American Language Supplement 2 (2 page)

In some cases the authors whose principal works are listed above are also the authors of other works. All references to the latter are in full.

The fact that there are differences between the way the average literate American speaks and the way the average literate Englishman speaks has long been noted.
¹
Many of these differences, as everyone is aware, have to do with vocabulary, and some are so striking that they inevitably attract attention. Thus the American, when he first hears an Englishman mention
corn
, is apt to assume that he means the Indian maize that goes under that name in this country, and is surprised to learn that he uses it as a generic term for all sorts of edible grain, including wheat, rye and barley. Contrariwise, the Englishman is puzzled and maybe a little upset when he discovers that
bowler
, which to him means what we call a
Derby
hat, means in the United States only a person engaged in bowling, and not any object at all. But these differences, though they still engage the scrutiny of persons who write about the two languages, are not as important as they used to be, for in recent years the English have picked up so many terms from the United States that they understand American more or less even when they do not undertake to speak it; and in any case the subject need not be pursued here, for it has been dealt with at length in Chapter VI of Supplement I and at various other places in the same book.

The differences in pronunciation, however, show a higher degree of resistance to change, despite the ever-growing influence of American talkies, and some of them promise to survive for a long while. They extend to many common words,
e.g., can’t, deficit
, and
secretary
. The Englishman, using the first of these, gives it a broad
a
that is rare in the United States save in those areas – for example,
the Boston region and the swankier suburbs of New York – where emulation of English usage is still potent in speechways; and most Americans, when they seek to imitate him or his imitators in speaking, are careful to throw in plenty of
cawnts
, and some even add a few
cawns
, though he actually pronounces
can
exactly as we do, to rhyme with
pan
. In words of the
deficit
class – other examples are
compensate, confiscate
and
demonstrate
– the difference is one of stress rather than of vowel-quality, for the Englishman puts the accent on the second syllable, whereas the American commonly stresses the first. In
secretary
what the Englishman does is to get rid of a syllable altogether, so that the word becomes, to American ears,
secretry;
the American himself almost always gives it its lawful four, and lays a slight but unmistakable second stress on the third, which he rhymes with
care
.

This last difference is typical of many others, for American speech, on the whole, follows the spelling more faithfully than English speech, and is thus clearer and more precise. A musician might describe the divergence by saying that the latter tends toward
glissando
, whereas the former is predominantly
staccato
and
marcato
. Why this should be so is not known with any assurance, though a great many persons have put forth confident theories, some of which have to do with alleged differences in the vocal apparatus of Americans and Englishmen, produced by differences in climate. But there is really no evidence that climate has any such effects. Even the adenoidal nasalization that Englishmen so often complain of in American speech, putting the blame for it on the comparative dryness of the American air, is really not peculiar to this country, for it is encountered also in the speech of the London cockneys, and is characteristic of the speech of all Frenchmen. Moreover, the mean annual rainfall in New York, Chicago and St. Louis is actually higher than it is in London, Liverpool or Edinburgh, and in the American South, where the American whine is seldom heard, it is higher still – in New Orleans, more than twice as high.
¹

My own guess, disregarding this nonsense about adenoids, is that Americans, taking one with another, speak more distinctly than Englishmen largely because their speechways were molded, for four generations, by Noah Webster’s famous Spelling Book. From
1783, when it was first published, until the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when the wizards of Teachers College, Columbia, began supplanting it with spellers of their own, it was the most widely circulated book in the country,
¹
and the most influential. Indeed, it was the only work on language that the average American ever saw, or even heard of. It had no traffic with slurring, but insisted that all words be pronounced as Jahveh had spelled them out to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or to the sons of Noah after the Flood.
²
Webster gave
secretary
four syllables, and noted that there was what he called “a half accent” on the third;
³
he insisted upon full
r
’s in such words as
far, fire
and
fore, hard, heart
and
cargo;
he frowned upon pronouncing
actual
as
actshual, aperture
as
apertshure
and
bounteous
as
bountcheous
, and he even insisted upon spelling pronunciations in such proper names as
Norfolk, Thames
and
Greenwich
.
⁴

But though he was thus very influential in fixing the national standards of pronunciation in rather rigid molds, he was only giving voice and momentum to what was really a spontaneous natural tendency. The Americans, taking one with another, were a highly matter of fact people, and could see nothing save folly in the affected
pronunciations that became fashionable in England during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century. Those pronunciations arose in the court circles of London, were adopted by the more pretentious sort of actors, and were propagated and given standing by the pronouncing dictionaries of Thomas Sheridan (1780) and John Walker (1791), both of whom had been actors and teachers of elocution before they put on the shroud of the lexicographer.
¹
But in the United States such dubious authorities were combatted earnestly and even with some violence (despite a few concessions) by the peppery Webster, and in consequence they were impeded in making converts for their stretched vowels and macerated consonants. American speechways went back to an earlier and less self-conscious era,
²
and remained more logical and rational. If the people
of the young Republic were influenced at all by relatively recent English precept and example it was by the movement toward spelling-pronunciations which antedated by half a century the rage for actorial affectations. Their speech was thus marked by clarity,
¹
and not only by clarity but also by a high degree of uniformity, so that nearly all the English travelers who ventured into the country after the Revolution were struck by the comparative absence of class and regional dialects. These Englishmen, accustomed to being beset by what they regarded as gross barbarisms the moment they got out of the ambits of the court, the theatres and the two universities at home, were astonished to discover that nearly all Americans talked alike, on the lower as well as the higher levels of society, and that their talk was generally clear and hence easily understood. There were, of course, some differences, and Webster himself often gave evidence that he was a New Englander and not a Southerner, but such differences were not numerous and none were important. Save, in fact, for a few oddities in vocabulary, it was perfectly possible to understand any man encountered along the road, even in the Far South or beyond the Alleghanies, and there was nothing anywhere that could be reasonably compared to the gnarled and difficult local dialects of Somerset, Lancastershire and Yorkshire, to say nothing of Scotland and Wales, or of proletarian London.
²

Allen Walker Read has devoted two of his valuable studies in the history of American English to the observations of these travelers and of other Eighteenth Century Englishmen.
³
The first to discourse upon the subject was probably Hugh Jones, a clerical pedagogue
who spent the years from 1716 to 1721 at William and Mary College in Virginia, and while there wrote “An Accidence of the English Tongue” that was the first grammar-book ever begotten on American soil. In another work, “The Present State of Virginia,” he testified that “the planters and even the native Negroes generally talk good English, without idiom or tone.”
¹
This was confirmed forty years later by a Scotsman of noble birth, Lord Adam Gordon, who made a progress through the colonies in 1764 and 1765. In Philadelphia, he said, “the propriety of language surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks in a degree of purity and perfection surpassing any but the polite part of London.” Five years afterward came William Eddis, who wrote home on June 8, 1770:

Such testimonies continued until near the end of the century, when the London reviews launched that ill-humored war upon American speechways which has gone on ever since, with prudent truces every time a pressing need for Yankee bayonets has made it impolitic to be too critical of Yankee talk.
²
Even the unhappy success of the Revolution, though it left some bitterness, did not provoke the attack, for the English, during the decade following Yorktown, seem to have entertained some hope that the wayward colonies
might return, and, in any case, regarded them disdainfully in the rôle of political and commercial rivals. Indeed, there were Englishmen who spoke favorably of American speech while the struggle was actually going on, and one of them was the otherwise bitterly anti-American Jonathan Boucher,
¹
who wrote on December 23, 1777 that “in North America there prevails not only, I believe, the purest pronunciation of the English tongue that is anywhere to be met with, but a perfect uniformity.” On July 19 of the same year one Nicholas Cresswell, who came out in 1774 and remained three years, wrote that “though the inhabitants of this country are composed of different nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do.” “No country or colonial dialect is to be distinguished here,” he went on, “except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.” So late as 1791 the editor of an English reprint of Dr. David Ramsay’s “History of the American Revolution” was moved to say in his preface: