American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  2 Webster’s theory of the divine origin of language was set forth at length in his introduction to his American Dictionary of 1828, and it continued to appear in the successive editions thereof until twenty-one years after his death, when his heirs and assigns employed a German philologian named C. A. F. Mahn to revise it. In brief, old Noah accepted the statement of Genesis XI, 1 that after the Flood “the whole earth was of one language and of one speech” and concluded that this must have been what he called Chaldee. Also, he concluded that Chaldee remained the base of all the tongues inflicted upon the descendants of Noah when they built the Tower of Babel, and that it was thus the Ur-Sprache of the whole human race. See Etymology, Anglo-Saxon, and Noah Webster, by Charlton Laird, American Speech, Feb., 1946, pp. 3–15.

  3 He also gave four clear syllables to territory. This American pronunciation was noted by General Thomas P. Thompson in the Westminster Review for Oct., 1933. “There are [American] mispronunciations,” he said primly, “which the English will never submit to; for example, a member of the Senate will never be excused for calling territory Terry Tory.” The English pronunciation makes it something on the order of territry.

  4 Worcester, to be sure, stumped him, and though he rejected Wooster he was willing to compromise on Worster. Also, he allowed that it was best to pronounce Mishilimackanac as if it were spelled Mackinaw. He spelled and pronounced Chicago Chickaugo.

  1 They were not, of course, the first English lexicographers to interest themselves in pronunciation, but they seem to have been the first to exert any important influence. The principal dictionary makers before them, e.g., Samuel Johnson, devoted themselves mainly to vocabulary, morphology and syntax. An elaborate and excellent study of the subject is in Standards of English Pronunciation According to the Grammarians and Orthoepists of the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, by Esther Keck Sheldon. This is a thesis submitted in 1938 to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, where Mrs. Sheldon received the doctorate. It has not been published, but I have had access to it through the kindness of Dr. Robert C. Pooley, Dr. Miles L. Hanley and the author. It starts with Jean Palsgrave in the Sixteenth Century and ends with the attempts to reform and refine English pronunciation made by Sheridan, Walker and their contemporaries. “We think of the Eighteenth Century,” says Mrs. Sheldon, “as the time when the desire to regulate and fix the language, above all to reform its speakers, predominated.” See also Walker’s Influence on the Pronunciation of English, likewise by Mrs. Sheldon, Publications of the Modern Language Association, March, 1947, pp. 130–46. I should note here, without detracting in the slightest from the value of her studies, that Henry Cecil Wyld calls attention in A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 1, to the unsatisfactory nature of written records of speech. It is sometimes very hard to make out precisely what sounds an author undertakes to represent.

  2 James Boardman, who visited the United States in 1829, wrote in his America and the Americans; London, 1833: “The variations from the present usages of the mother-country in respect to many words and expressions really English can be accounted for by supposing the language now used in America to be the same imported by the Pilgrim Fathers and others to the period of the separation of the governments, since which the Americans have ceased to look to England as their model.” “There can be no doubt,” said Robert J. Menner, in The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915, p. 360, “that the number of native-born Americans at the time of the Revolution whose pronunciation was exactly the same as that of Englishmen was exceedingly small.” The archaisms that survived are discussed in AL4, pp. 124–29 and in Supplement I, pp. 224–26. Their tendency to persist in an immigrant language is well exemplified by the case of Icelandic.

  1 Edward Everett, writing on June 19, 1827, said: “The great difference between the American and English mode of speaking … has seemed to me that we are apt … to pronounce every syllable. Great pains are generally taken in our schools … to teach boys to pronounce extra-ordinary, min-i-a-ture, etc., which are the things that first strike an English ear.” To say “the schools,” in 1827, meant to say Noah Webster.

  2 “It has often happened to me in our own island,” said Sir Charles Lyell in his Travels in America in the Years 1841–2; New York, 1852, “without traveling into those parts of Wales, Scotland or Ireland where they talk a perfectly distinct language, to encounter provincial dialects which it is difficult to comprehend.”

  3 Amphi-Atlantic English, English Studies, Oct., 1935, pp. 161–78, and British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part VI, 1933, pp. 313–34. I am indebted to both papers for much of the foregoing and for more of what follows.

  1 Jones taught mathematics at William and Mary and was chaplain to the Virginia House of Burgesses. He published both of his books in London in 1724. Later he came back to America, remaining until his death in 1760.

  2 See AL4, pp. 12–23 and 28–48, and Supplement I, pp. 33–44 and 56–76.

  1 See AL4, p. 35n.

  2 Ramsay (1740–1815) was a Pennsylvanian who moved to South Carolina and there became a man of mark. He was a physician and served as a surgeon in the Continental Army. In 1776 he was elected to the South Carolina Legislature, and sat off and on until he was captured by the British in 1780. From 1782 to 1786 he was a member of the Continental Congress, and during the last two years its president. After the Revolution he returned to the South Carolina Legislature. He was murdered by a lunatic. Beside his History of the American Revolution, first published in 1789, he wrote a History of South Carolina, a History of the United States, and a biography of Washington. See AL4, p. 17.

  1 See State of Birth of the Native Population, 1940, prepared under the supervision of Dr. Leon E. Truesdell, chief of the population division of the Census Bureau; Washington, 1944. In California, in 1940, 48.7% of the native population had been born in other States; in Oregon, 49.4%; in Wyoming, 55.2%, and in the District of Columbia no less than 60.7%. Of the 5,316,338 white inhabitants of New York City, 76,399 came from Massachusetts, 113,987 from the Carolinas, 128,954 from New Jersey, and 145,869 from Pennsylvania. Alaska contributed 108, Nevada 229, Wyoming 477, Idaho 552, South Dakota 967 and Delaware 2994. Nor is this movement into metropolitan cities only. Chattanooga, Tenn., with 128,163 inhabitants, had 50,488 born in other States – 1030 in Ohio, 595 in Texas, 462 in New York, 204 in Oklahoma, 148 in Massachusetts, 45 in Vermont, 32 in Maine, and 15 in New Hampshire.

  2 Boston and New York, 1889, p. 63.

  3 Early New England Pronunciation; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1927, p. 129.

  1 The Assimilation of the Speech of British Immigrants in Colonial America, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Jan., 1938, pp. 70–79. The late Marcus L. Hansen in his chapter on The Settlement of New England in Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England; Providence (R.I.), 1939, p. 63, concluded that of the 4,000 families, embracing 20,000 individuals, who reached New England between 1628 and 1640, “the majority originated either in the eastern and southern counties of England, where Puritanism and agricultural change were in the air, or else in the western counties, where fishing and shipping were important occupations.”

  2 Report of the Council, Proceedings of the society, April, 1885, pp. 342–71.

  3 Neither of the high contesting parties seems to have made any use of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words; London, 1847; nor of Thomas Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English; London, 1857 (not to be confused with Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary in six vols.; London, 1896–1905), nor of the publications of the English Dialect Society, which began to appear in 1873; nor of Edward Moor’s Suffolk Words and Phrases; London, 1823.

  1 English Sources of American Dialect, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April, 1886, pp. 159–66. J. R. Bartlett, in the second edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms; Boston, 1859, pp. xxv and xxvi, also favored this N
orth Country theory, though without offering any evidence.

  2 The American Accent and What it Really is, Scottish Educational Journal, Oct. 11, 1935, p. 1283, and The American Accent: What Was its Origin?, Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, Sept. 30, 1942.

  3 Americanisms: The English of the New World; New York, 1872, p. 427.

  4 p. 627. The old kingdom of East Anglia comprised the present counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, and part of Cambridgeshire. A list of books and articles on its speech in modern times is in Arthur G. Kennedy’s Bibliography of Writings on the English Language From the Beginning of Printing to the End of 1922; Cambridge and New Haven, 1927, pp. 383 and 384, and another is in A Bibliographical List of the Works That Have Been Published, or are Known to Exist in MS., Illustrative of the Various Dialects of English, edited by W. W. Skeat and published by the English Dialect Society; London, 1875. In the same works are bibliographies of the speech of the Midlands, the North Country and the West Country, and of most of the English individual counties.

  1 The Origin of Dialectal Differences in Spoken American English, Modern Philology, May, 1928, p. 391.

  2 Louisiana State University Studies, No. XX; Baton Rouge, 1935.

  3 pp. 72 and 73.

  4 His material came mainly from A Word-List From East Alabama, by L. W. Payne, Jr., Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part IV, 1908, pp. 279–328, and Vol. III, Part V, pp. 343–91. Payne reported on Lee, Macon, Russell and Tallapoosa counties, Alabama, and Troupe, Harris and Muscogee counties, Georgia. This is low country, with an average altitude, except for a narrow peninsula making down from the Appalachian chain, of less than 600 feet.

  1 The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, pp. 248 ff. and Vol. II, p. 226.

  2 pp. 63 and 64.

  3 Southern Speech, in Culture in the South, edited by W. T. Couch; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1934, p. 614.

  4 See Supplement I, pp. 511 ff. A writer in Town Topics, April 26, 1906, p. 13, reported that this emulation became marked in the 80s. Americans, he said, then began “landing in England with a twang and returning with that twang made more abominable by the effort to inflect and produce the English language as Londoners of fashion do. This curious importation has grown and developed until now the result is of an alarming ugliness. Compounded of bastard Briticisms and inescapable nasalities, it is delivered from a mouth apparently abrim with steaming porridge.… The syllables cannot really be said to issue at all. They mingle in one blend of inchoate vowel sound; the consonants die before they are decently born.” The writer, with the lack of reticence characteristic of a society journalist, named some of the fashionables of the time who were most given to this lingual Anglomania: the Sloanes, Whitehouses, Havemeyers, Palmers, Stokeses, Brokaws, and Haggins. “Our spoken American,” he said, “is threatened from the top down, and slang and all the perishing inventions of the vulgate do not menace it one tithe as sombrely as does this mannered mouthing by our millionaires.” The increasing rage for English speechways had been lampooned by Mrs. Burton Harrison in The Anglomaniacs in 1887, and by Edgar Fawcett in A Gentleman of Leisure, c. 1880. See American English, by Gilbert M. Tucker, Transactions of the Albany Institute, Vol. X, 1883, p. 335.

  1 A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English; Springfield (Mass.), 1944, p. xxxii, and American Pronunciation, by Kenyon alone, ninth ed., Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. vi. Kenyon is professor of English at Hiram College and rewrote the Guide to Pronunciation for Webster 1934. Knott was general editor of this Webster from 1926 to 1935, when he became professor of English at the University of Michigan and editor of the Middle English Dictionary. He died on Aug. 14, 1945.

  2 The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 40.

  3 For example, Lewis and Marguerite Shalett Herman in Talk American; Chicago, 1944, p. xi.

  4 The Pronunciation of Short a in American Standard English, American Speech, June, 1930, p. 396.

  5 Postvocalic r in New England Speech: A Study in American Dialect Geography, Acts of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists. Copenhagen, 1936, p. 198.

  1 British and American Pronunciation: Retrospect and Prospect, School Review, June, 1915, p. 38.

  1 It was almost the rule, between 1800 and 1835, for poor young men to earn their way through college by teaching school, and large numbers continued until they were ripe for politics or one of the professions. In the rural South and Middle West the custom survives more or less to this day.

  2 Quoted by George H. McKnight in Modern English in the Making; New York, 1928, p. 484.

  3 “If we examine the structure of any language,” he said in his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, pp. 27–29, “we shall find a certain principle of analogy running through the whole. We shall find in English that similar combinations of letters have usually the same pronunciation, and that words having the same terminating syllable generally have the accent at the same distance from that termination.… In disputed points, where people differ in opinion and practise, analogy should always decide the controversy.”

  4 Brander Matthews says in Essays on English; New York, 1921, p. 216, that the German Bühnenaussprache was revised in 1898 by a committee consisting of five professors of language and six actors and managers. American actors of the tonier sort still use some of the traditional pronunciations of the English stage, but Frank Vizetelly says in A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced; New York, 1917, p. ix, that these affectations are but little imitated outside the theatre, even in England. He gives some curious specimens – aitches for aches, bird for beard, kwality (with the a as in at) for quality, rallery for raillery, Room for Rome, yur for your, moo-errn for mourn, ge-irl for girl, and England with the e of end.

  1 Said C. K. Thomas in the Quarterly Journal of Speech Education, Nov., 1927, p. 452: “The West, since it grew up with its attention on more urgent questions than niceties of speech, developed a more natural type, mainly free from the artificialities of polite speech.”

  2 In Sources of Pronunciation, American Speech, June, 1929, pp. 416–19, J. S. K[enyon?] discussed acutely the four dominant influences, to wit, tradition, analogy, borrowing and spelling. The last-named, he said, is always most powerful in the middle ground between the illiterate and the “educated and cosmopolitan.” The overwhelming majority of Americans, as of other folk, have always stood in that middle ground.

  3 I am reminded of this by Mrs. Delia H. Biddle Pugh, of New York, who writes: “In country schools in the old days spelling-classes stood up and spelled extraordinary as E X ex, T R A tra, extra, O R, or, extraor, and so on. This influenced the American tendency to give full value to every syllable.” Certainly it worked powerfully against such English forms (borrowed in Boston and New York) as extraw’n’ry.

  4 This is the conclusion, on the college level, of J. M. Steadman, Jr., in The Language Consciousness of College Students, American Speech, Dec., 1926, p. 131. “The imitation of the teacher as a superior linguistic authority,” he says, “is by far the most important single cause of change.”

  1 Says Eilert Ekwall in American and British Pronunciation; Upsala, 1946, pp. 29 and 32: “Educated American pronunciation on the whole remains at the stage which British pronunciation had reached about the time of the Revolution, while modern British pronunciation has left that stage far behind.… Educated American was under the influence of Standard British all through the colonial period, an influence probably stronger in the later than in the earlier part.”

  2 His strictures are dealt with at length in Supplement I, pp. 4–14.

  1 This judgment was confirmed forty-two years later by another Scotsman, John M. Duncan, whose Travels in America was published in Glasgow in 1823. In Vol. II thereof he said: “The inferior orders of society in America certainly speak more accurately than the inferior orders in Britain.… Here, however, my concessions stop. The educated classes do not speak by any means so accurately in America as in Britain; there are more deficiencies in grammar, in accent, in pronunc
iation.” I am indebted here to Dr. J.-M. Carrière, of the University of Virginia.

  2 On Sept. 27, 1760, he wrote from London to David Hume: “I hope … that we shall always in America make the best English of this island our standard, and I believe it will be so.” But this was before the Revolution.

  3 See Supplement I, pp. 18–20.

  4 Here I am indebted again to Allen Walker Read’s Amphi-Atlantic English, before quoted.

  1 This was in 1841. It had been taught at Randolph-Macon College since 1839 and at the University of Virginia since 1825.

  2 p. 94.

  3 Lectures on the English Language; fourth edition, revised and enlarged; New York, 1870, p. 676.

  1 The essay making up the book were first published in the Galaxy in 1867, 1868 and 1869, and appeared between covers in 1870.

  2 Preface dated New York, July 8, 1870. The passage is on p. 8 of the New Edition, Revised and Corrected; New York, 1876.

  3 p. 62.

  4 Galaxy, April, p. 523.

  1 Every-Day English; New York, 1881, p. 89. It will be noted that White put the word America into ironical quotation marks – a banal indication of his Anglomania. This animosity to the vernacular was denounced by Dante, so long ago as the first years of the Fourteenth Century, in II Convivio. He found five causes for it, thus summarized by Gordon Hall Gerould in The Gawain Poet and Dante, Publications of the Modern Language Association, March, 1936, p. 33: “blindness in discernment, mischievous self-justification, desire of vainglory, the prompting of envy, and abjectness of mind, or cowardice.” Of the last-named Dante said: “On account of this abjectness many disparage their own vernacular and praise that of others; and all such men as these are the abominable wretches in Italy who regard as low their precious vernacular, which, if it be low in anything, is only so in so far as it is heard in the bawdy mouth of these adulterers.”

  2 White was a New Yorker, born in 1821, and after trying medicine and the law took to journalism. He soon attained to notice as a musical and dramatic critic, and in 1853 began a series of studies of Shakespeare which eventually produced the Riverside edition of the Bard, published in 1883. He had no training in philology, but was a very cocksure fellow, and did not hesitate to pit his opinions against those of such authorities as William D. Whitney. During the Civil War he served gallantly as a Federal jobholder in New York. His son Stanford, born in 1853, was the celebrated architect, put to death by Harry K. Thaw on June 25, 1906.