American Language Supplement 2 (45 page)

The dialect of Labrador was discussed in papers by Mary S. Evans in 1903
²
and William Duncan Strong in 1931.
³
Miss Evans visited Fox Harbor on Lewis Bay, the southernmost large indentation on the Labrador peninsula, during the Summer of 1926. She found surviving many words and phrases that had been reported by an early explorer, George Cartwright, in 1792. She listed, among others,
to give a passage
, to give a lift in a boat, however short;
lop
, a wave;
puff-up
, the birth of a child, and
tickle
, a narrow neck of water.
He
, she said, was in common use for
it
, as in “I’ll take
he”
(meaning any inanimate object).
Uncle
and
aunt
were applied to all elderly persons, every girl was a
maid
, and girls and boys used
my son
in addressing their younger brothers. Strong, who visited northern Labrador in 1927–28, added
lund
, quiet;
tidy
, swift;
scrammed
, almost frozen, and
chronic
, a gnarled tree, beside some curious names for the local fauna and flora. He said that in northern Labrador
she
was often used for
it
instead of
he
, as in “Put
she
in a bag,” referring to a struggling fish.

The dialect of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, which was settled by Germans in the Eighteenth Century, has been studied by a competent phonologist, M. B. Emeneau, of Yale.
⁴
German is no longer spoken there, but it is still understood by a few oldsters and its influence upon the local speech remains evident. Some of the examples cited by Emeneau are
what for
(Ger.
was für
);
to make
in the sense of to prepare, as a meal;
to get awake
(Ger.
wach werden
);
with
used as an adverb after
to go
and
to come
(Ger.
mitgehen
);
off
similarly used after verbs signifying cleaning (Ger.
abwaschen
);
all
used in place of
all gone; apple-snits
(Ger.
schnitte
);
lapish
, insipid
(Ger.
láppisch
);
klotsy
, heavy or soggy (Ger.
klotzig
);
to fress
, to eat greedily (Ger.
fressen
);
hexed
, bewitched (Ger.
hexen
);
to grunt
, to complain (Ger.
grunzen
);
shimmel
, a very blond person (Ger.
schimmel
, a white mould), and
Fassnakday
, Shrove Tuesday (Ger.
Fastnacht
). Emeneau reports that all these loans show signs of dying out. The dialect has, in general, the characters of the general speech of Canada, and especially of Nova Scotia,
e.g.
, the tendency to change the diphthong of
how
into one made up of
o
and
u
, so that
couch
and
coach
become homonyms. But it drops the
r
in nearly all situations after verbs, whereas the letter is commonly sounded in the rest of Canada.
¹

The speech of the Dominion, and especially of the eastern part is now being investigated in a scientific manner by Henry Alexander, professor of the English language and literature at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont., with a view to the preparation of a volume for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. He is the author of an excellent short manual on the development of English, “The Story of Our Language,”
²
and made a preliminary report on his field work at the Chicago meeting of the American Dialect Society in December, 1945. His researches on the coast of Nova Scotia, during World War II, provided proof that even philology has its dangers, and may some day have its martyrs. His questioning of local informants aroused the suspicion of the Army and Navy patrols guarding the coast against Hitler, and when he was arrested and a copy of the International Phonetic Alphabet was found upon him it was assumed to be some sort of code. Fortunately, he was finally brought before a naval officer who recognized this sinister-looking alphabet, and when he proved that he was an Englishman by birth and an Oxford man and that he had no police record in Kingston, he was liberated with nothing worse than a warning to sin no more.
³

In one of his invaluable historical papers Allen Walker Read has shown that the Americans of fifty years before the Revolution were already acutely aware of the existence among them of groups speaking English with tell-tale brogues and accents.
¹
That awareness,
indeed, must have gone back to at least a century before, for it is hard to imagine that the Indians who picked up the language of the Colonists at Plymouth and Jamestown learned to speak it correctly overnight, and before the middle of the Seventeenth Century the English were in frequent contact with Frenchmen and Dutchmen. Later came Swedes, Germans and Spaniards, and meanwhile the nascent Americans began to notice that the Scotch, Irish and Welsh immigrants who came in,
¹
and even some of the English,
²
spoke in ways that were not their own. By 1775 the Southern Negro began to be differentiated in speech, by 1797 the rustic Yankee, and after the War of 1812 the Westerner.
³
After the great Irish immigration of the late 40s and the German immigration which followed it the Irishman
⁴
and the German became standard types in American comedy, alongside the Negro minstrel introduced by Thomas D. Rice (1808–60) in the 30s. They were followed, in the 50s, by the Chinaman, and in later years by the Scandinavian, the Italian and the Jew. So early as 1823 James Fenimore Cooper had attempted German, French, Irish, English and Negro dialects in “The Pioneers,” though he made his Indians speak conventional English.
⁵
But there had been an attempt to render Indian English in a serious book published in 1675, to wit:

German dialect apparently got its first literary recognition in 1856, when Charles Godfrey Leland wrote the earliest of his long series of “Hans Breitmann” ballads to fill an unexpected gap in
Graham’s Magazine
. These ballads were very popular during the Civil War, and Leland continued to bring out volumes of them until 1895.
²
They were imitated by Charles Follen Adams, with almost equal success, in a “Leedle Yawcob Strauss” series which ran from 1877 to 1910. Here is a specimen of the dialect that both used:

This stanza and the three that follow in the text well exhibit the earmarks of the German-American dialect as it was then understood,
e.g.
, the change of
ch
to
sh
, of
b
to
p
, of
p
, to
b
, of
th
to
d
, of
t
to
dt
, of
d
to
t
, of
v
to
f
and of
w
to
v
, the diphthongization of
o
, and the tendency to put verbs and adverbs at the ends of sentences.
⁴
In the 70s the so-called Dutch comedian became a popular figure on the American stage, and during the 80s and 90s that was a
rare burlesque show or vaudeville which did not present at least one specimen of him.
¹
He perished in World War I, though perhaps not altogether in consequence of it, for the Irish, Scandinavian and Negro comic characters perished with him, and the Jew moved from the stage to books. In 1913 or thereabout Kurt M. Stein, of Chicago, began contributing doggerels written in a different German dialect to Bert Leston Taylor’s column in the Chicago
Tribune
. This dialect was not an English filled with Germanisms, but a German filled with Americanisms. A specimen:

These verses were well liked by the readers of the
Tribune
, and especially by the Germans among them, and they continued to appear until the entrance of the United States into World War I made everything German taboo. They were resumed after the war, and in 1925 a Chicago publisher brought out a volume under the title of “Die Schönste Lengevitch.” It was an immediate success, and was followed by “Gemixte Pickles” in 1927 and “Limburger Lyrics” in 1932.

Since 1909, when the late Montague Glass’s “Potash and Perl-mutter” stories began to appear in the
Saturday Evening Post
, the speech of the immigrant Jews of New York, popular on the stage since the 90s, has been the dialect most cultivated by American comic writers,
e.g.
, Arthur Kober, Leo Calvin Rosten (Leonard Q. Ross) and Milt Gross.
²
It has been studied by Robert J. Menner,
³
Dolores Benardete,
¹
C. K. Thomas,
²
Robert Sonkin
³
and Alter Brody.
⁴
Menner says that Gross’s transcription is as accurate “as our poor alphabet will allow.” One of the chief marks of the dialect is its change of the short
i
, as in
bit
, to the long
e
, as in
beet
, and
vice versa
. Says Menner:

In the same way and for the same reason the speaker of this dialect confuses and interchanges the sound of
e
in
bed
and that of
a
in
bad
, so that
rang
becomes
reng
and
hat
becomes
het
. Again, the
o
of
don’t
and the
u
of
run
are exchanged, so that
don’t
becomes
dunt
and
punch
becomes
ponch
. Miss Benardete lists the following additional vowel changes: the
au
-sound in
mouth
becomes the
a
-sound of
mark
or the
o
-sound of
bow
, so that
down
becomes
dahn
and
now
becomes
no;
the
o
-sound of
not
is so shortened that it comes close to the
u
-sound of
cup
, so that
was
sounds like
vus;
the
au
-sound in
Maud
also turns into a kind of
u
, so that
yourself
is
yuself
and
because
is
bikus;
the
u
-sound of
cup
becomes an
a
-sound, so that
such
is
sahtsh
and up is
ahp
, and the vowel in
her
is changed to
oi
, so that
girl
is
goil
and
worth
is
woith
. Among the consonants
v
is changed to
f,w to v, v to w, d
and the
th
of
bath
to
t
, the
th
of
that
to
d
, and
g
to
k
.

In their valuable handbook for character actors
¹
Lew and Marguerite Shalett Herman describe all of the foregoing traits of the dialect, along with a number of others. In the initial position, they say,
d
is pronounced as in English, but in the medial position it changes to
t
, as in
rettesh
(radish), and at the end of a word, if preceded by another consonant, it is commonly dropped, as in
kain
(kind). The
k
that is substituted for
g
in the medial and terminal positions varies with the birthplace of the speaker: the German Jews make its sound that of
gk
, but the Eastern Jews use a plain
k
. In the initial position it remains
g
.
J
is often converted into
tch
, as in
tchahtch
for
judge
. In the combination
ng
the
g
is often sounded more clearly than by Americans, so that
singer
rhymes precisely with
finger
. At the beginning of a word
r
is usually pronounced correctly, but on occasion it may be preceded by the neutral vowel, so that
ribbon
becomes
uhreeb’n
. In the medial position, when followed by a vowel and another consonant, it is omitted, as in
pok
for
park
, but when followed by a vowel alone it is always sounded, as in
breenk
(bring). In the terminal position it is always dropped. The Lithuanian Jews, say the Hermans, have difficulty with
sh
and
tch
. The former is usually unvoiced, so that
fish
becomes
fees
, and the latter is reduced to
ts
, so that
bachelor
becomes
betseleh
. Most of the grammatical and syntactical peculiarities of Yiddish-American are common to the vulgar speech of the whole country,
e.g.
, the confusion of tenses, the use of
to lay
for
to lie
, the chronic misuse of
shall
and
will
and the substitution of
what
for
that
, as in “The girl
what
I seen.” But it also has some aberrations of its own,
e.g.
, the substitution of
stood
for
stayed
, as in “He
stood
in bed”; the addition of an unnecessary auxiliary, as in “
Did
the work was
did?
”; the inversion of subject and predicate, as in “Was coming many peoples”; the omission of
of
, as in “Three kinds meat”; the use of
might
for
maybe
, as in “
Might
he will come”; the omission of
there
, as in “Is two men on the corner?” the substitution of
by
for
at
, as in “I was
by
his house”; the use of
as
following
better
, and the use of
mine
for
my
.
²