American Language Supplement 2 (38 page)

The pronunciation of the Rhode Islanders in colonial days has been studied by Claude M. Simpson, Jr., who made use of the enormous collection of early spellings and rhymes assembled by Miles L. Hanley and his students at the University of Wisconsin,
²
and also of the town-records of Providence, Portsmouth and Warwick. In the latter he found a number of words used in senses not recorded in the NED, and others that antedated the NED’s examples. Of the former he recorded
creasing-plane
, apparently a common tool in the Rhode Island of 1700;
to enlarge
, to compensate;
faultive
, a person at fault;
flag-collar
, a cheap horse-collar, possibly stuffed with dried flag plants;
in forwardness
, in advance of;
hobbing-iron
, an instrument of unknown character;
act of oblivion
, a cancellation of debts;
to offend
, to obstruct, as a road, and
wainscoat-plow
, a carpenter’s tool. Simpson found old words in the town records that antedated “by over two centuries” the earliest examples given in the NED. His full dissertation has not been printed, but there is a copy of it in the custody of the American Documentation Institute at Washington, and microfilms and photostats are obtainable.

In 1936 Professor George Hibbitt, of Columbia, invading the town of Little Compton in search of local folk-lore, picked up phonograph records of the speech of the inhabitants, most of them descendants of immigrants who left the Plymouth colony at an early date. He reported on his return to New York that it was “clipped and sharply staccato, with no trace of the northern New England drawl.” He found
stoop
and
piazza
in use to designate a porch,
helpkeeper
used for
housekeeper
, and such pronunciations as
lodge
for
large, hahly
for
hardly, krasligged
for
crosslegged
and
summus
for
summers
.
¹
Another observer, reporting on the speech of Providence, lists
gangway
, a small street;
cleanser
, a cleaner of garments, and
rule
, a recipe. He says: “You hear broad
a’
s all up and down the street. One can’t be kidded about them here, or be covertly suspected of affectation or undue attachment to things English. As a matter of fact, we’re more consistent about our broad
a’
s than the English.”
²

South Carolina has produced an able phonologist in Dr. Raven I. McDavid, Jr., and as a result its speech promises to be studied more scientifically than that of any save a few other States.
³
Surveys for the Linguistic Atlas, begun by the late Guy S. Lowman, Jr., have been continued since his death in 1941 under McDavid’s direction, and a great deal of first-hand material has been accumulated. The speech of the State, according to Greet, is partly Tidewater Southern and partly the General Southern of the country above the fall-line, excluding the mountains of Appalachia.
⁴
The division between the two areas, according to another Southern authority, is made “by a line drawn through Columbia parallel with the coast.”
⁵
But McDavid has shown that the matter is rather more complicated than this, and that isoglosses mark off the different tides of early settlement.
The first settlers along the coast were mainly southern English but there was also a considerable body of French Huguenots. They were followed by two groups that pushed into the interior – the first, south of the Santee river, made up principally of German-Swiss, and the second, above the river, of Baptists from Wales and Presbyterians from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Finally, a flood of Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Germans came down from the north along the eastern slopes of the Appalachian chain, “totalling perhaps as many as the white population of the coastal settlements and of the townships planted from the coast.” The result was a formidable conflict of dialects, further complicated by later immigrations from the Northeast, but the commercial and cultural influence of Charleston was sufficient to make its speechways more or less dominant, and they are thus often encountered far in the interior.

The dialect of Charleston was first investigated so long ago as the 80s by Sylvester Primer, then a teacher at the College of Charleston.
¹
Those were the cradle days of phonology in the United States, and Primer found it necessary to expound, even to a presumably professional audience, some of the elements of that dawning science. Like most of the other early investigators of American speechways he was struck by the number of archaisms he encountered. Charleston, he reported, was a speech-pocket in which many Briticisms of the Seventeenth Century still survived, though there were already signs that they would not last much longer. “A stranger in conversation with a Charlestonian,” he said, “first observes a slight shade of difference in the pronunciation of certain vowels and words. Peculiarities of this kind are naturally more marked among the middle and lower classes, though the prevailing sound which a given letter may have acquired … pervades to a certain extent all classes of society.” He went on:

Obviously, Primer was here describing a speech quite different from the Tidewater Southern of Virginia – one in which relics of various British provincial dialects had been preserved by the social intransigence of Charleston, and spread by the city’s prestige to its dependencies. He continued:

McDavid’s studies began with the dialect of his native Greenville, a town of the Piedmont at the base of the Blue Ridge. His discussion of the phonology of that dialect is rather too technical to be summarized here, but it may be noted that, in the cases of two familiar words, to wit,
to hoist
and
to rear
, he shows how a divergence in meaning has flown from a divergence in pronunciation. He says:

Wedgefield, whose speech Miss Parler investigated in 1930, is a small village in Sumter county, about thirty miles east of Columbia. Among the terms she listed were
to put a bad mouth on
, to suggest an evil contingency;
big doin’s, adj.
, conceited, haughty;
brass ankle
, a person who passes for white but is suspected of having Negro blood;
butt
or
butts meat
, fat salt pork;
to cap the stack
, to cap the climax;
carbox
, a box-car;
to cut up Jack and kill Jinny
, to raise a commotion;
embroidery
, ambrosia (a dessert of oranges and grated cocoanut);
lot
, a stable yard;
mutton corn
, green corn;
paratoed
, pigeon-toed;
sick’em
, said to anyone who sneezes;
sivvy beans
, Lima beans;
to specify
, to make good, and
yinnah
, a pronoun used for
you
, singular and plural. Miss Parler reported that coarsely ground corn is called
grits
before cooking and
hominy
afterward. Only the lowest class of poor whites (locally,
po’ buckras
) call it
grits
after it is cooked. “This fact,” she says, “has led some of the people who pride themselves on their breeding to ask for
hominy
in a store. A few others used carefully to ask for a quart of
grist
, partly because
grist
was considered more correct, but chiefly to avoid such a po’ buckra word as
grits
.” Miss Parler says that the addition of the redundant
own
to possessive pronouns, as in
his own, the doctor’s own
, etc., is characteristic of upcountry South Carolina speech, and Dean J. C. Seegers, of Temple University, tells me that it is also to be found in Charleston, “usually among Charlestonians of German descent,” who also used
all both
.
¹
I am indebted to Dr. McDavid for the following additional observations:
²

In “Low-Back Vowels in the South Carolina Piedmont,” before cited, McDavid presents a statistical study of the speech of 75 students at Furman University, Greenville. He used 158 test words in which either the vowel of
father
or that of
law
may occur. He found that in the following,
inter alia
, the
ah
-sound was overwhelmingly prevalent,
horrid, orange, chocolate, wash, doll, swan, forest, God, quarrel, foreign, Chicago, John, moral, orator, Florence
and
borrow
, and that the
aw
-sound prevailed in
loss, cross, dog, gone, on
and
coffin
. In
log, daub, hog, frog, water, wasp, office, offer
and
swamp
there was divided usage.
¹

The glossary of South Dakota terms in the volume on the State in the American Guide Series
²
is headed “Language of the West,” and in it there is evidence that the local speech differs but little from that of the adjoining States. There are separate lists of farmers’, prospectors’, cowmen’s and sheepmen’s words and phrases, and at the end a brief section of “General Terms.” The latter includes nothing that has not been reported elsewhere save
honyock
, a homesteader, apparently a derivative of
hony
, an old American term for a poor white.