American Language Supplement 2 (42 page)

In 1935 Hamill Kenny called attention to the prevalence of
to
in West Virginia folk-speech in places where Standard English uses other prepositions, as in “He spent a day
to
us,” “I have a fear
to
water,” “We stayed
to
home,” “I had a course
to
(
i.e., under
) Professor Blank,” etc. He said that this last use was frequent in the colleges of the State. Wentworth calls it peculiar to West Virginia and southeastern Ohio, but lists examples of the use of
to
in place of
at, with, on, of, for
and
in
from Maine to Florida. In 1936 Dean B. Lyman, of the University of West Virginia, sent
American Speech
some idioms from southeastern West Virginia, in the Appalachian speech-area,
e.g., any more
without a negative, as in “The store is closed
any more”; at all
used in the same way, as in “We had the best time
at all”;
the use of the long
e
in such words as
condition, position, wish
, making them
condeetion, poseetion, weesh;
²
the use of
hope
for
wish
, as in “I
hope
you good luck”; and the inversion represented by “I
hope how soon
I’ll see you,” meaning “I hope I’ll see you soon.”
³
In 1939 John T. Krumpelmann followed with some locutions picked up at Huntington, on the Ohio river,
⁴
the metropolis of the State,
e.g., to beal
, to suppurate;
budget
, a package, and
want
without the infinitive, as in “The dog
wants out
.” The former two are common in other parts of the country, and the last is Pennsylvania German. Krumpelmann likewise noted the
change of the short
i
to a long one in
condeetion, feesh
, etc., and added the change of
u
to
oo
before
sh
, as in
poosh
(push) and
cooshion
(cushion).
¹
I am told by Mr. C. E. Smith, of the Fairmont
Times
, that
feesh, deesh
and
poosh
are heard also in Fairmont, which is in the north central part of the State, not far from the Pennsylvania line.
²
In Nicholas county, in the center of the State, according to another correspondent,
³
grist
is so pronounced that it rhymes with
Christ
.

The population of West Virginia is greatly mixed, with persons of Virginia origin probably predominating in the early strata, but with considerable elements of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio stock mingled with them, and, in recent years, of immigrant Irish, Italians and Poles. In Taylor county, of which Grafton is the chief town, and in the adjoining Barbour county, there is an ancient settlement of mixed bloods known locally as the Guineas. Some of them claim to be of Dutch and Indian blood, but they show a Negro strain and a few of their surnames suggest German ancestry. There is an excellent study of them by William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
⁴

On account of the eminence of the Milwaukee brewers Wisconsin is commonly thought of by Americans outside its bounds as a strongly German State, but as a matter of fact it was first settled by people from western New York, New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. The Germans, who began to filter in in 1839, did not come in large numbers until the middle 40s, and they were preceded by Norwegians and closely followed by Dutch, Czechs, Swedes and Poles. Dr. Frederic G. Cassidy, of the University of Wisconsin, who undertook a survey of the State for the Linguistic
Atlas, is of the opinion that these immigrants have had but little influence upon the local speechways, save in isolated communities. He says:

Cassidy, whose doctorate comes from the University of Michigan, was trained in field work there under Marckwardt, and after experience in Michigan and Ohio gathered the Wisconsin material singlehanded. It comes from 25 communities, covering all parts of the State. It will not be published as a whole until the Great Lakes and Ohio valley section of the Linguistic Atlas is completed. In 1923 Howard J. Savage printed a brief word-list of Wisconsin speech,
²
but it showed only a small number of terms not in common use elsewhere,
e.g., elm-peeler
, a poor white;
fuskit
, an old army musket;
hi-open-bopens
, Fourth of July merrymakers;
mule-foot
, a hog with undivided hoofs;
penadie
, bread crumbs with butter, sugar and hot water;
smooth-bore
, a worthless fellow;
splint-shin
, a strain of the leg muscles, and
yelper
, a young turkey. Savage also listed some local metaphors,
e.g., to take his commission
, to castrate, and
to tip over
, to die. In 1940 Cassidy printed a few locutions in
American Speech
,
³
but they were mainly terms familiar, in some form or other, elsewhere.
⁴
In 1947 an immigrant from New Jersey contributed to the Milwaukee
Journal
the following observations on Wisconsin speech:

One native, commenting upon this Jerseyman’s strictures in the
Journal
, declared that the peculiarities noted were confined to Milwaukee, where “even teachers and radio announcers are not free from local errors.”
²
Another,
pace
Cassidy, blamed the influence of various foreign groups. “We are,” he said, “a melting pot and speak a mixed language with disregard for correct English.”
³

The first to report on the speech of what is now Wyoming
⁴
was P. W. Norris, superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park.
⁵
In 1884, in a book called “The Calumet of the Coteau,”
⁶
he included “A Glossary of Indian Names, Words and Western Provincialisms,”
⁷
and thought it necessary to define, for the benefit of Easterners, a number of terms that are now familiar to every American schoolboy,
e.g., badlands, butte, cañon, geyser, mustang
and
pemmican
.
⁸
He also included some Indian words, from the Chinook and other dialects, that have since dropped out of use or become localisms,
e.g., illahi
, my country;
ka
, no;
kamook
, a dog;
kokosh
, pork;
manonim
, wild rice;
odeona
, a village;
siwash
, a male Indian;
skookum
, brave, and
tillacume
, enemies. In 1911 Helen Bruner and Frances Francis contributed to
Dialect Notes
“A Short Word List
From Wyoming”
¹
made up chiefly of cattlemen’s terms,
e.g., biscuit-shooter
, a camp cook;
²
dogie
, a motherless calf;
cavvies
, stray cattle, and
pail-feed
, a calf raised on skim milk. There is a much longer vocabulary of the cattlemen in the Wyoming volume of the American Guide Series.
³

A curious speech-pocket has been reported on the Hilliard Flats in a valley in the Southwestern corner of the State, near the Utah line.
⁴
The inhabitants of this remote region are the descendants of English coal-miners who got converted to Mormonism in the early 80s, came to Utah in search of salvation, and were put to work in coal-mines not far from their present home. In 1895 there was an explosion in the mines which killed about a hundred of them, and the rest departed for Hilliard Flats, resolved to become farmers. Their speech still shows signs of their English origin. They drop their
h
’s, add a final
r
to such words as
law
, and preserve a number of Briticisms, especially of the Nottinghamshire dialect,
e.g., dag
, a helping;
to dout
, to put out a fire;
hillins
, bed-clothing;
to marb
, to growl or grumble;
to piggle
, to pull or tug nervously;
to siden
, to put in order, and
to teem
, to pour from one vessel into another. They use
sempt
for
seemed, tret
for
treated
and
wed
for
weeded
.

The Klondike gold rush of 1897 made all Americans familiar with a number of Alaskan terms,
e.g., sourdough
and to
mush
, but few if any of them originated in Alaska. Some came from the Indian languages or from Eskimo or Aleut, others were heritages from the French-Canadian trappers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and yet others were simply Western mining terms.
⁵
After Pearl Harbor there was another and vastly larger influx of Americans
made up of soldiers and construction workers, and the population of the Territory is now much greater than it was in 1940. Inasmuch as these newcomers hail from all parts of the United States, the local speech has become inordinately mixed and its earlier vocabulary has been enriched both by importations and by neologisms coined on the spot. One of the latter appears to be
no-see-um
, a biting insect too small to be seen.
¹
Of the survivors from pre-Pearl Harbor days a good example is
mukluk
, defined in an advertisement of an Army supply house as boots made of tanned leather bottoms and canvas-duck tops, with a heavy felt lining and a laminated felt and leather sole.
²
Mr. Charles F. Dery, of Whitehorse, Y.T., who has been investigating speechways on both sides of the Alaska-Yukon border, reports that the newcomers have brought in terms from far-distant American dialects,
e.g., link
as the singular of
lynx
, which is mistaken for a plural, and
mad-ax
for
mattock
from Appalachia;
till
for
to
, as in “a quarter
till
seven,” from Pennsylvania, and
wait on
from the South.
³

There is a somewhat full account of the American English of Hawaii in AL4 pp. 372–77, based on studies by William C. Smith
⁴
and John E. and Aiko Tokimasa Reinecke
⁵
and an article by a correspondent of the Christian Science
Monitor
.
⁶
English began to be taught in the schools of the islands so long ago as 1853, but the polyglot strata in the native speech of the population, to wit, Polynesian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and various kinds and levels of English, has made the work of the schoolma’am difficult. Some of the syntactical eccentricities encountered are listed in a series of test papers for pupils in the elementary grades, prepared by Madorah E. Smith and W. B. Coale and published by the
University of Hawaii. Among them are difficulties with word order.
e.g.
, “I feed
every day the rooster
” and “We
together went home
”; with number,
e.g.
, “The boys
is
here,” “Give
a
food to my pet” and “There were four
childs”;
with tense,
e.g.
, “I
bring
it tomorrow,” “I began to
fell
asleep” and “He did not
ran
”; with prepositions,
e.g.
, “I must
to go to
Honolulu,” “It’s his turn
for do
that,” “I attend
to
school every day” and “My sister
stays Japan
”; with the articles,
e.g.
, “I must go to
the bed
,” and with various common idioms,
e.g.
, “
Lend
me look at the paper,” “Give me
a
chalk,” “I want to come
big
” and “We had
a
good
fun
.” A number of Hawaiian locutions survive,
e.g., “Hemo
(take away) this desk” and “I go home
pau
(after) school,”
¹
and there are English words and phrases that afflict the schoolma’am,
e.g.
, “We laughed
like hell
.” A curious habit of using geographical terms or their derivatives in place of the points of the compass,
e.g., waikiki, makai
and
ewa
, is noted in AL4, p. 377. Says Dr. Harold S. Palmer, professor of geology at the University of Hawaii: