American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  The lists compiled by Lee showed, in the main, only such mispronunciations and other malfeasances as are common to all the varieties of vulgar American, e.g., ager for ague, cleared for afraid, chaw for chew, I be for I am, nary for never, and snew as the preterite of to snow, but he also offered some locutions not recorded elsewhere, bag o’ guts, a loafer; beach, a sand island; belly-wax, molasses candy; garvey, a small scow; to go by water, to follow the sea as a calling; to goster, to domineer; hold-fast, a sore; to ground oak, to inflict injury on the person, or to threaten to do so; to lug, to bark, as a dog; shaklin, shiftless; to snag-gag, to quarrel; tickey, coffee; upheader, a horse or man of proud bearing; to bounder, to scrub the person, and do-ups, preserves. He found a number of Dutch loans, also surviving in New York, e.g., blickey, a small bucket (Du. blikje, from blik, tin); pinxter, Whitsuntide; noodleje, noodles, and rooleje (pro. rollitsh), chopped meat stuffed in sausage skins, to be sliced and cooked. He also found one that seemed to be German, to wit, spack, pork (Ger. speck, bacon, lard). He reported that v was often changed into w in South Jersey, e.g., in winegar and wittles. He said that applejack was always called simply jack by its makers, and that Jersey lightning was “hardly used by natives.”1 He noted the archaic housen,2 but did not mention the part or parts in which he found it. In 1938 George Weller reported it still in use among the Jackson Whites.3 To Lee’s first list William Marks and Charles Simmerman added a glossary of the argot of New Jersey glass-workers, and Lee himself one of the shingle-makers of South Jersey. Mr. L. Nixon Hadley, of Evanston, III., tells me that he has observed the substitution of a glottal stop for mid-t in Jersey speech, even on high levels, e.g., bo’le for bottle. “I will always remember,” he says, “the hilarity in a phonetic class when a very charming girl said: ‘I’ve tried and tried, but I simply can’t make a glo’al stop.’ ”1

  New Mexico

  There is a larger admixture of Spanish in the English of New Mexico than in that of any other State. “Little boys, begging on the streets of Taos,” says Spud Johnson, editor of the Taos Valley News,2 “say ‘Dame un dime,’ pronouncing the final e of dime like the final e of dame.” In the vocabulary of the State’s speech in the New Mexico volume of the American Guide Series3 nearly all the 300 terms listed are Spanish loans. Spanish, indeed, is the house language of a great many New Mexicans, especially on the lower levels, and as a result the English they speak shows a marked accent and various other peculiarities. A dialect closely resembling it has been studied in Southern California by Douglas Turney, who reports that the familiar sentence, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party” becomes “Na-hoo eess tay-ee tah-eemm fore old goohd mehnn to cahmm to tay-ee aidd ofe tay-ee par-tee.” He says that its speakers have difficulty with the English long i and short a and the combinations sh and ng.4 The local school-ma’am struggles against these aberrations diligently, but without much success. She is impeded by the fact that the so-called Spanish element of the population – it is actually largely Indian – has been made extremely race-conscious by the lofty scorn of the 100% Americans, and is thus not disposed to make any concession to Yankee ways. From time to time its politicoes launch plans to replace English with Spanish in the primary schools of the State. Though they have never reached that goal it is now the law that any local school-board may provide for the teaching of Spanish, beginning with the fifth grade. At last accounts about 8,000 children were being so taught.5 The English spoken by what are called the Anglos of New Mexico is basically General American, but h is full of the aforesaid Spanish loans, along with many Indian loans, and also shows some influence of Appalachian speech, apparently exerted upon it by way of Texas.1 The Spanish of the State has been studied at length by Dr. Aurelio M. Espinosa and his colleagues,2 but its colorful English still awaits scientific investigation.

  New York

  When Oliver Farrar Emerson, a young Iowa schoolmaster, sought the degree of Ph.D. at Cornell in 1889, he chose for the subject of his thesis the phonology of the common speech of the Ithaca region. The result was the first really scientific study of an American dialect ever published.3 Ithaca is in the central part of the State, at the lower end of Lake Cayuga, and has been the home of Cornell since 1868. It is in a region settled mainly by immigrants from New England, but with some infiltration from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia. Its first settlers were veterans of the Revolution, and most of the New Englanders among them came from Connecticut. There were also some Massachusetts men, but they apparently came from the western end of the State, and in consequence the speech of the region, at the start, was free from the imitations of English fashions that had begun to creep into the Boston area. To this day it offers an excellent example of what has come to be called General American. That is to say, it prefers the short a before f, th and s, it usually sounds the r, and it runs to a generally clear and distinct style of pronunciation, though terminal g is sometimes dropped. “In comparison with standard English,”4 said Emerson, “it represents a dialect of the Eighteenth Century, with certain peculiarities usually attributed to the Seventeenth Century.… It has remained practically uncontaminated by the speech of foreigners.… [Its] predecessor [was] probably the English of the eastern division of England.” This surmise, as we have seen, has been amply confirmed by later investigations.5

  Emerson’s pioneer study directed the attention of philologians, both professional and lay, to the speech of upstate New York, and during the years following many other papers on the subject got into print. Among those who wrote them were B. S. Monroe,1 B. L. Bowen,2 Henry Adelbert White,3 Mrs. F. E. Shapleigh,4 Jason Almus Russell,5 Gerald Crowningshield,6 and, above all, C. K. Thomas, whose seven excellent studies of upstate pronunciation began to appear in American Speech in 1935,7 and who followed them five years later with two of downstate pronunciation.8 Monroe’s investigation was confined to the speech of students at Cornell. He tested 141 of them, of whom 125 were natives of the State, distributed over all save seven of its counties, and the rest had been living in it since childhood. His report described an almost pure specimen of General American. In such words as grass, path, pass and laugh his subjects preferred the flat a by overwhelming majorities, never running to less than 127 to 14, and their preference for a clear terminal r, as in door and tier, was even more marked. The only students who elided the sound came from the Hudson valley, and even among these more retained it than dropped it. Monroe found a heavy predominance of the ah-sound in fog, hog and frog, but, rather curiously, a clear o-sound in dog and log. He reported, somewhat incredibly, that more than two-thirds of his subjects turned kl into dl in clean, clock, Clark, etc., and gl into dl in gladness and inglorious, and sought to account for it by the fact that Noah Webster had advocated these prissy mispronunciations in his American Dictionary of 1828. But Webster quickly abandoned them, and it is hard to imagine them surviving on the Cornell campus of 1896.

  Bowen’s word-list of 1910 was gathered in Monroe county, ten miles west of Rochester. This is the Genesee country, which was settled largely by Massachusetts people, but there were also infiltrations from the South and by Irish and Germans. Bowen found a great many of the mispronunciations that are common to all vulgar American, e.g., apurn (apron), attackted, bust, childern, crick, deef, dreen (drain), et and to rile, and also not a few characteristic New Englandisms, e.g., buttery, meeting-house, pail, I swan, spider (frying-pan) and tunnel (funnel), but he could find no trace of Southern influence, and very few of the locutions he listed seemed to be of local invention. White’s shorter word-list, published two years later, came from the region just east of Syracuse, which was settled largely by New Englanders, though there were also some Dutch among its pioneers, and later came Irish, Germans and Scandinavians. Like the Bowen list, it showed few if any local contributions to the vocabulary. Mrs. Shapleigh’s list, based on the speech of Roxbury, a village on the east branch of the Delaware river, just west of the Catskills, was too short to be illuminating, but it co
ntained one term not reported elsewhere, to wit, skimmelton, a noisy serenade to a newly-married couple, usually designated a charivari, sherrivarrie, chivaree or callithump. Russell reported on Hamilton, the seat of Colgate University, some miles southwest of Utica, and his list included a number of campus terms. Crowningshield investigated the dialect of the northeastern corner of the State, mainly settled by immigrants from western Massachusetts and Vermont. He found the flat a even in aunt, and reported that the broad a was never used elsewhere “except as an attempt at elegance and refinement.” The o of frog, hog and hot and even rob and doll, he said, became ah, but not that of log and dog. The e was diphthongized to ai in leg, edge and measure. The r was never elided, except as an affectation, but the final ng was usually reduced to n.

  Thomas, who is a first-rate phonologist, picked up the inquiry begun by Emerson in 1889, and carried it much further, partly because of the advances of phonetics since Emerson’s time but mainly because of his own superior equipment. At the beginning of his inquiry he worked mainly with Cornell students who were natives of upstate New York, and in his first group were 223 individuals from 50 of the 53 upstate counties. Later he made field trips which increased his force of informants by about 50%, and in this new lot were many “persons without college education, in some cases with very little education.” Still later he added more, some of them educated and some not, and in the end he had 666, representing all of the upstate counties, with the heaviest representation from the western part of the state and the lowest from the southern. His conclusions agreed pretty well with those of his predecessors. He found that some form of the short a, which he described as “one of the more variable American phonemes,” was overwhelmingly prevalent, and that even in aunt the broad a occurred only in speakers who had picked it up from old-fashioned aunts – probably relatively recent immigrants from New England – who preferred it. The r was elided, he reported, “only in a few cases of dissimilation in which an unstressed r before a consonant drops out before a following r in the same word,” e.g., gove’nor, pa’ticular, and it was seldom that he encountered the intrusive r, as in idear, vanillar. He made a particular inquiry into the nature of the r-sound, and found that, like the a-sound, it was very variable. He also found considerable variations in the o- and u-sounds. There were signs that deef was dying out, and crick with it. “A speaker,” he noted, “may pronounce creek as crick when conversing, but as creek when reading.” In the pronunciation of either and neither the ee-sound prevailed over the eye-sound. Been occurred as bin 228 times to 87 times as ben, and no time “in unaffected speech” as bean. Ate was pronounced as spelled 224 times to one time for et, and eggs 200 as spelled to 35 as aigs. In general, he found the upstaters speaking “in a rather close-mouthed fashion,” but with relatively few losses of consonants: even the h of forehead was clearly articulated. His conclusion was:

  Upstate New York speech is more closely allied with General American than with either of the other main dialectal types, but it is less closely allied than is sometimes supposed. In the East, the traditional boundary line of the Hudson river is apparently of no present significance; the line between New York and New England is certainly no further west than the political boundary, and the line between upstate and metropolitan New York is almost at right angles to the Hudson.

  Thomas is still pursuing his investigation of upstate New York speech,1 but meanwhile he has turned aside for a look at that of New York City, and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland counties.2 In this section he has found three different speech-areas – that of the city, including suburban Nassau county, that of the more rural parts of Long Island, and that of Rockland and Westchester, on the two banks of the Hudson above the city. “The historic roots of Suffolk speech,” he says, “are in Connecticut”; that of Rockland and Westchester “shows some traces of upstate speech.” Thomas’s material came from 420 persons, about half of them Cornell undergraduates “who have always lived in the down-state counties,” and whose ancestors, in not a few cases, “have lived there for some generations.” This material excluded, on the one hand, the affectations of the Hudson valley Anglomaniacs, and on the other hand the perversions of the lower classes in New York City. Thomas found the flat a prevailing in all situations, least in aunt, ask, dance, laugh and last, but overwhelmingly in after, basket, class, grass and path. In calm, of course, the broad a had it, and the same sound occurred in gong and pond and on, though not in laundry, which showed an o-sound. Been was predominantly bin, not bean, and either was ee-ther, not eye-ther. On the educated level investigated there was but small evidence, of course, of deef, crick and the like. Curiously enough, Thomas concluded that, in its general characters, this downstate speech showed rather more resemblance to Southern American than to either General American or the New England type. “In population, if not in territorial extent,” he said, it “seems worthy of recognition as a fourth main type, especially when we realize that it includes not only the nine counties of this article, but parts of southwestern Connecticut and northern New Jersey as well.”

  The vulgar speech of the New York City area, once known as Boweryese but now generally called Brooklynese, seems to have attracted little attention until after the Civil War. Its chief characteristic today is generally assumed to be its conversion of the er-sound into oi, but that change apparently did not appear until a relatively late date. When William Cullen Bryant, visiting New York in 1818, made some notes upon the talk he heard, he put down horl for hall, barl for barrel, boees for boys, sich for such and yesterday with the accent on the last syllable, but he did not record boid and thoidy-thoid.1 Nor did either of them or any of their analogues get mention in the introduction to John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States,” first published in 1848, though he noticed and remarked the loans from the Dutch still surviving in New York speech. When the oi-sound first appeared, and by whom it was first recorded I do not know, though there is evidence that the New York newspapers were aware of it by 1880, chiefly in the forms of goil and loidy. But even down to the 90s, when Edward W. Town-send began writing his “Chimmie Fadden” stories, the accepted hallmark of Boweryese was not boid or even goil, but the substitution of t or d for the two forms of th, as in wit or wid for with, and dem for them. When, however, E. B. Babbitt, then secretary of the American Dialect Society, published, in 1896, the first study of the New York City dialect from the standpoint of a competent phonologist, the oi-sound was duly noted and discussed.2 Babbitt called it “the one distinctive peculiarity of the New York pronunciation,” and said that it was “only sporadic, and very rare at that, outside the region under consideration,” to wit, New York City, the adjacent parts of New Jersey, “the commutation district” along the Hudson, Long Island, and “the Sound cities of Connecticut, up to Hartford.” It has since been found, as we have seen, in parts of the South,3 and Babbitt himself noted its use by a Kentucky woman, but it still remains pathognomonic of New York speech, and later observers have found that it rises therein to relatively high cultural levels.1 Said Babbitt:

  In a schoolroom in Brooklyn, with 37 pupils, 35 had this pronunciation without doubt, and of the other two one proved to have been born in Scotland and the other in Bristol, Conn. Out of a hundred cases of guards on the elevated road at Eighty-first street, 81 announced Eighty-joist, and in seven of the other cases the guard was clearly an Irishman or a German. The sound is difficult to imitate consciously, and outsiders, unless they come to New York very young, rarely adopt it, but the genuine born-and-bred New Yorker rarely escapes it.

  Brooklynese has since been studied by other philologians and discussed at great length by the newspapers, but a good deal of mystery still hangs about it,2 and its history remains to be determined. The theory has been advanced that its substitution of oi for er is a legacy from Dutch times,3 and may have been suggested by the pronunciation of the Dutch ui, as in duivel,4 but, as Edwin B. Davis has argued, this notion i
s brought into doubt by the fact that the actual Dutch ui of colonial days has become, not oi, but the i of bite, as in Spuyten Duyvil and Schuyler.5 Davis is rather inclined to account for oi by recalling that the “replacement of a consonant by a semivowel before another consonant in order to obviate some complexity of occlusion or constriction is a common phonetic phenomenon,” but he neglects to explain why this one is not found in other dialects. Greet, a very competent authority, says that it “may appear … throughout the South,” but he finds that it is “tense and very marked” in the New York dialect, and that it is not reported in any of the dialects of England.1 Kenyon and Knott say that it is unknown whether there is any connection between the occurrence of the sound in the South and in New York.2 It has been suggested that its prevalence in New York may owe something to the influence of Yiddish,3 but for that surmise there is no real evidence.4 Indeed, there is evidence running the other way in the fact that oi seems to have come in before Yiddish began to be the second language of the area.