American Language Supplement 2 (33 page)

Francis B. Lee, of Trenton, began investigating the speech of New Jersey in 1892, and two years later he published the first of two reports upon it in
Dialect Notes
,
⁴
but since then the philologs of the State have neglected the subject, though there must be rich material in the dialect of the so-called
Pineys
or
Piners
in the central and southern counties and in that of the Jackson Whites in the Ramapo mountains along the boundary-line between New Jersey and New York – in full sight, on a clear day, of the topless towers of Manhattan. The noblesse of the Newark region and the Oranges
speak something resembling the pseudo-English of the Hudson valley, and the proletarians of Hudson county show the influence of Brooklynese, but in the main Jerseymen use General American. Even along the Atlantic coast there is a gap in the broad
a
territory between Cape May and Sandy Hook.

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

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 Series
³
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.

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 contained 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: