American Language Supplement 2 (40 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
Culturally and historically, Vermont has always been closer to New York than to eastern New England, and that fact is reflected in its speech.
1
The
r
in such words as
barn
and
four
is clearly sounded
2
in the western part of the State; the flat
a
is common, even in
aunt
,
3
and the vocabulary, save for some archaisms, seems to be mainly identical with that of General American. Rather curiously, the Vermont dialect has been very little studied. Indeed, the only report on it that I have encountered is but a fragment, and deals exclusively with the speech of the southernmost part of the State, bordering on western Massachusetts.
4
It shows no terms not to be found in other places. Even Calvin Coolidge’s use of
to choose
in his famous “I do not
choose
to run”
5
has been reported from places as far distant as Alabama.
6
Some of the peculiarities of Virginia speech were noted before the Revolution – for example, by Philip Vickers Fithian, a young Princeton graduate who served as tutor to the children of Robert Carter on the great estate of Nomini Hall near Richmond in 1773 and 1774.
1
Others were recorded by Noah Webster in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” published in Boston in 1789,
2
by John Pickering in his “Vocabulary” of 1816, by Robley Dunglison in the
Virginia Literary Museum
in 1829, by Mrs. Anne Royall in her “Letters From Alabama” in 1830,
3
and by uncounted lesser observers during the years before the Civil War.
4
In later times there has been a great deal of writing on the subject, beginning with a paper by Sylvester Primer, “The Pronunciation of Fredericksburg,” published in 1890,
5
and including two whole books, B. W. Green’s “Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech”
6
and Edwin Francis Shewmake’s “English Pronunciation in Virginia,”
7
and a pamphlet,
Phyllis J. Nixon’s “Glossary of Virginia Words.”
1
Virginia speech is also dealt with in Elizabeth Jeannette Dearden’s “Word Geography of the South Atlantic States,” already noticed under Maryland and North Carolina, and there are studies of it in the philological literature by W. Cabell Greet,
2
Argus Tresidder,
3
G. G. Laubscher,
4
Guy S. Lowman, Jr.,
5
George P. Wilson,
6
A. P. Man, Jr.,
7
Chad Walsh,
8
Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr.,
9
J. Wilson McCutchan,
10
L. R. Dingus,
11
Richard H. Thornton,
12
C. Alphonso Smith,
13
Atcheson L. Hench,
14
and C. M. Woodward.
15
Three main speech areas are commonly distinguished in Virginia – that of the Tidewater dialect, which runs up to the fall-line on the rivers; that of General Lowland Southern, which covers the Piedmont, and that of Appalachia. There are a number of small speech pockets, but they are not important. One is to be found in Gloucester county, in a small peninsula called Guinea Neck, between
the York and Severn rivers at their mouths. This remote region is said to have been settled by Hessian prisoners disbanded at Yorktown, but no trace of German influence remains in its speech, which resembles, according to Greet,
1
that of Charleston, S. C. The inhabitants are fishermen, and there are no Negroes. One of the local peculiarities is the exaggerated use of singular nouns in the plural, as in
two doctor
. Another is the pronunciation of
here
as
hee
, with no trace of the
r
remaining and no substitution of
ah
. Another area of aberrant speech is the Shenandoah Valley, where terms and pronunciations borrowed from Pennsylvania, from Appalachia and from the Piedmont have been mingled with Tidewater. The speech of the Piedmont, according to Miss Deardon, “is more closely related to Tidewater than to mountain speech,” mainly because the area was settled from the coast, and not by the movement of population down the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge. The chief dialect boundary in the State, she says, “runs north and south parallel to the Blue Ridge.” It enters the State between Frederick and Loudon counties, the first of which borders on West Virginia and the second on Maryland, and crosses the North Carolina line in the vicinity of Danville. It runs well to the east of the mountains in the southern part of the State.
Green’s “Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech,” a volume of 530 pages,
2
lists about 7200 terms and is thus the largest State glossary ever published. Green, who hailed from Warwick county on the James, not far from its mouth, in what is called the Lower Peninsula, dealt mainly with Tidewater speech, and found it heavy with archaisms. “It seems to resemble,” he said, “the standard English of the time that the first immigrants came to the country, and there has been no foreign mixture, as the comers were English and few or none have come from other parts of the United States.” Unhappily, his enormous word-list is by no means confined to Virginia localisms; on the contrary, it is burdened with many words and usages that are common to the vulgar speech of the whole country. In a number of cases, however, he records locutions that have not been noted elsewhere,
e.g., akerel
, a man’s given-name;
aquecope
,
an enlarged spleen following malaria;
berlue
, a noise or racket (from
hullabaloo?
);
by-blow
, a bastard;
drabbletail
, a slattern;
goer-by
, a passer-by;
hang-by
, a hanger-on;
minister’s face
, the upper part of a hog’s head, less the ears, nose and jowl;
smicket
, a small amount, and
to yuck
, to yank or jerk.
Man’s word-list of 1914 was gathered between 1901 and 1907 in Louisa county, in the Piedmont region of the center of the State, northwest of Richmond. He noted that
air
and
hour
were both pronounced
aiah
, that
few
was used in the sense of any small amount, as in “a
few
mashed potatoes,” that
on
was used before designations of time, as in
on yesterday
and
on last week
,
1
that hobgoblins were called
bineys
or
evils
, and that the local underprivileged were given to a number of curious outrages upon the normal conjugation of verbs, e.g., “
I’m is
the one.” Dingus’s list of 1915 came from the Clinch Valley in Scott county, in the far southwestern corner of the State, and thus showed mainly Appalachian terms,
e.g., fire-board
, a mantlepiece;
Good Man
, God;
holler-horn
, a disease among cattle, supposed to be cured by boring holes in their horns;
to lumber
, to make a loud noise;
new ground
, virgin land;
to norate
, to gossip;
piece
, a short distance;
rise of
, slightly more than, and
skift
, a light fall of snow. Dingus noted the usual Appalachian euphemisms,
e.g., male
for
bull
and
male-hog
for
boar
, and added one that seemed to be indigenous –
boar-cat
for
Tom-cat
. He added some notes on the phonology and syntax of the local speech. The
a
in closed syllables, he said, was invariably that of
man
, and at the end of a syllable it became the neutral vowel. The unaccented
o
at the end of words became
er
, with “the
r
always heard, even if it is indistinct.” “Present participles used attributively are compared as other adjectives,
e.g., runnin’er
horse,
singingest
girl,
grown upest, worn outest
.” Laubscher, in 1916, recorded
either
in the sense of
instead
at Lynchburg, as in “You can do that
either
,” apparently a sign of Pennsylvania influence by way of the Shenandoah Valley. Thornton, commenting upon Dingus’s word-list, found in it “survivals of pure Elizabethan English preserved among the mountains of southwestern Virginia for three centuries,” and cited
agin
as a conjunction,
hope
as a variant of the old preterite
holp
, and
dremp
for
dreamed
.
Shewmake’s “English Pronunciation in Virginia,” unlike Green’s “Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech,” is confined to the speech of the State, and though it deals almost wholly with what is here called Tidewater, it attempts to differentiate between different speech levels, running from that of the educated gentry at the top to that of the most ignorant country Negroes at the bottom. “The city of Richmond,” he says,
is regarded as the speech center of the territory in which the Virginia dialect prevails, though dwellers in other cities of eastern Virginia, as well as many rural folk of the same region, may speak this dialect in an equally representative way.… It would be inaccurate to say that the Virginia dialect is traceable in any marked way to Negro influence, for the details that make it up are, in the main, either different from typical Negro English or else are clearly derived from other sources.… Virginians are distinguished from other Americans less easily by their vocabulary than by their pronunciation. A speaker may talk for an hour without using many words or constructions that are not standard, but his peculiarities of pronunciation will reveal themselves in almost every sentence that he utters.
1
Shewmake lists the more significant of these peculiarities as follows:
1. The insertion of the “glide or vanishing
y
-sound between
g
and
a
in words like
garden
and
garment
, between
c
or
k
and
a
in such words as
card
and
carpet
, and after
c
or
k
in words of the type of
sky
and
kind
.… It is heard chiefly in the speech of men and women of the older generation belonging to some of the old, highly cultured families.”
2
2. “The great majority of Virginians pronounce … words like
path
and
dance
… with the sound that
a
has in
man
, but the pronunciation with the so-called broad or Italian or Cavalier
a
and also that which includes what is known as intermediate
a
3
are both heard at times.”
3. “The so-called standard pronunciation of diphthongal
ou
is approximately that of
a
in
father
plus that of
oo
in
pool
or possibly that of
oo
in
foot
, but the pronunciation heard in Eastern Virginia is approximately that of
u
in
hut
plus the same sound used in standard pronunciation for the second part of the diphthong.… Typical eastern Virginia speech includes those who pronounce
about, house
and
out
with dialectal
ou
, and
crowd, how
and
loud
with standard
ou
.”
Uh-oo
is used “when the diphthong is immediately followed in the same syllable by the sound of a voiceless consonant, but under all other conditions standard
ah-oo
is employed.”
4. “The standard sound of the diphthong … in such words as
bright, like
and
price
… is that of
a
in
father
plus that of
i
in
pin;
the dialectal sound is approximately that of
u
in
hut
plus that of
i
in
pin
.” This dialectal sound occurs when the diphthong is followed immediately by a voiceless consonant,
e.g., advice, bite
and
life
, and when it is followed in the next syllable by a voiceless consonant and an obscure vowel,
e.g., cipher, hyphen, rifle
and
viper
. In other cases the standard diphthong is heard,
e.g.
, in
alibi, dialect, bridle, typhoid, advise
.
5. “The substitution of
n
for
ng
in unaccented syllables pervades almost all levels of speech in Virginia.”
6. Following the
a
of
father
, the
e
of
her
, the
o
of
or
and the
u
of
fur, r
“is not sounded at all.”
1
Initial or medial
r
preceded by any other vowel becomes a sort of neutral vowel. In other situations it has its full sound.
7. The following words have the sound of
oo
in
pool: aloof, boot, groom, proof, rooster, root, soon, spook
and
spoon
. The following have the sound of
u
in
pull: butcher, coop, Cooper, hoop, Hooper, nook
and
rook
. “The rest vary with different speakers:
broom, hoof, room
.”
8. “Virginians share the general lack of uniformity in pronouncing
God, log
and
fog
. Though the
aw-
or
au
-sound, or an approach to it, is often noticed, many, if not most Virginians use the short
o
-sound, as in
hot
.”
2
