American Language Supplement 2 (4 page)

Webster was a New Englander, but he was not a Bostonian, and his central purpose, as he wrote to John Pickering, was “to deliver … my countrymen from the errors that fashion and ignorance” were seeking to introduce from England
²
– and succeeding more or less in the Boston and New York areas. He advocated, above all, clarity and consistency in utterance,
³
and was against all the vowel changes, sacrifice of consonants and other perversions that were imitated from contemporary England usage in the Anglomaniacal circles of the East. In particular, he was opposed to the artificial
Bühnenaussprache
that Sheridan had introduced, and that Walker was soon to reinforce, for his opinion of actors was almost as low as his opinion of political and theological rhetoricians.
⁴
He thus gave
powerful, if not always conscious support to the Northern British influences – always in favor of relatively precise utterance – that were operating upon American speech west of the Hudson, and he was supported in turn by the natural tendency of hard-driven pioneers to say what they had to say in very plain language, without airs and fopperies.
¹
The schoolma’am, without doubt, found it difficult to induce her pupils to speak with any elegance, just as her heirs (as we shall see anon) are finding it difficult today, but she at least taught them to articulate clearly and to pronounce words according to more or less logical patterns,
²
and in this benign endeavor her efforts were vastly facilitated by the popularity of the spelling-class and the spelling-bee, which broke up words into their component parts, and gave every part its full value.
³

It is easy, of course, to over-estimate such influences, and every pedagogue is well aware that the speech actually acquired by the young is determined not only by what they are taught in school but also by what they hear outside. But I think it is unwise to argue, as some linguists have done, that the schoolma’am is a mere bystander in the process of speech change.
⁴
She needs a favorable environment to work her will upon her charges, but in the United States she has always had it, for Americans, from the days of their
beginning, have vastly esteemed so-called education and accepted precept and example so docilely that their culture has inclined more and more toward a nation-wide uniformity. As year chases year they tend in ever increasing multitudes to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, live in houses of the same sort, follow the same recreations, admire the same mountebanks, fear the same hobgoblins, cherish the same hallucinations and delusions, and speak the same language. That language is now being studied as it was never studied before, but in all probability a considerable time must yet pass before we attain to a really sound knowledge of its origins and growth.

The beginnings of this prevailing speech of the country, as opposed to the New England and Southern varieties, apparently date from the Revolution,
¹
but until the closing years of the Eighteenth Century it seems to have attracted little notice, either from purists at home or from visiting Englishmen. Even the alert and far from amiable John Witherspoon, writing from his rectoral stool at Princeton in 1781,
²
had little to say about the pronunciation of Americans, but confined himself to their grammatical and semantic innovations. And what little he said was mainly favorable, perhaps because he was a Scotsman and hence no partisan of the currently fashionable form of Southern English. “The vulgar in America,” he allowed, “speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain, for a very obvious reason,
viz
., that being much more unsettled and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology.” His chief complaint was laid, not against this speech of “the vulgar” as he had encountered it in the Middle Colonies, but against the more pretentious discourse of the presumably educated classes. “I have heard in this country,” he said, “in the senate, at the bar and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of
rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain.”
¹
But even here he was flogging what he presumed to be errors in usage, not errors in pronunciation. The same may be said for the English reviewers who loosed their torrent of objurgation toward the end of the century. They were dealing with written, not spoken American, and in consequence they lavished their scorn upon such American contributions to the vocabulary as
reliable, lengthy, bogus, to donate, to advocate, to progress, balance
(in the sense of remainder) and
to jeopardize
, and had nothing to say about the flat
a
or the resurrected
r
.

It remained for native Americans to set up the doctrine that the only right way to speak English was the ever-changing way of the English upper classes. Benjamin Franklin, despite his heterodoxy in other respects, seems to have inclined to this idea, perhaps because he had spent so much time in England,
²
and it was apparently supported more or less by the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres organized in New York in 1820, with John Quincy Adams as its president.
³
Irving, always eager for English notice and favor, ran the same way, and so, after a somewhat timorous show of independence, did Cooper. Nor is there any evidence that any other American authors of the pre-Civil War era greatly resented the notion that spoken American, save for the differences in vocabulary, should conform to English standards, though Edward Everett and George Ticknor objected to the patronizing air of Englishmen who favored it, and Walt Whitman, characteristically substituting hopes for observation, predicted that Americans would eventually become “the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world – and the most perfect users of words.”
⁴
But all these writers scarcely more than played with the subject, and their acquiescence in the
theory that the speech standards of England should also prevail in America was mainly only tacit. The first Americans to give the language of the country what might be reasonably described as serious study were William C. Fowler and George P. Marsh, the former of whom published “The English Language in its Elements and Forms” in 1850, and the latter of whom followed with “Lectures on the English Language” in 1859. Fowler, who was a son-in-law to Noah Webster, was professor of rhetoric at Amherst and the first Northern pedagogue to undertake courses in Old English.
¹
Marsh was a Vermonter who went in for politics and rose to high office, but had many outside interests and among other things tried to introduce the camel into the United States. Fowler distinguished between the language of New England, that of the South, and that of the rising West, but predicted that “the system of school education, and the use of the same textbooks in the institutions of learning, and of the same periodicals and reading books in families – in short, the mighty power of the press” would eventually iron out these differences and make “the people of America one in language as one in government.”
²
He was willing to be polite to English example on the higher levels of speech – that of “the best authors and public speakers” – but he argued that “the great mass of the people of the United States speak and write their vernacular tongue with more correctness than the common people of England.” Marsh took much the same position, but he noted that “a marked difference of accent” was already separating the speech of the two countries. This separation he deplored, saying,

But this, after all, was hardly more than a flourish of rhetoric, characteristic of the time and buried in the last pages of a long book, and it would be unjust to accuse Marsh of advocating an abject conformity to English standards. The first to do that in an all-out and undisguised manner was another amateur philologian, and one whose influence, for a good many years, was greater than that of Marsh or even of Fowler. He was Richard Grant White. In his “Words and Their Uses,” undertaken immediately after the Civil War,
¹
he apologized most humbly for his occasional criticisms of English usage, saying that “no insinuation of a superiority in the use of their mother tongue by men of English race in ‘America’ is intended, no right to set up an independent standard is implied.”
²
And then he proceeded to formulate a criterion:

To which he added in 1876, in a magazine article entitled “American Pronunciation of English”:
⁴

White republished this paper in a second volume, “Every-Day English,” in 1881, but omitted the passage I have just quoted. He made up for it, however, with the following:

White was challenged by a number of other writers on speech, notably Fitzedward Hall and G. Washington Moon, but the most refined opinion of his time seems to have supported him, and his books remained authorities for many years. “Words and Their Uses,” indeed, was the
Stammvater
of all the cocksure treatises on “correct” English which still appear in large numbers, and are accepted gravely by the innocent.
²
The schoolma’am followed it dutifully for more than a generation, either at first hand or at second, third or fourth, and the super-gogues who trained and indoctrinated her seldom showed any doubt of its fundamental postulates. It received a heavy reinforcement in 1905, when Henry James, the novelist, broke his voluntary exile in England long enough to harangue the year’s graduating class at Bryn Mawr College on the evils of American speech.
³
James was no phonologist, and it was apparent that his notion of the speechways of his native land was
picked up, not by direct observation,
¹
but by a study of the barbarisms credited to Americans in the English comic papers,
e.g., popper, vanillar, vurry, Amurrica, tullegram
and even
Philadulphia
. He had, however, high prestige as a writer and imitated very effectively the lofty air of an Oxford don, so his ill-natured remarks made a considerable impression. He did not argue categorically that Americans should adopt English speechways – indeed, he made it plain that he believed that any such cultural ascent was beyond their poor powers –, but he at least indicated clearly that he thought their own were ignorant, uncouth and against God. If asked, he said, to define what he meant by speaking badly, “I might reply to you, very synthetically [
sic
], that I mean … speaking as millions and millions of supposedly educated, supposedly civilized persons – that is the point – of both sexes, in our great country, habitually, persistently, imperturbably, and I think for the most part all unwittingly, speak.” He then proceded to rehearse his specimens of American speech from the English comic papers, and to denounce the American
r
as “a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth” and a “signal specimen of what becomes of a custom of utterance out of which the principle of taste has dropped,” leaving in the air the conclusion that the only road to linguistic decency lay through its obliteration as in England, and the adoption of all the other refinements of Oxford English. This pronunciamento, despite its donkeyishness, was politely received in pedagogical circles, and so late as 1916, Fred Newton Scott was telling the schoolma’ams, male and female, of the National Council of Teachers of English, that “almost everyone who touches upon American speech assumes that it is inferior to British speech.”
²