Whereas, These strangers within our gates who seek economic betterment, political freedom, larger opportunities for their children and citizenship for themselves, come to think of our institutions as American and our language as the American language.
In addition, the word psychological was inserted before influence in the fourth whereas, apparently in deference to the Freudian thought of the time, and the examples were stricken out of the fifth. The sixth disappeared without leaving a trace. This statute is still on the books of Illinois as Chapter 127, Section 178 of the Acts of 1923. But all the similar bills introduced in other Legislatures seem to have failed of passage. The one brought up in Minnesota (H.F. 993, March 8, 1923) was sponsored by two members of the House of Representatives, N. T. Moen and J. N. Jacobson, both of them apparently of Scandinavian origin. It was supported by two enthusiasts, John M. Leonard, president of “the American Foundation” of St. Paul, and A. J. Roberts, editor of the American National Language Magazine, published in the same city. But though the mighty Magnus Johnson also gave it some help, and it had a favorable report from the Committee on Education, it got no further. In 1908 the American-Language Legion was launched in New York “to secure popular use and statutory recognition of the name, the American language, as the exclusive designation of the official language of the United States and its dependencies.” It issued a sticker bearing the word American in six sizes of type, and many times repeated. The idea was that “whenever friends of this movement encounter, in any of their books, any name sought to be relegated by the American-Language Legion, American in a corresponding size of type may be sheared from this sheet and pasted over, making it read: the American language.” But this ingenious scheme seems to have come to nothing also.
Meanwhile, the plain people of England and the United States, whenever they come into contact, find it difficult to effect a fluent exchange of ideas. This was made distressingly apparent during the World War. When the American troops began to pour into France in 1917, fraternizing with the British was impeded, not so much because of hereditary animosities as because of the wide divergence in vocabulary and pronunciation between the doughboy and Tommy Atkins — a divergence interpreted by each as low mental visibility in the other. There was very little movement of slang from one camp to the other, and that little ran mainly from the American side to the British. The Y.M.C.A., always pathetically eager for the popularity that it could never gain, made a characteristic effort to turn the feeling of strangeness among the Americans to account. In the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition of July 7, 1917, I find a large advertisement inviting them to make use of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouse in the Avenue Montaigne, “where American is spoken.” At about the same time an enterprising London tobacconist, Peters by name, affixed a sign bearing the legend “American spoken here” to the front of his shop, and soon he was imitated by hundreds of other London, Liverpool and Paris shopkeepers. Such signs are still familiar all over Europe, and they have begun to appear in Asia.105
8. FOREIGN OBSERVERS
The continental awareness of the growing differences between English and American is demonstrated by the fact that some of the popular German Sprachführer now appear in separate editions, Amerikanisch and Englisch. This is true, for example, of the Metoula-Sprachführer and of the Polyglott Kuntze books.106 The American edition of the latter starts off with the doctrine that “Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch können,” but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its examples would be unintelligible to many Englishmen — e.g., free-lunch, real-estate agent, buckwheat, corn (for maize), conductor and popcorn — and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle — e.g., saloon, wash-stand, water-pitcher and apple-pie.107 In the “Neokosmos Sprachfuhrer durch England- Amerika”108 there are many notes calling attention to differences between American and English usage, e.g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage, conductor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the boots in an English hotel and of the clerk in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section to a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as whiskey-sours, Martini-cocktails, silver-fizzes, John-Collinses, and ice-cream sodas.109 There are many special guides to the American language in German — for example, “The Little Yankee,” by Alfred D. Schoch and R. Kron (Freiburg, 1912), “Uncle Sam and His English,” by W. K. Pfeiler and Elisabeth Wittmann (Berlin, 1932); and “Spoken American,” by S. A. Nock and H. Mutschmann (Leipzig, 1930). It is also dealt with at length in various more general guides — for example, “Hauptfragen der Amerikakunde,” by Walther Fischer (Bielefeld, 1928); “The American Wonderland,” by S. A. Nock and G. Kamitsch (Leipzig, 1930); and “America of Today,” by Frau Voight-Goldsmith and D. Borchard (Berlin, 1929). Nor is it overlooked by pedagogues. I have before me a circular of the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin, offering courses in both Amerikanisch and Englisch — two for Anfanger, one for Vorgebildete, and one for Fortgeschrittene — each of eight weeks, and at a fee of ten marks. The American language also gets attention in a number of French, Italian and Scandinavian guide-books for immigrants and travelers; in one of them110 I find definitions of butterine, cat-boat, clawhammer, co-ed, craps, dago, dumb-waiter, faker, freeze-out, gusher, hard-cider, hen-party, jitney, mortician, panhandle, patrolman, sample-room, shyster, sleuth, wet (noun), dry (noun), headcheese and overhead-expenses. The standard guide-books for tourists always call attention to the differences between the English and American vocabularies. Baedeker’s “United States” has a glossary for Englishmen likely to be daunted by such terms as el, European-plan and sundae, and in Muirhead’s “London and Its Environs” there is a corresponding one for Americans, warning them that bug means only bed-bug in England, that a clerk there is never a shopman, and that homely means domestic, unpretending, homelike, never plain-looking, and giving them the meanings of trunk-call, hoarding, goods-train, spanner and minerals.
From the earliest days the peculiarities of American have attracted the attention of Continental philologians, and especially of the Germans. The first edition of Bartlett’s Glossary (1848) brought forth a long review in the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (Braunschweig) by Dr. Felix Flügel, and in 1866 Dr. Friedrich Köhler published a “Wörterbuch der Americanismen,” based on it. In subsequent volumes of the Archiv and in the other German philological journals there have been frequent discussions of the subject by Ludwig Herrig, Karl Knortz, Johannes Hoops, Hermann U. Meysenberg, Ed. O. Paget, Paul Heyne, Georg Kartzke, Walther Fischer, Fritz Karpf, Martin Pawlik and H. Lüdeke. It has also been discussed at length in the German lay press, especially by C. A. Bratter, Friedrich Schonemann and Arnold Schöer. It is common in German for translations of American books to bear the words aus dem Amerikanischen on their title-pages, and the term is frequently in use otherwise.111 Like his German colleagues, Dr. Otto Jespersen of Copenhagen, perhaps the first living authority on modern English, is greatly interested in Americanisms, and at one time contemplated doing a book on them. The third edition of the present work was translated into German with a commentary by Dr. Heinrich Spies of Berlin in 1927,112 and the same scholar has lectured on the subject at Berlin, Greifswald and elsewhere. Various Dutch and Belgian philologians, among them Barentz, Keijzer, Aronstein, Zandvoort, Peeters, and van der Voort, have published studies of American, and so have various Frenchmen and Italians; and at the University of Paris, in 1921, Ray P. Bowen was appointed lecteur d’américain. At Tartu-Dorpat in Estonia Dr. Heinrich Mutschmann, professor of English in the university there, has printed an excellent Glossary of Americanisms (1931) — in fact, a much better one than any that has come out in America since Thornton’s. Two other foreign scholars who show more interest in American English than is usually displayed at home are Professor Wincenty Lutoslawski, of the University of Wilna in Poland, and Professor Sanki Ichikawa, of the Imperial University at Tokyo. The early editions of the present work br
ought me into pleasant contact with these gentlemen, and I have received valuable suggestions from both. Says Dr. Ichikawa:
It is a great question with us teachers of English in Japan whether we should teach American English or British English. We have more opportunities for coming into contact with Americans than for meeting Englishmen, but on the other hand books on phonetics are mostly done by English scholars. As to the vocabulary, we are teaching English and American indiscriminately — many of us, perhaps, without knowing which is which.
The literature on Americanisms in Japanese is already of some weight. It includes an excellent formal treatise, “English and American of Today,” by G. Tomita (Tokyo, 1930), and a number of smaller studies. Such monographs as “Japanized English” by S. Aarkawa (Tokyo, 1930) and “English Influence on Japanese,” by Dr. Ichikawa (Tokyo, 1928) give a great deal of attention to American forms. The Russians are also conscious of the difference between the two languages, and there is a party at Moscow which holds that American should be taught in the schools, not English. As yet this party does not seem to have prevailed, but so long ago as March, 1930, it was bold enough to propose the following resolutions at a conference of teachers of language at Moscow:
1. Oxford English is an aristocratic tongue purposely fostered by the highest British governing and land-holding classes in order to maintain their icy and lofty exclusiveness.
2. It is not used by the majority of the residents in Great Britain and certainly not by its intelligent working class elements.
3. It is not used by the majority of English-speaking peoples the world over.
4. The aristocracy is introducing all sorts of affectations, such as the chopping short of syllables and the swallowing of the terminations of words, in order to make it all the more difficult for anyone else to speak the language in their manner.
5. The American language is more democratic, for the employing classes speak no differently from their employes. It is more standard, due originally to the settlement of the West by Easterners, and lately due to the radio and talkies.
6. The American language is more alive and picturesque, tending more to simplification both as to spelling and grammar.
7. Linguist “purity” is mere fiction for language does not grow out of the air, but is determined by particular social conditions and in a measure is a reflex of these conditions. Language purity at best reflects a pedantic attitude and at worst an attitude either aristocratic or chauvinistic.
8. Since American engineers are preferred by the Soviet authorities to the English, since the latest industrial technique finds its highest development in the United States, good American English serves Soviet purposes best.113
The apparent feeling of so many American philologians that giving serious study to the common speech of their country would be beneath their dignity is not shared by their European colleagues. In England the local dialects have been investigated for many years, and there is a formidable literature on slang, stretching back to the Sixteenth Century and including a glossary in seven large volumes. In France, as in Germany, Italy and Japan, a linguistic atlas has been published,114 and the Société des Parlers de France makes diligent inquiries into changing forms; moreover, the Academie itself is endlessly concerned with the subject. There is, besides, a constant outpouring of books by private investigators, of which “Le Langage populaire,” by Henry Banche, is a good example. In Germany, amid many other such works, there are admirable grammars of all the dialects. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of the vulgate, and the government has granted a subvention of 7500 kronor a year to an organization of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically. In Norway there is a widespread movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national language based upon the speech of the peasants.115 In Spain the Real Academia Espanola de la Lengua is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografía and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals, taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a large literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it excellent studies of the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.116
1 British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 313.
2 A Voyage to Georgia, Begun in the Year 1735; London, 1744, p. 24. Moore was something of an adventurer. He went to West Africa for the Royal Africa Company in 1730, and got into obscure difficulties on the river Gambia. But when he came to Georgia in 1735 it was in the prosaic character of storekeeper to the colony. He arrived late in the year and remained until July, 1736. In 1738 he was back, staying this time until 1743. His subsequent career is unknown.
3 In the World, No. 102, Dec. 12, 1754. Quoted by Read.
4 The Literary Magazine, Sept.–Oct., 1756. Evans’s book was published in Philadelphia in 1755 by Benjamin Franklin and D. Hall. It was accompanied by the author’s General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America.
5 Secret Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. II, p. 95. In the earlier editions of the present book I said that these instructions were issued to Franklin on his appointment as Minister to France. Where I picked up the error I don’t recall. It was corrected by the late Fred Newton Scott in the Saturday Review of Literature, Oct. 11, 1924. The instructions to Franklin, dated Oct. 12, 1778, contained no mention of language.
6 Witherspoon’s papers appeared under the heading of The Druid. This list and the foregoing quotation are from No. V, printed on May 9, 1781. The subject was continued in No. VI on May 16, and in No. VII (in two parts) on May 23 and 30. All the papers are reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931. They are also to be found in Witherspoon’s Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, Vol. IV; New York, 1800–01.
7 The Oxford Dictionary’s first example is dated 1440. After 1652 all the examples cited are American, until 1843, when the usage reappears in England.
8 The letter is reprinted in full in The Beginnings of American English, before cited, pp. 41–43.
9 The full text is in The Beginnings of American English, just cited.
10 For this letter I am indebted to George Philip Krapp: The English Language in America, Vol. I, p. 7.
11 His reference, of course, was to Johnson’s Dictionary, first published in 1755.
12 His Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, a sort of trial balloon, was published in 1806. There is a brief but good account of his dictionary-making in A Survey of English Dictionaries, by M. M. Mathews; London, 1933, pp. 37–45.
13 Published in 1783. There was no national copyright until 1790.
14 Later on in the same essay Webster sought to support this doctrine by undertaking an examination of Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Home, Kaims and Blair. Of Johnson he said: “His style is a mixture of Latin and English; an intolerable composition of Latinity, affected smoothness, scholastic accuracy, and roundness of periods.” And of Gibbon: “It is difficult to comprehend his meaning and the chain of his ‘ideas, as fast as we naturally read.… The mind of the reader is constantly dazzled by a glare of ornament, or charmed from the subject by the music of the language.”
15 The successive parts of the quotation are from pp. 20, 22, 22–3, and 36.
16 The members of the Philological Society of New York, organized in 1788, were for him, but they were young men of little influence, and their society lasted only a year or so. Webster became a member on March 17, 1788, but on Dec. 20 he left New York. The president was Josiah O. Hoffman and among the members were William Dunlap, the painter and dramatist, and Samuel L. Mitchell. On Aug. 27 Ebenezer Hazard, then Postmaster-General of the Confederation, wrote to a friend in Boston that Webster wa
s “the monarch” of the society. In April, 1788 Webster printed in his American Magazine a notice saying that its purpose was that of “ascertaining and improving the American tongue.” On July 4, 1788 the society passed a resolution approving the first part of his Grammatical Institute. See The Philological Society of New York, by Allen Walker Read, American Speech, April, 1934.
17 Contributed to the American Museum for 1788. Under the heading of Philology he said: “Instruction in this branch of literature will become the more necessary in America as our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage and the pulpit of Great Britain, from whence [sic] we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of style in the United States. The present is the age of simplicity of writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thick-set metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country.”
18 In a letter from Monticello, August 16, to John Waldo, author of Rudiments of English Grammar. On August 12, 1801 Jefferson wrote to James Madison: “I view Webster as a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passion,” but this was with reference to a political matter. In his letter to Waldo, Jefferson adopted Webster’s ideas categorically, and professed to believe that “an American dialect will be formed.”
19 See Towards a Historical Aspect of American Speech Consciousness, by Leon Howard, American Speech, April, 1930.
20 Published in two volumes; Philadelphia and London, 1912. Thornton, who died in 1925, left a large amount of additional material, and its publication was begun in Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. III, 1931.
21 “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell and torture.” All this was a part of a review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States, Edinburgh Review, Jan.–May, 1820.
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