this stock was, the experiences of the New Haven Colony well illustrates; the first settlers in the town of New Haven represented at least three distinct neighborhoods—one part from London, one from Kent, and one from Yorkshire—the last colonizing in the quarter which our modern ‘York Street’ marks. Guilford was mainly settled from Surrey and Kent, and Milford from Herefordshire in the west. Here we have then a mingling of streams, from the metropolis, the southeastern counties, the distant northeast, and the western midland; and this partial view is typical of the whole. In populating Connecticut, not only London and the eastern counties, but in less degree the southwest, the midland, the northeast, all bore their part, and all contributed their fair share to our treasury of town names.”’ A more discriminating and extensive study of town names might be useful, however, in indicating the relative proportions of American colonists from the several regions of England.

American English shares with British English a noticeable ten- dency to make the spoken or auditory forms of words conform to the written or visual forms. This is characteristic of all highly

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developed literary languages, and the tendency in general grows as the printed and written aspects of language become more prominent in the language consciousness of a people. Thus we find that many words which now have but a single standard form in both American and British English became established in this form under the influ- ence of spelling and within the modern English period. Examples of this are wreck, formerly pronounced [rek] or [rek], but since the end of the eighteenth century, only [rek].1_ So also mesh formerly varied between [me§] and [mz], but now has settled on only the former. In get, yet, yes, the eighteenth-century pronunciations [git], [jrt], j1s] have completely given place to one with [e] in accord with the spelling. In sward, recorded by earlier phoneticians as [sord] and [sword], the spelling with w has made the latter pronun- ciation universal, though the w in sword has not made its way into pronunciation. Many similar examples of adaptation of the spoken form to the written form of words will be found in the chapter on the American pronunciation of English. But though this tendency is a necessary tendency in all modern languages which take their speech into the mind to a considerable extent through the eye as well as the ear, it seems in American English to have found a field specially favorable for its development. Since the standard in America has not been the spoken language of any particular locality or class of society, but one based on a theoretical national custom, necessarily it made its appeal largely through literature, wherein national custom is most comprehensively expressed. In other words, American English replaced social tests by literary educational tests in speech, the latter being almost altogether tests applied through the printed page. In this way American English has become in many instances more rational, that is, more subject to analogical rules, than British English. In the latter, pronunciations often persist through the sanction of social custom which grotesquely contradict the ordinary and expected conventions of spelling. Thus in England for chemist one may still hear [/krm1st], for clerk one may hear [kla:k],

1 For further historical details concerning the pronunciation of these sounds, see the discussions in the second volume.

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for falcon one is more likely to hear a pronunciation with the I silent in England, but pronounced in America; in asthma, isthmus, the more general pronunciation in England gives th the value of ¢, but in America almost universally the letters th have their ordinary value as a voiced or voiceless continuant.

The contrast between the British and the American attitude towards this question of harmony between pronunciation and spelling is still more marked in proper names. In America the rule is that pronunciations have been modified to accord with the common analo- gies of spelling, or spellings have been modified to accord with pro- nunciations. Thus Berkeley, Berkshire, Hertford, and many similar family and place names, are pronounced in America with the value which e before r and a consonant ordinarily has, but in England these words have [a:]. If the pronunciation with [a:] is retained in Amer- ica, then the spelling would normally be made to conform, as Bar- clay, Hartford. In England the word Greenwich is commonly pro- nounced [’grintd3], but the almost universal pronunciation in the town in Connecticut of that name is [/grim‘wit§]._ The name of the town Worcester in Massachusetts is of course pronounced [/wuista] as in England, but Wooster in Ohio, though it retains the old pro- nunciation, changes the spelling to agree with the pronunciation. Thus also original Beaufort, a not uncommon Southern name in America, is sometimes written as pronounced, Buford, and older Beauchamp is written Beecham. ‘The proper name Ralph, when so spelled, is pronounced [relf]in America, but often [re:f], [rerf] in England. For Jenny only [’d3ent] would be heard in cultivated speech in America, but in England, [’d31n1] perhaps more frequently than [/dzenz].

In many other proper names respect for the spelling seems often to encourage a fuller pronunciation of the relatively unstressed parts of the words in America than in England. The word Hobart, said to be pronounced [‘habot] in England, Michaelis-Jones, Phonetic Dictionary, p. 180, would be pronounced [‘ho:‘bart], [‘ho:‘ba:t] in America, or in rapid speech [‘horbot]. Words like Ayscough, Avebury, Eddystone, would seem to American ears more naturally pronounced

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as [/e1s‘kof], [/erv‘bert], [‘edr‘stom] than in the British fashion as [’etskof], [etbert], [/ediston].

Examples similar to these might be added in large numbers, enough certainly to justify the conclusion that though both British and American English strive in many instances to bring the visual and the spoken forms of the words of the language into harmony, the effort seems to have worked more fully and effectively in America than in England. If Americans appear more reasonable and less conventional than the British in this respect, the explanation is to be found not in the peculiarly practical nature of the American people, but in the special conditions of English speech in America, especially in the influence of elementary popular education upon speech, and in the exaltation of literary and theoretical standards of speech above the social traditions of spoken language.

Mixture of races in America has had much less direct effect upon the feeling for the American mother tongue than might be expected. The American nation is a composite of many peoples, but its lan- guage has shown no tendency to become polyglot. So far as pronun- ciation is concerned, it is doubtful if in a single instance the pro- nunciation of normal American English has been modified by the influence of a foreign language. There are to be sure many foreign- ers in America who speak ‘‘broken English,’ who speak with an ‘faccent,” but the character of this kind of English is always unmis- takable. Henry James, in The American Scene (1907), p. 228, describes an occasion on a certain afternoon in Boston, when he listened to the conversation of “‘a continuous passage of men and women,” none of whom spoke English. Some spoke ‘‘a rude form of Italian,” others ‘‘some outland dialect’”’ unknown to the observer. ‘‘No note of any shade of American speech struck my ear,” the passage continues, “‘save in so far as the sounds in question [i.e., of the foreign speakers] represent to-day so much of the substance of that idiom [i.e., of American speech].’”” But what elements of the “‘substance” of American speech to-day come from Italian, or from Polish or Russian or Lithuanian, or any other ‘“‘outland dialect’’?

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Called to a strict account for his remark, Henry James could not have pointed, one may be quite sure, to a single specific instance in which any sound of a foreign speech has been taken over into American English, or has modified in any degree the sounds of American speech. No doubt some sounds of American English may be found in foreign languages—in any foreign language. But there is no sound of American speech which cannot be traced back to periods much earlier than those in which foreign contaminations have been possible.

In vocabulary a few words from foreign languages have been taken over into American English, more from the Indians, with whom, strangely enough, the white people have never had very intimate or extensive social communication, but who have always appealed to their imagination, than from any other source; but the number of distinctly American foreign borrowings is less than the language as spoken in Great Britain reveals, where colonial relationships and international commerce have been particularly favorable to the borrowing of foreign terms. So far as syntax and idiom are concerned, it is again doubtful if a single instance of a foreign construction which has made its way into general or standard use at any time can be pointed out in American English. The explanation of this fact is that American English, in spite of the presence in the body politic of large numbers of people speaking foreign languages, has never been really exposed to contamination with foreign idioms. Immigration of other than English-speaking peoples began early, but from the start the foreign elements have been quickly assimi- lated to the native. In the seventeenth century, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a number of French Huguenots sought a refuge in America, but they soon dispersed and disappeared in the body of the population. Before the end of the century, large num- bers of Germans had settled in Pennsylvania and the Valley of Virginia, and there they have maintained a kind of separate existence to this day, retaining a modified German dialect still widely in use for colloquial purposes and also illustrated to some extent in a litera- ture of their own.

62 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA

The Pennsylvania German dialect, however, exhibits the develop- ment which always takes place when the language of a people of relatively lower cultural and social standing comes into contact with that of a higher, that is, it has been deeply affected by English but has not exerted a corresponding, or even an appreciable, influence in the opposite direction. This statement applies not only to the German of the early emigrants, but likewise to that of the vast numbers who came later. The Germans in America have been more tenacious of their continental traditions than any other class of emi- grants, and German has occupied a more important position in the instruction of the public schools than any other living language of continental Europe. But the effect of German upon American Eng- lish has been negligible. The statement of Richard Grant White, Atlantic Monthly, November, 1879, that “with all our German immigration, there is not a single German phrase current among us” is still true. By the same token the following statement of Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), p. xxxvii, was never true: ‘‘The great extent to which the scholars of New England have carried the study of the German language and literature for some years back, added to a very general neglect of the old masterpieces of English composition, have had the effect of giving to the writings of many of them an artificial, unidiomatic character, which has an inexpressibly unpleasant effect to those who are not habituated to it.” German was studied with some enthusiasm by a few persons in New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and Germany then seemed to many New Englanders not only a fresh fount of philosophic wisdom but also a land of poetry and romance. It is not apparent, however, that any New England writers consciously or unconsciously went so far as to fashion their style after German writers.’

To the generation of Americans of German parentage born upon American soil, German has seemed almost as much a foreign

1For a discussion of the knowledge of German in New England, see Goddard, “German Literature in New England in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century,” in Studies in New England Transcendentalism, pp. 202-206. The Monthly Magazine

and American Review, II (1800), 284-287, has an essay “On the Study of German,”’ giving reasons for the study of that language.

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language as French or Italian, to be learned with the same assiduity and labor. This statement applies even more strongly to other groups of Americans of foreign parentage. Northern Teutons from Den- mark, Sweden and Norway, southern Europeans from Italy and Greece, eastern Europeans from Poland, Russia, Hungary and the smaller states, even Asiatics from Armenia and Turkey have come in steady streams, and for a time in limited communities have main- tained a civilization of their own. In every instance, however, these bodies of foreign emigrants have come from relatively low social levels. Even in their own countries they had not, as a rule, assimi- lated the highest culture which their native surroundings afforded, nor had they exerted such a controlling part in it that they could feel it as a precious possession to be cherished at any cost. They came to America with an initial readiness to accept the institutions of their new homes. Undisciplined in the control of public affairs, they were not prepared to take a constructive part in the organization even of their own life in America, and have thus been, to the present time, the led rather than the leaders. The main result of foreign emigration to America has consequently been to add to the number of native born illiterates a very large number of illiterates of foreign parentage. So far as the American standard of national use is concerned, it matters little whether illiteracy is native and provincial or colored by recollection of foreign idioms. The great problem of instruction which by general agreement has confronted and still confronts the educational forces of the country is to correct the one as much as the other, and to the solution of this problem, the public schools have turned their attention with such intelligence and energy as to make speakers of standard American out of foreigners as readily as out of provincial Americans. In many instances, indeed, their success has been greater with children of foreign parentage than with native Americans, for the former, aware of a heavy social handicap to overcome, put forth special exertions, whereas the latter, inclined to think themselves as good as any one else, refuse to have their eyes opened to conditions which might destroy their personal satis- faction.

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The question of climate inevitably arises when one attempts to consider the formative influences which have determined the charac- ter of a national language. The weather is always an engrossing sub- ject of interest, and every community is likely to be so impressed by the peculiarities of its own particular style of weather as to ascribe to it powers and effects which extend wide and deep. Such ascrip- tions, however, are very rarely susceptible of positive proof, nor do they, on examination, often seem plausible. In the case of American English, for example, if one were to seek for an effect of climate on speech, with what climate would one begin? From Maine to Florida, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from Oregon to New Mexico, the greatest diversities of climate are to be found. One may pass from the tropical climate of the south to the sub-Arctic climate of the far north, from mountain to prairie, from sage-brush desert to forest, and in no one of these regions would one find what might be called the typical ‘“‘American climate.’”’ The distinctive feature of American climate, as of the social life of the country, is diversity, rather than uniformity. Diversity of social life may well be a significant element in determining the character of American speech, but it is difficult to see how diversity of climate can produce any effects except such as are purely local. But even in localities, it is doubtful if climate can be regarded as an effective cause of local characteristics of speech. The most plausible case could perhaps be made for Southern American English as contrasted with Northern. The languorous climate of the South has been thought to account for the slow soft voices of the Southerners, their general loss of the sound of r final and before consonants, and perhaps for a tendency to obscure unstressed syllables to a greater extent than is customary in the North. As to slowness of speech, something will be said later in the discussion of the American “‘drawl,’’ but for the moment it will be sufficient to point out that observers have generally found this to be a characteristic not only of Southern but all American speech. The Yankee drawl has been the subject of comment for generations. Furthermore, if a warm climate be regarded as having produced a languorous manner of speech in the American South, the principle

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involved must be one applicable to human society in general. The evidence of Italy and Southern France alone, however, is sufficient to disprove that a Southern climate produces a slow and lazy speech. The loss of the sound of 7, again, cannot be regarded as due to South- ern climate, for exactly the same phenomenon appears in some Northern American communities, notably in New England and southern New York, and it is of course one of the well-known char- acteristics of standard British English. The same applies to the slurring of unstressed syllables. In many instances, and probably this statement could be made universal, what might be regarded as peculiar to Southern America finds parallels in usages of other regions with very different climates, and in every case a better explanation could be made for the several features on the basis of the effect of social relations than on that of the effect of climate.

One general description of American English has often been given which is at the same time an accusation against it, the blame for which has frequently been laid upon the climate. The statement usually runs that the American voice is hard, inflexible, lacking in resonance and over-tones, that it is monotonous and dry. Toa certain extent Americans themselves acknowledge this, though fain to deny it when their attention is called to it by the alien critic. The state- ment is also often made that the cultivated Southern American voice stands in strong contrast to the voice of the cultivated Northern or Western speaker, that it has a different and more musical quality. It would be a rash person, however, who should say that a hard and inflexible voice is universally or even generally characteristic of the North or West. It cannot be regarded as one of the natural products of these regions. The division in this matter of the speaking voice is not to be made on the basis of locality, but more reasonably on the differences of temperament and habit. Men of affairs who have given themselves up to the bitter competition of business, who have fought first to gain a position and then to maintain it in the face of remorseless opposition, may not infrequently reveal in the harshness of their voices the severity and social inhumanity of the struggles through which they have gone. Such men often fill in a democratic

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community positions of greater importance than their social virtues qualify them to occupy. They are often rich men, and consequently part of that traveling American public prominently seen and loudly heard in conspicuous places. They are indeed a characteristic product of American conditions, and if their voices seem not to possess the quality and modulations of a gentle speech, the explanation is to be found in the fact that their activities have not been in the regions where the milder and easier social adaptations have had weight. A hard, domineering habit of mind will show itself in the same way in the voice of the speaker, whether he be a Northerner or a Southerner, an American, an Englishman, or of any other race. The barometer by which the fluctuations of speech are measured is an extremely sensitive one, but its records are to be interpreted in terms of social atmosphere, not often in those of wind and rain and weather.

Though a summary such as has been attempted in this chapter cannot pluck the heart out of the mystery of American English, it provides pegs nevertheless to which we may attach impressions. The feeling for a mother tongue must always rest upon distinctive national traditions. Few of the principles brought forward in this chapter to account for the existence of an American idiom would be equally applicable to the speech of England, France, Italy, Russia, or Ger- many. Nations make their own histories, and American speech, for better or for worse, is the child of the American people. But in this matter of the formation of a standard or generalized national speech, among western nations perhaps the closest similarity is to be found between the United States and Germany. A standard national speech may be based, first, upon the particular dialect of a locality, general- ized and extended to the whole people; or second, upon the speech of a special social class, accepted and imitated by all other classes as providing the approved model of speech; or third, upon neither a local nor a class dialect, but upon the formally recorded, that is, the relatively fixed and visual aspects of the language. Manifestly American standard English is not primarily an extended local dialect. Neither is it the speech of any social class, a gentry, a nobility, or

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even a peasantry. The main supporting foundation for the feeling for a standard speech in America is to be found in the written lan- guage, not of course in the ingenious literary devices of the profes- sional literary style, but in what may be designated as the normal daily uses of the written language. Each new group of American citizens has entered into possession of the language not as a natural inheritance, not as a privilege, but as an acquisition, as something to be gained through intelligent application and study. In America, as in Germany, the chief task of language in the last four or five gen- erations has been to provide some kind of amalgamating medium to hold together a great variety of elements geographically, socially and culturally disparate, assembled suddenly and without preparation. The problem of language in America has therefore been a problem of organization. Out of heterogeneity, unity had to be produced, not by century long processes of slow development, but quickly and efficiently. To attain this end, the surest and speediest way was to base the feeling for the national idiom upon what are in some respects the more mechanical sides of speech, that is, upon reading and writing as the most readily comprehensible among the necessary accomplish- ments of all good citizens. It is on the foundation of education in these elemental, but profoundly significant aspects of the use of speech, that the main structure of American linguistic unity has been reared.

VOCABULARY

The vocabulary of the English language in America has always been in the main the same as the vocabulary of the English language in England. In other words, both American English and British English are constituent elements in a unity which must be designated the English language. This is the unity of the English-speaking communities. But such a bald statement immediately raises the questions in what this unity consists, what it is that gives the English language of the English-speaking peoples its distinctive and essential character, and what it is that enables one to relate the several aspects of the language, for example, British and American English, to the central and unifying idea of its nature. In effect this is merely the question of dialects, of their definition and relationships.

Two ways of establishing a central character or idea of the English language are possible. One may say that an actually existent form of the language has been by common experience, and therefore by right, established as the preeminent authority for the language. If any such claim were to be made for the English language, obviously it would be the language of England, or some particular form of the language of England, which would be elevated to this supreme posi- tion. Without entering into debate of the reasons which might be adduced as justly supporting or denying any such possible claim, one may more profitably consider the question of fact here involved. The question of fact is whether all those or any great majority of those who must be said to use the English language do thus in practice look upon the English of England as having provided the final court of authority, the home to which all errant forms of English speech must return finally for paternal blessing and approval. The answer to this question is obviously that a feeling for a fixed center of the English language in the real speech of any English community does

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not exist strongly enough to be a determinant in the many and varied uses of the speech. The mother tongue of all those who use English is not the English of any particular region or of any defined section of society. It is something vastly more comprehensive and subtle than this. The many different varieties of English speech are evi- dences of the practice of those who are equals in the enjoyment of their linguistic inheritance. One form of English speech does not exist by ‘sufferance of another form, but each form, by the fact of its existence, is an element helping to determine the nature of the whole.

The central nature of the English language not being determined by the real practice of any locality or group, it remains that it must be determined by anidea. It isin fact a concept, a state of mind, and not an objective reality. When one thinks of the English language as a unity in this way, one is prepared to take a reasonable view of those details of language commonly designated Americanisms and Briticisms. Is the notion of the English language in America so dif- ferent from the central idea of the English language that one must give a special name to it and call it the American language? Or in other words, must one establish a new central idea and feeling for the language which shall give to that speech a unity and character of its own? Where do the bounds of sympathetic inclusion within the nature of the English language end?

Now students of psychology have always maintained that no two individuals can ever be exactly alike, and one may extend this statement to speech and say that the language of no two individuals can ever be exactly alike. Whatever generalization one makes, there- fore, on the basis of the speech of a group of individuals, even if the group contains only two, must allow for a greater or less area of negli- gible variation in the speech of these several individuals. A general- ization of the speech habits which the group has in common, that is the determination of the unity of the group, can be made only by eliminating from the generalization those habits which the group does not have in common. This necessity confronts the systematizer, no matter how small or how large the group.

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The extent of the area of negligible variation which one permits in language depends very much upon feeling. A single word or intonation in a particular set of circumstances may cause one to expel violently the user of the word or intonation from the circle of one’s sympathy. Under other circumstances, however, one may find this word or intonation both acceptable and grateful. One for- gives much where one’s sympathy is engaged, but where it is not, a little spark of occasion may kindle a mighty conflagration of scornful denial.

It is for this reason that one meets with extraordinarily diverse statements of the difference between American and British English. One observer finds them, to repeat the words of the opening of this chapter, essentially the same. Another finds them altogether differ- ent, the user of the one language unintelligible to the user of the other. Thus on the one side, we find Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses (1870), p. 56, declaring himself as follows:

“Tf in an assemblage of a hundred educated well-bred people, one half of them from London, Oxford, and Liverpool, and the other from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia . . . a ready and accurate phonographer were to take down every word spoken during an even- ing’s entertainment, I feel quite sure that it would be impossible to dis- tinguish in his printed report the speech of the Britons from that of the Americans, except by the possible occurrence of acknowledged local slang, or by the greater prevalence among the former or the latter of peculiar words, or words used in peculiar senses, which would be acknowledged to be incorrect as well by the authorities of the party using them as by those of the other party. In brief, their spoken language, reproduced instantly in writing, could be distin- guished only by some confessed license or defect, peculiar to one country, or more prevalent there than in the other. . . . The stand- ard in both countries is the same. . . . But although the written speech of these people would be to this degree indistinguishable, an ear at all nice in its hearing would be able to separate the sheep from the goats by their bleat. . . . Among those of both countries who had been from their birth accustomed to the society of cultivated people,

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even this distinction would be made with difficulty, and would, in many cases, be impossible.”

On the other side, we hear Fitzedward Hall, an American, declar- ing that ‘though I have lived away from America upwards of forty- six years, I feel, to this hour, in writing English [that is British as contrasted with American], that I am writing a foreign language, and that, if not incessantly on my guard, I am in peril of stumbling. . . . Not for five minutes can he [the American] listen to the conver- sation of his fellow countrymen, or for that length of time read one of their newspapers, or one of such books as they usually write, without exposure to the influence of some expression which is not standard English”—that is, which does not belong to the central idea of the English language, or feeling for the language, as these figured in Fitz- edward Hall’s experience.' It is difficult to disburden the author of so extreme a statement of the charge of wilful determination to discover differences at all hazards. And in fact when Hall had the temerity to collect many illustrations of ‘“‘solecisms, crudenesses, and piebald jargon” in the writings of respectable American authors like Mrs. Stowe, Howells and others, it was not difficult for his critic to point out, in most cases, precisely the details of practice which Hall brought forward to prove the un-English character of American usage in the writings of standard British authors, and to maintain con- vincingly that only patient search would be required to find abundant parallels to the remainder of Hall’s examples. In the same spirit as Hall another critic declared that he was almost completely bilingual. “T can write English,” he says, ‘‘as in this clause, quite as readily as American, as in this here one,’’ Mencken, The American Language (1919), p. vii. But such criticism is made ineffective by its manifest perversity. The truth must lie somewhere in the middle.

When one says, however, that American and British English to the impartial observation are essentially the same, that they are

1Fitzedward Hall, ‘‘The American Dialect,” in The Academy, London, March 25, 1893, pp. 265-7, discussed and reprinted in R. O. Williams, Some Questions of Good English, pp. 107 ff.

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elements in the unity of the English language, this is not equivalent to saying that they are identical. Just as an exaggerated view of the difference between the two may lead to the discovery of differ- ences where in normal experience no sense of difference exists, so an exaggerated view of the similarity of the two may lead to a lax re- gard for such distinctions as common experience really recognizes. These latter distinctions are of course the ones which should be made the basis of discussion when one sets out to consider the significant relations of American English to the speech of any other specialized groups in the general unity of the English language.}

It is significant that the word Americanism did not come into exist- ence until after the Revolution. It was coined, according to his own assertion, by President Witherspoon of Princeton. Writing in 1784, Works, IV, 460, he says that ‘‘the word Americanism, which I have coined for the purpose, is exactly similar in its formation and signifi- cation to the word Scotticism.”’? The term was devised to designate the discussion of ‘‘an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among persons of rank and education, different from the use of the same terms or phrases, or the construction of similar sentences, in Great Britain.”” Witherspoon did not assume an altogether condemnatory attitude towards his Americanisms. “‘It does not follow, from a man’s using these,” he declares, ‘‘that he is ignorant, or his discourse upon the whole inelegant; nay, it does not follow in every case, that the terms or phrases used are worse in them- selves, but merely that they are of American and not of English growth.” In detail, however, Witherspoon’s own observations are not numerous or important. The instances of Americanisms which he cites are few in number and not of great significance. As Wither- spoon was a Scotchman by birth, he probably came to America with an ear already cocked for the detection of provincialisms of speech, and it is therefore remarkable that he did not discover more than the few examples which he mentions.

1 For a collection of opinions on the relative degree of differentiation or identity in British and American English, see Mencken (1921), pp. 1-38.

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In general the attitude of Americans in the period immediately following the Revolution was one of cordial welcome to all that might be regarded as distinctive for American speech. The new nation was felt to be in need of a new idiom. Noah Webster’s persistent advocacy of an American language has already been noted. Even more em- phatically did Thomas Jefferson express his faith in neologism. Always hostile to “the Gothic idea that we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind,” Jefferson gladly welcomed what seemed new in language. ‘‘I have been not a little disappointed,” he says, Writings, ed. Washington, VI, 184, “and made suspicious of my own judgment, on seeing the Edinburgh Reviewers, the ablest critics of the age, set their forces against the introduction of new words into the English language; they are particularly apprehensive that the writers of the United States will adulterate it. Certainly so great growing a population, spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer the purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old. The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. . . . But whether will these adulterate, or enrich the English lan- guage? Has the beautiful poetry of Burns, or his Scottish dialect, disfigured it?” The enlargement of the English language, Jefferson contends, ‘‘must be the consequence, to a certain degree, of its trans- plantation from the latitude of London into every climate on the globe; and the greater the degree the more precious will it become as the organ of the development of the human mind.” This enlarge- ment will come “‘not indeed by. holding fast to Johnson’s Dictionary; not by raising a hue and cry against every word he has not licensed, but by encouraging and welcoming new compositions of its elements.”’ But in England Jefferson fears that ‘‘the dread of any innovation

. and especially of any example set by France has palsied the spirit of improvement.” ‘‘Here [in America] where all is new, no innovation is feared which offers good. . . . And should the language of England continue stationary, we shall probably enlarge our em-

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ployment of it, until its new character may separate it in name, as well as in power, from the mother tongue.”

These quotations from Jefferson indicate fairly well the attitude of the more liberally minded Americans towards the question of vocabulary in speech. There were some conservatives, for example, Dwight, who declared himself, Works, IV, 278, unwilling ‘‘to see the language of this country vary from that of Great Britain’; and there were of course hostile critics in England, like those of the Edinburgh Review, who treated American English with scorn and reviling. But when one examines the charges of the earlier British critics, and the confessions or apologies of the American critics, one finds them both strangely deficient in definite detail. There is usually no question of the feeling involved, but the grounds of this feeling are not made evident. A few stock examples of Americanisms occur again and again, such as belittle, clever, lengthy,’ locate, improve (in the sense merely to make use of, employ), guess, fix, progress, as a verb. Some of these may be regarded as characteristic of the vocab- ulary of English in America, but the examples usually brought forth illustrate the state of mind of the critic much better than the state of the English language in America. Thus a British critic in the Monthly Mirror, for March, 1808, remarks that American authors make use of new and obsolete words, ‘which no good writer in this country would employ.” ‘‘And were it not,” he continues, italicizing the reprehended words, ‘‘for my destitution of leisure, which obliges me to hasten the occlusion of these pages, as I progress I should bottom my assertion on instances from authors of the first grade; but were I to render my sketch lengthy, I should zlly answer the purpose, which I have in view,” see Cairns, British Criticisms, p. 37. Doubtless an American who had formed his style by the study of Holofernes might have written thus, but doubtless there was never such an American. For asummary of British criticisms of American speech, see Mesick, The English Traveller in America (1785-1835), Chap. VIII.

1 Discussed in detail in ‘‘The Trial and Condemnation of Lengthy,’’ Monthly Magazine and American Review, III (1800), 172-174.

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A reasonable conception of the term Americanism must obviously be arrived at before it is possible to examine the distinctive elements in the vocabulary of the English language in America. In any such conception a very large group of differences will immediately occur to the observer which must be characterized as in themselves having very little distinguishing value, whether for British or for American English. These are differences between American and British prac- tice which rest merely upon what may be called the accidents of convention and which are therefore significant only when one of these forms of the English language is compared with the other. These conventional differences are of the kind which ordinarily in polite society fall by consent within the area of negligible variation. It is true that such differences have often been the centers about which the most violent storms of social prejudice have raged. To take an extreme example, not of vocabulary, but of spelling, the difference between American honor and British honour is one that rests entirely upon a difference of convention. All spellings are established only by convention, and the form of a word which is agreed upon must needs be the form of the word. On logical and historical grounds perhaps as good a case could be made for one of these forms as for the other, and if some elements of feeling not dependent primarily upon linguistic considerations were not im- ported into the discussion of the spellings, one’s attitude towards them would be colorless and unprejudiced.

Many words and locutions of this sort immediately strike the attention when one. compares American with British usage, especially when one compares the concrete English of every-day intimate life in America with the English of the same life in England. Thus in America the common usage is coal, when one speaks of the fuel to be put on a grate, but in England it is coals which are put in a grate. The difference is merely that in America coal is used as a mass- word, like iron, stone, wood, etc., whereas in the British coals, em- phasis is laid upon the fragmentary character of coal utilized as fuel. Perhaps, however, American usage has gained slightly in distinct- iveness, since coal means the fuel before it is burned, leaving coals

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to designate the separate pieces of coal when incandescent. But in words of this type it nearly always takes an ingenious analysis to make out anything characteristic for either British or American English. It merely happens that convention, through the accident of circumstances, has generalized upon one form in England and upon another form in America. A similar development continually takes place in all aspects of language that are divisible into terms of social grouping. The speaker from a southern region in America is likely to have, in a great number of instances, a set of conventional habits different from those of a speaker in New England. Perhaps the one may say I reckon and the other may say I guess, or the one may speak of a veranda when the other speaks of a porch. These habits extend to the most subtle and minute details of speech, and a really exhaustive analysis would make them extremely numerous. Such an analysis would not, however, make them individually any more important, and in the end they would merely illustrate more fully the fact that in a very great number of words the conventional habits which a group establishes are significant only because they have been established by convention. In a list of two hundred words chosen by Mencken (1921), pp. 118-116, to illustrate the difference between British and American English, in most instances the words could be transferred from one list to the other without violence to what one might feel to be the proper character of either type of English. Thus does it make any essential difference whether one speaks of a brakeman (American) or a brakesman (British) on a train? of a coal-scuttle (said to be American), or a coal-hod (said to be British)? or a poorhouse (American) or a workhouse (British)? The list of such doublets in which usage is divided but indifferent might easily be swelled to numbers far in excess of two hundred. In the end their significance might be great, because an accumulation of details of this kind might become heavy enough to destroy that sense of security and harmony in the use of the idiom which one has in relation to all those whom one takes to be fellow citizens in the republic of English speech. Whether or not this point has been reached in the differentiation of British and American English,

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whether or not the area of variation has become so great as no longer to be possibly negligible, depends very much upon individual choice and view. Certainly differentiation has not proceeded so far as to result in unintelligibility. Whether it has gone so far as to destroy the sense of sympathy and intimacy between one who uses American English and one who uses British English depends largely upon the degree of sanctity one attaches to coal-scuttle as contrasted with coal-hod, or brakeman as contrasted with brakesman.'*

In some words the wavering of convention before it became set- tled is definitely traceable. The history of such words as gotten and got, of guess in the general sense of think, suppose, would carry one back to Anglo-Saxon times. For both of these words examples could be found in British use, at various times, so close in kind to the American use that it would take a hair-splitting analyst to distin- guish between them. What alone could make the American usage distinctive would be the more frequent, that is more conventionalized use of gotten as participle and guess in the sense of suppose, and also the fact that the critic has directed attention to gotten and guess, among other words, and thus has made them more or less conscious uses. In England bug and bloody have also taken on certain con- ventionalized meanings which define their use in polite society more strictly than the words are defined in American usage. The phrasal preposition back of, for which Thornton gives citations beginning with 1774, has apparently more general usage in America, in the sense of behind, than it has in England. It also has a variant form in back of, which completes the analogy to in front of, this latter being unquestioned usage both in England and America.

Other expressions which one interested in the gradual fixing of convention and habit in British and American speech may study in the examples cited by Thornton, supplementing these by the New English Dictionary, are allow, reckon and calculate, in local and familiar use as practical synonyms of guess, suppose; the phrase at that, as

1 With respect to coal-scuttle and coal-hod, it may be noted that the Fowlers’ Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Oxford, 1924), gives coal-scuttle as present British use, but does not record coal-hod.

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in “our food was of the most unwholesome kind, and scant at that;”’ bureau, meaning a chest of drawers; chores, meaning odd jobs about the house; clever, in a variety of senses which shade into each other so gradually that often it is difficult to tell where one type of usage begins and another ends; cracker for biscuit; homely, not infrequent in British use, but so much less general in England than in America that it may ultimately disappear from British standard speech and remain only as an Americanism; raise, as in the phrase, ‘‘I was raised, as they say in Virginia, among the mountains of the North,” Paulding, Letters, I, 102, though the usage is not limited to Virginia and is applied to animals and plants as well as human beings; rooster, for cock, with which should be compared roost-cock. Examples of roost-cock occur early, though there is no record of a word roost-hen, and the American rooster seems to be merely a variant development from roost-cock. The word calico may mean in England a white cotton cloth, but in America it means only cotton cloth stamped with a pattern.

Though all such variations of use as those just cited are of great importance to the dictionary maker, the listing of forms of American speech which derive their interest by reason of contrast with British speech is nevertheless but a small part of the task of the student of the American vocabulary. His more important concern is to describe the vocabulary directly in relation to American life, to attempt to give in some degree a record of the American mind as reflected in words. This is manifestly a large undertaking, and the categories presented in the following pages are to be regarded as suggestive, rather than exhaustive. They are set forth here as indications of some of the directions which special studies of Ameri- can vocabulary may take in anticipation of that day when we shall have a really satisfactory knowledge of this important subject.

The history of any language which covers as long a period of time as the three hundred years of the English language in America must be to some extent a history of words and expressions which

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have become obsolete. Some examples will be cited to show that there is material for the lexicographer and historian in older American texts. In many instances words have fallen completely out of use; in others the word survives with a loss of some of its earlier meaning, or survives now only in local or rustic use. Often the word has passed out of British as well as American use, which means probably that it was never well established in any form of English speech. Thus one finds the word bolts, as in the phrase ‘‘boards and bolts,” Braintree Records, p. 4 (1646), frequently used in the early town rec- ords in the sense of timber sawed into lengths ready to be split into clapboards, a meaning no longer current in English. The New English Dictionary cites only two occurrences of this word in Eng- land, one for 1688, the other for 1753. In Dedham Records, III, 47 (1638), appears the word stover, ‘‘those which haue not stover enough for the cattle they nowe possesse,” a word which occurs in Shakspere, and which may still be heard rustically in America. A word haver, meaning hay, also occurs occasionally in the early rec- ords, but is known now only in names, as in Haverstraw, on the Hudson, Haverhill, in Massachusetts. The Hasthampton Records, I, 112 (1657), speak of ‘‘pease wheat and selfe at the whom [home] lott,” but a word self or silf, in a sense appropriate to this passage, is not found in the dictionaries and probably is not now anywhere used. These records frequently use while in the sense of until, as in I, 10 (1650), ‘‘noe man shall set any gun but he shal loke to it while the starrs appeare.”” This use occurs also in the Braintree Records, p. 5 (1652), of a road “to rune through his ground while it come to Martine Sanders ground.” Sherwood, A Gozeteer, p. 82, cites this as a Georgia provincialism in 1837.

The word spong, a topographical term, has now completely passed out of American use, though it was current in the seventeenth century in the forms spong, spang, spung. It meant a strip or sec- tion of meadow, as in the Groton Records, p. 136, ‘‘two parcells or spongs,” “the northernmost spang of Buck medow,” “‘severall spongs or angles.” It occurs also in the Southold Records, I, 56 (1658), ‘Ca spang of meadowe,” and a late use of the word in the phrase

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‘‘spang of Creekthach,” II, 484 (1719). In these records, II, 185 (1682) we also have ‘‘spong or slip of meadow.”

The word hole, which still survives in various place names in New England, was formerly used in much the same sense as spong. Thus we read in the Plymouth Records, that ‘Mr. Howland desired a smale hole or pcell of meddow neare his land graunted him for- merly by the toune,” I, 46 (1662), and later that ‘‘hee hath pitched upon foure acrees of meddow in a hole mowed by Captaine Brad- ford,” I, 59 (1663). The records also describe a grant of ‘‘3 holes of meddow” to Francis Cook, I, 208 (1655). They mention place names like swan hold, I, 81 (1655), hobshole, I, 110 (1668), Billingtons holes, I, 155 (1677), giles holes, I, 219 (1673). The Groton Records, p. 136, mention skull holl, and also use the word in the sense of a section of meadow. The word is no longer in general use and no doubt the more common sense of hole, meaning a depression or hollow, as in a hole in the ground, a bog hole, etc., has tended to crowd out the use of the word merely in the sense of meadow or section of meadow. Perhaps transitional forms are to be seen in the Southold Records, where we read of a flagge hole, II, 58 (1685), a phrase which appears a little more clearly in flaggy hole, I, 455 (1686). In these records, I, 453 (1684), Joshua Horton sells “‘all the holes of water and meadows” belonging to him. A further application of the word hole is occasionally met with in earlier American usage, one which survives in some place names, like Wood’s Hole in Mas- sachusetts. In this sense the word means a narrow inlet or cove of the sea. In the Rocky Mountains, as in Jackson’s Hole, the word hole means an open park-like region.

The word pan as a geographical term is now in common use in the phrase hard pan, a hard sub-stratum of soil which holds water. In the sense of a shallow pool, the word is also on record in salt pan, oyster pan, and the New English Dictionary records other uses in South Africa. In the United States the word has never become widely current, though we read in the Southold Records, II, 276 (1645), of a fresh pann on Long Island. In this connection it may be noted that the word hummock is often used in these records to

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designate a much larger body of solid ground than would now be called by that name. Thus in the Southold Records, II, 246 (1694), we read of ‘“‘a small humuck of kreekthatch,’”’ being one acre or thereabouts. The word appears also as hommock and hammock, II, 143 (1690).

Concerning the word meadow itself, the editor of the Groton Records, p. 135, remarks that “‘the first settlers of the town did not attach the same signification to the word meadow which now belongs to it in New England, where it means low, swampy land, without regard to the mowing. They called by the name meadow all grass- land that was annually mown for hay, and especially that by the side of a river or brook, and this meaning of the word was the com- mon one in England, whence they brought their language.” Yet in the Plymouth Records one often finds reference to meadows or ‘“‘meadowish land,’ apparently with reference to swampiness. We still have surviving the term meadow in the sense of swamp in local names; as in the Great Meadow in Maine, the Hackensack Meadows in New Jersey, the Tuolumne Meadows in California, etc. The truth seems to be that the early settlers in New England had no specific word for what now would ordinarily be called swampy ground, per- haps because ground of this character in the section of England from which the colonists came had long been drained and cultivated when they migrated to America. They had the word marsh for extensive areas of wet land, applied especially to the salt marshes of the coast. But the word swamp first meant primarily thicket, land covered with undergrowth. It is still used in this sense by elderly persons in New England, though more generally the idea of wetness has become uppermost in the use of the word. The earlier sense is made certain by innumerable passages in seventeenth cen- tury records. In the Dedham Records, III, 33 (1637), when persons received lands for their houses, it was ordered that ‘‘their swamp lotts shall adioyne therunto.” Thomas Jordan was granted, p. 61 (1639), ‘‘One Acre of Swamp to be layd out next his owne ground,” and Edward Culver was granted, p. 96 (1642), ‘‘one smale parcell of upland and swampe nere his house lott.” There is frequent

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reference to the clearing of “‘undergrowne stuffe” from the swamps, but nothing is said about draining or drying them. Swamps with large trees growing in them were distinguished from swamps only with undergrowth. The point here was that timber lands were held in common and the timber carefully guarded. But swamps were lotted out and clearing of them was encouraged in order that they might be brought under cultivation. This was done at least in the town of Dedham, and when the General Court at Boston ruled that large tracts of swamp should lie common, like the forests, the citizens of Dedham protested, ‘‘beinge we haue bin at charg to lay out the greatest part into proprieties and diuers have bin at charg in cleareing the same,’’ Dedham Records, IV, 239 (1646). Jonathan Edwards, in his Personal Narrative, Life, by Dwight, p. 59, says that he, with some of his schoolmates, ‘‘joined together and built a booth in a swamp, in a very retired spot for a place of prayer.”’ As Edwards was a native of Connecticut, near Hartford, his use of swamp in this passage to mean a place with thick undergrowth would be in keeping with local use. From this earlier sense of swamp apparently comes the colloquial phrase to be swamped, that is, to be lost in a multitude of tasks or duties. The phrase to swamp out timber is a current lumbering usage in Maine.

The undergrowth of the swamps is spoken of as shruffe in the Dedham Records, IV, 98 (1664), which also mentions shruffey upland, IV, 8 (1659), and shruffey meadowe, IV, 22 (1660), 98 (1664). An unusual use of the word rubbish occurs in Southold Records, I, 410 (1674), in the phrase rubish land, meaning land cumbered with under- growth.

The Plymouth Records, I, 219 speak of ‘“‘a little doak or valley.” The word doak, doke, dolk occurs dialectally in England in the sense of a dint, a hollow, but has altogether passed out of American use.

Along the coast with its many indentations and peninsulas, the term neck came to be used almost in the sense of meadow. It is now known to many persons in the name of the Little Neck clam who have no notion that the historical meaning of the word is geographical, not anatomical. On Long Island, where the word neck still survives

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in many place names (also in Virginia in the Northern Neck), a controversy between Huntington and Oyster Bay arose over the question whether three necks or four necks of meadow. belonged’ to Huntington, Huntington Records, p. 58 (1664). Ina legal conveyance, p. 54 (1663), the phrase ‘““‘my halfe neck of meddow excepted” apparently illustrates also the use of the word in the sense merely of section or strip of meadow. From this use of neck in neck of meadow may have come another Americanism, neck of woods, meaning region, section, settlement in the woods. The earliest example of this which Thornton has found is for 1851.

As the name for an island, key, adapted from Spanish cayo, “shoal, reef,’ has not been limited to American use, but the word has been much more commonly employed here than elsewhere, especially in the West Indies and Florida. Key West is the name of a city, but also now may be the name of a kind of cigar. An older spelling kay sometimes occurred.

The word everglades as used in Florida to designate the great swamps of that region is of unexplained etymological origin. The earliest occurrence cited by Thornton and by the New English Dictionary is for 1827. The word may be a corruption of some Indian word for the locality.

An interesting geographical word, records of which have been found only on Long Island, but of which several examples in England are cited by Wright, English Dialect Dictionary, is the word bevel. The quotations will illustrate its meaning. In Hempstead Town Records, I, 25 (1657) we read of a ‘‘parcell of Land Lying in ye Beavell plowed ye Last yeare.”’ A place is named, I, 75 (1660), ‘‘ye hollowes lyeing in the beavell.” In 1665, Adam Mott, I, 167, sells a “peace of Plaine Lande of mine Lieing in the Home Bevell.”” The phrase “home bavell” occurs again, I, 202 (1665). At another place, I, 234 (1668), we read of ‘‘the parsonage hous bevle.’’ If one might hazard a guess at a slightly more precise meaning than the above quotations, and many like these, from the Hempstead Records justify, one might suppose that a bevel was a piece of level but sloping and well-drained ground. At I, 103 (1662), we read of ‘‘ye hollowes lying in ye Bevell,”

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and at I, 90 (1660), of ‘‘ye hollos lieing in ye bevell”; and see above the quotation from I, 75 (1660). Evidently this was a well-known local name, and it is equally evident that a bevel was not as low as a hollow.

The word hollow as a geographical term is commonly used in these records, as at I, 107 (1659), ‘‘hollowes and Meadow Land,” and apparently it meant ground lower than a meadow but not so low asa swamp. Though not now generally current in this sense, in the name of Sleepy Hollow the word has become forever established in American tradition. In Hempstead Records, I, 74 (1659), we read of ‘‘one hollow conteyning one and an halfe Accre.” In the next year, p. 75, “the wallnut hollow” and ‘“‘ye chery-tree hollow,” in the plural designated as hoolas, were granted to a citizen of the town as a free gift “for his assistance, for ye help of him and his famely.”

Another name for the tillable sections of New England which has not completely disappeared but is more familiar now in place names than as a common noun is the word interval, intervale. It occurs in the town records as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, but the term bottom-land, bottoms, has tended to displace it, and it is now archaic and poetic.

Peters, General History of Connecticut (1781), p. 110, preserves an Indian topographical word which is now known only as a proper name. Speaking of the Connecticut River, he says that ‘‘in its northern parts are three great bendings, called cohosses, about 100 miles asunder.”’ From this word was derived the name of the present Coos County, in northern New Hampshire, still pronounced as a dissyllable and formerly sometimes written with an h between the two vowels, as in Cohors, Green, Three Military Diaries, p. 108. A tribe of Indians was known by the name of Coos, the name being, as frequently, merely the ascription of a geographical term to the Indians who happened to live in that locality. The Indian word is said to mean crooked, ‘‘which appropriately describes the channel of the Connecticut in the north,” Sanborn, History of New Hamp- shire, 1875, p. 422. The same word probably appears in Cohoes, the name of a town on the Mohawk in Albany County, New York. Near

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Cohoes is Boght, an old but small village, named from the Dutch word for bend, “in reference to a bend in the Mohawk,” French, Gazeteer of New York (1860), p. 166. Apparently the Dutch word Boght is merely a translation of an older Indian name for the same locality.

The word run as a colloquial American word for a stream of water, as in Bull Run, etc., had an early origin in the phrase “‘a run of water,” meaning a stream, Huntington Records, p. 86 (1666), and often. It occurs in the Hempstead Records, I, 314 (1679), ‘‘the run Called Jonsons run,” also I, 167 (1665). The New English Dictionary gives two earlier citations, one for 1605 and another for 1652, and describes the word as American and northern British dialect. The earlier mean- ing of creek as a branch of the sea has been generally extended in America to mean a small fresh-water stream, though this use is not yet very common in New England, where such streams are usually called brooks. The popular pronunciation of the word is as though it were spelled crick. Early examples of the word in this sense are not found, but appear abundantly in the eighteenth century, Thorn- ton’s earliest being for 1674, and the next not until 1737. Webster, in the dictionary of 1828, says the word means ‘‘in some of the American States, a small river. This sense is not justified by ety- mology, but as streams often enter into creeks and small bays or form them, the name has been extended to small streams in general.”

The method of portioning out the common lands to the townsmen of the first New England communities has led to the general Ameri- can use of lot to designate a limited section of land. Ordinarily the word now means a portion of land facing a street and meant to be a site for a building. A fifty-foot lot means a lot with a street front fifty feet wide. Originally, however, lots were of various kinds, home lots, swamp lots, wood lots, pasture lots, etc. This usage still remains in New England where what would elsewhere be called fields are commonly called lots. From this usage was derived also the familiar popular saying, “to cut across lots,” that is, to go over the fields instead of around by the road, or metaphorically, to follow economy rather than formality in any procedure. The practice of drawing

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lots was continued down into the eighteenth century. The town of Lunenburg, Lunenburg Records, p. 24 (1721), paid for ‘‘Travil and Expene When The Lotts Were Drawn at Concord,” and the records contain, p. 58, a list of all the lots in the town with ‘‘The names of those That first Drew them.” References to the drawing of lots in the seventeenth century are numerous. At Dedham it was voted in 1669, Dedham Records, IV, 187, “that the proprietors at Paw- comptucke should draw Lotts in the first oportunitie, that it might be better knowen wher each mans propriety will lye.’ In the Nor- walk Records, p. 60 (1671), the agreement is recorded that ‘‘all those men that now draw lots with their neighbors, shall stand to their lots that now they draw.’ If one is surprised that the Puritan fathers employed so worldly a method as drawing lots to decide important matters, it should be remembered that they had scripture authority in Acts I, 24-26, for so doing.

In connection with the lots of the colonial settlements a use of the word frontier occurs which shows interestingly the change in meaning of that word. In American history the frontier has been a moving border land between civilization and the desert. Perhaps its meaning in the following passage from the Hempstead Records, I, 37 (1658), is essentially the same: “it is ordered by the Townesmen of Hempsteede for this present yeare, That all ye fencis of ye frontiere lotts that runn into ye field shall bee substantially and suffissiently fenced by ye 25th day of this present monthe of Aprill,”’ the penalty for neglect being five shillings, “‘unto ye use of ye towne.”

A geographical word folly occurs in the Hempstead Records, I, 309 (1677), ‘there was given to Thomas sothard a small pese of land lying betwene his folly and the ould ox-paster”; also I, 320 (1678), ‘“‘there was given to Nathaniell Pearsall . . . on the west side of his folly.” In the New English Dictionary one finds the dialectal word folly, meaning a clump of trees on the top of a hill. The only two citations given are one for 1880, the other for 1888. Are these pas- sages in the Hempstead Records early illustrations of the same word? The word is certainly topographical, but whether it means a hill or not, the context does not make evident. Near Wilmington, Delaware,

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is a place called Folly Woods. As a second guess one might derive the word from Dutch vaalje, a little valley, the valley of a brook, a word, however, not on record. The diminutive -je in Dutch words regularly becomes -y, and Dutch aa [a1] would be represented in English by o [9]. The only modification would thus be the change of initial » to f, which might well take place through popular etymology.

Another word in the Hempstead Records which seems to be of geographical meaning has defied explanation. It occurs in the phrase ‘‘at the south sid of John Carmans tilsom,”’ I, 291 (1672), a piece of land containing three acres being thus described. At a town meeting, I, 290 (1672), there was given ‘“‘to John Pine a home lott by his fathers tilsom an privilig to kepe half a dusen Cattell in the sumer.”” Another piece of land is likewise described as ‘‘lying on the south sid of John Carmans toylsum the land Containing two or three eakers,”’ I, 291 (1672). At an earlier town meeting, I, 98 (1661), the town gave to Thomas Jeacokex, that is Jaycocks, ‘‘three Acors of Land Liing att the South west Corner of John Carmons Tille sume, Provided itt be no hindernce to Any highway.’ The word occurs most frequently with reference to John Carman’s land, but the refer- ence to John Pine’s tilsom seems to make it general.

Another unexplained word, though not geographical, in the Hemp- stead Records, I, 342 (1675), occurs in the phrase ‘“‘to pine the eare- bred,” this phrase being used in connection with a cart and wheels made by John Jennings. The purchaser agreed to pay for the “Cart and Whels” when Jennings. should ‘‘pine the earebred.”’ Perhaps pine is for pin, and bred probably means board, and if eare is the old- fashioned word for ploughing, the whole phrase might mean ‘‘to pin the plough-board.” This meaning, however, does not fit well with the cart and wheels of which the earebred is apparently a part.

An unexplained bird name, chirie birds, occurs in the Dedham Records, III, 19 (1656), and so often. But perhaps this is merely cherry birds.

The verb improve and the noun improvement were in the early periods of colonial New England used in senses which are now no longer ordinarily attached to the words. As now used the words

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apply to buildings, fences, etc., constructed on land which by being placed there may be said to improve the land in the sense of making it more useful for man’s purposes. One may even hear of improve- ments being made on a river, meaning the building of dams or bridges where they are necessary. This use of the word is directly derivable from the general value of the word in the sense to make better. The special American use of the word, often cited by critics as an illustra- tion of Americanism, gave it the generalized meaning of to employ, use, occupy, without special reference to the notion of making better, though obviously this notion often lies very near. Thus we may improve the occasion to do something, or the busy bee improves each shining hour. As is pointed out by Logan Pearsall Smith, The English Language, p. 224, the generalized use is old, improve, improvement being terms of Law French “ originally employed to describe the proc- ess of enclosing waste land and bringing it into cultivation.” From this the transition to the meaning of making profitable use of any- thing is easy. Under improve, the New English Dictionary remarks that ‘‘the ancient sense, or something akin to it, was retained in the 17-18th century in the American colonies.” But the fact is that the ancient senses were not all exactly alike. Thus in the Plymouth Records, I, 43 (1660), special provision is made for the disposition of trees which have been cut down and had the bark removed, if the person who cuts down the trees “shall . . . not Improve the bodyes of such trees soe peeled.”’ But other uses are still more general. It was decreed, I, 54 (1663), that if any one cut wood at certain pro- hibited places, he should ‘‘forfeit all such wood to the townes use; to be Improved for the use of the minnester’’; also that no one ‘‘under pretence of hiering of servants shall Improve and Imploy any man or boy that hath no Right to the Commons of the Towne,” I, 72 (1664). The town agreed, I, 117 (1670), that the salary of ‘‘all such as are improved in any publicke place” should be ‘‘accoumpted as Ratable stocke.” The earliest example of this American use of improve in Thornton and the New English Dictionary is from 1677, and no British occurrences are cited. It is almost certain, however, that the usage was brought to New England from England. It is found

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in the earliest of the town records, too early to have developed upon American soil.

Many other terms of varied meaning which arose in the process of occupying the land and which have in part or wholly passed out of use as the particular stage of civilization which brought them into being has been left behind, occur as one reads early American records. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word yeoman still survived as a designation for what has later come to be generally called a farmer. In the town records a tiller of the soil is occasionally designated as yeoman, just as a carpenter or mason would be given his distinctive trade name. The term was a favorite one with Noah Webster, who was fond of describing the landholders of Massachusetts and Connecticut as the yeomanry of New Eng- land. The word is now archaic and poetic in American use, except as it survives in the official terminology of the United States navy.

The words settle, settler, settlement, are self-explanatory and have had an obvious history. The associations of the word planter are now mainly with the plantations of the South, and the word has been immortalized, for St. Louis at least, by the name of the Planters Hotel. In earlier periods, however, both plantation and planter were used in the North also as equivalents of settlement, settler, or farmer. Governor Hutchinson, in the preface to his history of Massachusetts Bay, speaks of the “importation of planters”? from England to that region. The patent of the Plymouth Company, 1620, was “for planting and governing that country called New England.” In the Huntington Records, p. 403 (1684), p. 407 (1684), and often, planter means merely farmer or husbandman. The same use occurs in the Hempstead Records, as at I, 34 (1660), and often elsewhere. The older use survives in the last stanza of Woodworth’s Old Oaken Bucket, ‘‘As fancy reverts to my father’s plantation.”

The word homestead has an interesting seventeenth-century variant in homestall, in Watertown Records, Land Grants, etc., p. 20, and often in these records. A variant of settle, settler which was formerly in use was seat, seater, for which a few citations are given by Thornton under seat and unseated. In the Journal of the House of

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Burgesses, 1659-1693, p. 466, in Virginia, one finds the record of ‘a, byll declareing wt Seating is,” and on p. 468, another ‘“‘giuing allowance to those yt by mistake Seat upon other mens lands.”

The word tarry has now almost completely passed out of every- day use, though the word is quite familiarly known as a literary or somewhat poetic word. It was formerly, however, one of the com- mon words of the New Englander’s vocabulary, and is one of the words often met with in earlier realistic attempts to record rustic New England speech. Irving smiles at it in his Knickerbocker His- tory, Book III, Chap. VIII, remarking that ‘‘a Yankee farmer is in a constant state of migration, tarrying occasionally here and there.”

Other archaisms which persist in familiar speech are carry, in the sense of conduct, escort, as in the song, Carry me back to old Virginia, or carry a horse to water, Sherwood, A Gazeteer (1837), or in the phrase of rustic gallantry, May I carry you home? and the word raise, in the sense of to rear or foster a person. Both of these words are now more general in the South than elsewhere, but they seem merely to be local survivals there of formerly more general uses. In Easthampton Records, II, 452 (1699), a sum of money is paid “to W™ Rose for Carring Sarah whitehar [Whittier] away three dayes,”’ and again, II, 458, advice is taken ‘‘about Carrying her to Docter Beateman.” As for raise examples are found in the New English Dictionary as early as 1601, though the dictionary describes the usage as now chiefly found in the United States. Thornton’s examples are abun- dant, though they do not distinguish between raise as applied to human beings and as applied to animals and plants. Webster, in the dictionary of 1828, says that ‘‘the English now use grow in regard to crops, as, to grow wheat. This verb intransitive has never been used in New England in a transitive sense, until recently some persons have adopted it from the English books. We always use razse [of crops], but in New England it is never applied to the breed- ing of the human race, as it is in the southern states.’’ The polite equivalent for raise as applied to children is to rear.

The word to girdle as applied to trees, one of the methods by which trees were killed to aid in the more rapid clearing of the land,

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is mentioned by Webster in the dictionary of 1828 as an American use. The word has outlived pioneer days and is still in familiar use. When the trees were cut down and rolled together to be burnt, the neighbors came to assist in what was called a log-rolling, a social function that has passed out of existence, leaving the word, how- ever, with a political metaphorical meaning.

The American sidewalk, in England footway or pavement, is an old word for which the earliest citation in the New English Dictionary is for 1739. This was then an English use of the word, but now the word has fallen out of favor in England, but