Perhaps the first verb to be borrowed from English by the Syrian immigrants to the United States was sannas (to make a cent). It appears in the sentence, “L’yom ma sannasna” (We haven’t made a cent today). Another early loan-verb was shannaj (to make change, whether of money or of situation). Examples “Shannijli ha-r-rval” (Change this dollar for me) and “Wayn bi-n-shannij?” (Where do we change?). Sharraj (to charge) is also of some antiquity. Here are some other verbs:
bardan (to board). The form here is the past tense singular, masculine gender.
darrav (to drive).
narvas (to become nervous or agitated). Narvasu might well represent “He got his goat.”
layyat (to be late). Example: “L’train mlayyit” (The train is late).
bather (to bother). Examples: “La tbathirni” (Don’t bother me), and “Haji tbathru” (Stop bothering him).
bartak (to park).
sammak (to smoke).
anshar (to take out insurance).
bunnab (to pump). There is no p in Arabic.
karrak (to crank). A Syrian was heard to say “Karrakna l-car w’kakkna” (We cranked the car and it kicked us).
faxan (to fix). Example: “Hada mush mfaxan” (This is not fixed).
fabrak (to manufacture). This verb is also heard in Syria.
haldab (to hold up). A recent borrowing.
sayyan (to sign, as a check).
mass (to miss, as a train).
farraz (to freeze).
t’amrak (to become an American). This has an analogue in Standard Arabic, to wit, tfarnaj (to become an Ifranji, or Frank, i.e., a European).
Arabic has a large capacity for coining verbs which convey the meaning of whole sentences in English. When a Syrian related a hard-luck story to a Syrian friend a third Syrian present said Fartinlu, meaning “Tell him it is unfortunate.” Kaddam is a verb signifying to say God damn. Inflectional variants are kaddimlu (Tell him God damn) and kaddamlu (He told him God damn). Sometimes a recent immigrant mistakes English suffixes, e.g., -ing, for Arabic case endings, with curious results. An old Syrian woman once said: “Everytin you buy-it-in, in the house-in-it you make-it-in” (“Everything you buy, you can make in the house).
Loan-nouns are given Arabic pronominal suffixes. Thus your business is bizinsak and my business is bizinsi. Plurals are commonly formed by adding the Arabic -at, as in house-at (houses), star-at (stores), baz-at (bosses), shoes-at (shoes) and lattat (lots). It will be noted that shoes-at is a double plural. The doubling of the first t in lattat indicates what is known to Arabic grammarians as tashdid, or intensification: the word is pronounced lat-tat.122
American proper names offer some difficulty to the Syrian who has not mastered English. He commonly converts them into nearly related Arabic words, and sometimes the meaning of the latter is amusingly incongruous. Dr. Hitti tells, for example, of an old Syrian in New York who wrote down his own telephone exchange, Adirondack, as al-qadi ’indak (the judge is with you).
7. GREEK
a. Modern Greek
Classical Greek never begat children which devoured it, as classical Latin begat the Romance languages; nevertheless, it suffered serious injuries as the Hellenic world disintegrated. On the Greek mainland it now has two forms. The first, cultivated by the educated class, is called the katharevousa, and is a somewhat artificial imitation of the classical language; the second, called the demoteke and spoken by the masses of the people, is a Greek with changed vowels, new stresses, a vocabulary heavy with loan-words (from Latin, Romance, Slavic, Turkish and Arabic sources), and a greatly decayed grammar. In the other regions inhabited by Greeks (for example, the Ægean islands and the Asia Minor littoral) the popular language has proceeded in the same general direction but by different paths, so that some of its dialects are mutually unintelligible. There is a well-known comedy by D. K. Byrantios, “Babylonia” by title, which depicts a group of Greeks from all over the Near East trying in vain to make themselves comprehensible to one another and to “an Athenian scholar who speaks in the language of Plato and Xeno-phon.” I quote from an article by Mr. Sotirios S. Lontos, editor of Atlantis, the Greek daily published in New York.123 “It has often occurred to me,” adds Mr. Lontos, “that had this play been written today, the author would surely have included among his dramatis personæ a Greek from America, who, speaking the Greek lingo he had acquired during his stay in the United States, would have the experience of his lifetime trying to make himself intelligible to his fellow countrymen in Greece.”
This American-Greek is avoided as much as possible by the contributors to Atlantis, but it is used freely by the paper’s advertisers and by its readers. Like all the other immigrant languages, it has taken in a great many American words, and more are added constantly. Most of them are given Greek suffixes and respond to such inflections as survive in the popular Greek of the homeland. Others suffer changes in their vowels or consonants, or both. Here are some examples from Mr. Lontos’s list:
American American-Greek
automobile atmobilly
bank panga
bar barra
barber barberis
basket basketta
beef-stew beefestoo
bill-of-fare billoferry
boss bossis
box boxy
bum bummis
car carro
chef seffis
city-hall sityholly
coalmine colmina
corporation coporessio
cream creamy
depot typos
elevator eleveta
fan (sporting) fenna
farm farma
floor florry
ginger-ale gingerella
greenhorn grihonnis
hot-cakes hati-kaekia
hotel otelly
license lasintza
lunch launtzi
market marketta
meat mete
note nota
parade parata124
parking parkin
peanut pinotsi
picnic picniki
pies (pl.) paia
policeman policemanos
postoffice postoffy, or postoffeon
sheriff sherrifis
shine (noun) saina
showcase sokessa
sidewalk sadeveki
sport sportis
stand standtza
station (police) stessio
steak stecky
steward stooars
taxes texas
ticket ticketto
train traino
young man youngmanos
young woman youngwomana125
Many other words are used without any change, e.g., flat and street. The Greeks have difficulty with our ch and sh sounds, and so have to modify words containing them. The sound of d becomes th or t in Modern Greek. Thus depot is converted into typos. Inasmuch as typos is a perfectly good Greek word, signifying printing-office, the latter change offers some inconvenience. In the same way newcomers from Greece are puzzled by mappa, which means both map and mop in American-Greek, but signifies cabbage at home. Saina, which is American-Greek for shine, also serves for sign. The American-Greeks, like all the other immigrants, quickly annex the common American expletives and terms of opprobrium. God damn it, at their hands, becomes godamiti, and son-of-a-bitch becomes sonababitsi. Even within the bounds of the Greek vocabulary they fall into new usages in this country. Thus, their common word for fire is photia, whereas per is more often used at home, and they prefer xenodocheon to estiatorion for restaurant. The numbered streets in America give them some difficulty. They do not translate Twenty-fifth street directly, but change the ordinal number to the cardinal, and make street plural, thus coming to Twenty-five streets. In Greek, proper names take the article, which varies with the gender. Thus the name of every American city, in American-Greek, has its gender. San Francisco and St. Louis are masculine, New York is feminine, and Chicago is neuter. “Boston and Milwaukee,” says Mr. Lontos, “take
the feminine article when used in good Greek, but in ordinary American-Greek are neuters.” The Greeks suffer linguistic confusion immediately they attempt English, for in Modern Greek nay (spelled nai) means yes, P.M. indicates the hours before noon, and the letter N stands for South. To make things even worse, the Greek papoose means grandfather and mammie means grandmother.
The Census of 1930 revealed 174,526 persons of Greek birth in the United States, 101,668 persons born here of Greek parents, and 27,557 born here of parentage partly Greek, or 303,751 in all. Of these, 189,066 reported that Greek was their mother-tongue. The Greek-Americans are served by fifteen periodicals in Greek, of which four are daily newspapers.
8. ASIATIC
a. Chinese
As we have seen in Chapter XII, Section 1, the influence of English on Chinese, even in China, is already very considerable. Not only does Chinese absorb a great many English and American loan-words; it also tends toward grammatical and syntactical accord with English. In the United States these tendencies are naturally very noticeable, not only among the rank and file of Chinese-speaking immigrants, but also among the Chinese students who frequent American universities. Says Dr. Arthur W. Hummel, chief of the Division of Orien-talia in the Library of Congress:
Dr. Hu Shih, leader of the current literary revolution in China, has told me, what I had myself previously observed, that his Chinese word-order is very much like that of English. He says that whereas, before he came to America to study, he could not get good English by keeping to the Chinese word-order, he now finds that he can translate his Chinese writings almost word for word. This is, perhaps, more true of Hu Shih’s writings than of others; nevertheless, it represents a rather wide-spread tendency, due to the fact that all Chinese youths who go to school at all must spend some time on English.126
There are, of course, difficulties in the way of English loan-words, for on the one hand some of their sounds are absent from Chinese, and on the other hand the lack of an alphabet in Chinese makes it necessary, in writing, to find whole syllables approximating their sounds, and sometimes that leads to absurdity, or, indeed, is downright impossible. Consider, for example, the Chinese handling of the word America, which is first encountered in writings of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). It is represented by hooking together the ideograph for ya, a common prefix to proper names, with those for mei (beautiful, admirable), li (clever, or interest on money), chia (a suffix), and chou (region, country). The result is Ya-mei-li-chia-chou, meaning the beautiful and clever (or interest-collecting) land. In everyday use this is abbreviated to Mei-kuo (beautiful land). American is similarly reduced to Mei-kuo-jên (beautiful-country man). Sometimes the effect is amusing, as when New York becomes Niu (to grasp, to seize) -yo (important, compendious), i.e., the grasping, important city, or Roosevelt becomes Lo (a net) -s-fu (a blessing), or -fou (to revive). Many common English words have been taken into Chinese by the same process. The Southern Chinese (who are most numerous in the United States) find our r difficult, so they sometimes change it to l or h, but the Northern Chinese under Manchu influence, make a guttural of it. In both cases, loans often have to be changed radically in order to represent them in Chinese ideographs, which are extremely numerous (about 10,000 are in use) but still fall short of being innumerable. The following examples are listed by Professor Tsung-tse Yeh of Tsing Hua University, Peiping:127 k’a fei (coffee), sha-fa (sofa), sai-yin-ssŭ (science), fan-shih-ling (vaseline), fan-o-ling (violin), hu-lieh-la (cholera), wei-shih-chi (whiskey), nik-ko-lo (negro), mo-t’o (motor), t’o-la-ssŭ (trust), p’u-k’ê (poker), shui-mên-ting (cement), wa-ssŭ, (gas), tê-lü-fêng (telephone), hsüeh-ch’ieh (cigar), p’u-ou (boy), san-wei-chih (sandwich), su-ta (soda), ting (tin), ch’a-ssŭ-ta-ssŭ (justice), pi-k’o-ni-k’o (picnic). In many cases, of course, translation takes the place of this onerous attempt at transliteration. Thus, fork becomes ch’a-tzŭ, from ch’a, a prong, with tzŭ, a common suffix, added, and telephone becomes tien-hua, literally, electricity talk. Other examples are:
cigarette: chih-yen (paper smoke).
safety-razor: t’ui-tzu (gentleman instrument).
tooth-paste: ya-kao (tooth-grease).
elevator: tien-t’i (electricity, or lightning, ladder).
life-insurance: jên-shou-pao-hsien (man old-age guarantee to feel at ease).
locomotive: huo-ch’e-t’ou (fire wagon).
motor-car: ch’i-ch’e (vapor wagon).
moving-picture theatre: tien-ying-yüan (electricity shadow hall).
soda-water: ch’i shui (vapor water).128
Sometimes there is a combination of translation and transliteration, e.g., yah-mee (yard), in which the second syllable means rear in Chinese, and ping-chi-ling (ice-cream), in which the first syllable means ice. Many loans, of course, are taken in unchanged or almost so, e.g., hello, kid, guy, nuts and the universal O.K. The Americanized Chinese, even if he be a Cantonese, often masters the r, and is thus able to use such terms as all right, girl, good-morning and dutch-treat. In writing, they are represented, not by syllables of the same general sound, but by corresponding Chinese words. Thus, all right is represented by shih (yes), autumn by chin (autumn), and graft by weila (bribery). The third person pronoun ta is the same in Chinese in all genders, but under the influence of Western education the Chinese have begun to use slightly different ideographs to represent he, she and it, though all of them continue to be pronounced ta. There is a considerable difference of opinion as to the proper representation, in Chinese, of God. About a century ago the Catholic missionaries in China were ordered by a papal decree to use T’ien-Chu (Lord of Heaven), but most of the Protestant brethren use Shang-Ti (Emperor Above), with a minority preferring Shén (Spirit). The Chinese journalists of the United States incline toward purism in their writing, but their colleagues in China, following Liang Chi-chao (1869–1928), founder of Peiping’s first daily newspaper, are extremely hospitable to neologisms. At the time of the Revolution of 1911 such reformers as Liang Chi-chao, K’ang Yu-wei, and Chang Shih-chao brought in a great many novel political terms from English, and they promise to stick, e.g., teh-moh-ka-la-si (democracy), p’u-lo-lieh-t’a-li-ya (proletariat) and pao-êrh-hsi-wei-k’ê (bolshevik). The English honorifics, Mr., Mrs. and Miss, are in common use both in China and among Chinese in this country, albeit they usually take the forms of Mi-tse-te, Mi-hsi-tse and Mi-tse. Their use is opposed by a faction of Chinese, led by Dr. Liu Fu, president of the Women’s College of Peiping, who ordained in 1931 that his charges should be called Kuniang, not Miss.129 The transliteration of Chinese words into English presents difficulties. The system ordinarily used is that devised by Sir Thomas Wade half a century ago, but of late it has a rival in a scheme for the complete romanization of Chinese writing proposed by Dr. Chao Yüan-jên.130
The Census of 1930 disclosed 74,954 Chinese in the United States, of whom 30,868 had been born here. There are 27,179 in Hawaii. There were more in the Continental United States at earlier periods, but of late, because of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1882 and its successors, the flow of immigrants has been toward South America and the Malay Archipelago, not toward the United States. There are now twenty Chinese periodicals in the country, of which eight are daily newspapers.
b. Japanese
Standard Japanese, even more than Chinese, has been hospitable to English loan-words, and in Chapter XII, Section 1, I have described some of their effects upon the language. The Japanese spoken in this country, of course, is full of them. On account of the differences between the Japanese phonetic system and that of English many have to be changed materially. Every Japanese word ends either in a vowel or in n. Thus, Japanization produces such forms as the following: aisukurimu (ice-cream), bata (butter), bazarin (violin), bifuteki or bisuteki (beefsteak), biru (beer), bisuketto (biscuit), bi- yahoru (beer-hall), botan (button), chokoretto (chocolate), daia-mondo (diamond), dansu (dance), dainamaito (dynamite), ereki (electricity), gasu (gas), hankachi or hankechi (handkerchief), kat-suretsu (cutlet), k
akuteiru (cocktail), kohi (coffee), kosumechikku (cosmetics), kyabetsu (cabbage), naifu (knife), penki (paint), ranpu (lamp), renkoto (raincoat), resu (lace), renzu (lens), risurin (glycerin), seruroido (celluloid), shatsu (shirt), sosu (sauce), suponji (sponge), taouru (towel) and toranpu (tramp).131 There are many substitutions of one vowel for another. The ah of father is commonly substituted for the er of river, the ure of measure, the ir of girl and the or of labor. An i like that of police is added to many words, e.g., match, edge, and the oo (or u) of book is added to others, e.g., block, club, crab, map. An ee-sound is substituted for the short i in sit, it, miss, ship, and for the ai-sound in crime and guide. The g is commonly nasalized, so that Chicago becomes Chi-cango, and cigar is cingah. Before i, s changes to sh and z to dzh, and before i and u, t and d become ch (tsh) and j (dzh). In words beginning with hi there is often a change to shi. There is a considerable confusion between r and l, and most Japanese find it hard to distinguish between such pairs as grow-glow, broom-bloom, royal-loyal. After f an h is often inserted, as in fhence (fence), and o frequently appears in compounds, e.g., good-o-morningu, good-o-bye. The sounds of th (both as in the and as in thin), pl, bl and ks are almost impossible to a Japanese.132 There are two systems of transcribing Japanese into English, the Hepburn system and that of the Nippon Romazikwai (Roman Letter Association of Japan), which proposes to abolish the ancient Japanese use of modified Chinese ideographs. The Japanese government appears to be unable to decide between the two.
American Language Page 95
