American Language Supplement 2 (56 page)

1
Bilingualism in the Middle Colonies, 1725–1775,
American Speech
, April, 1937, pp. 93–99.

1
The English at home had been aware of the curious dialect of the Welsh since Elizabethan times, as is shown by the speeches of Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V,
c
. 1599,
e.g.
, “Got’s plood! Up to the preaches, you rascals! Will you not up to the preaches?” (Act III, sc. II). The Englishman’s French had been the butt of French humorists since the Middle Ages. See The Fabliau “Des Deux Anglois et de 1’Anel,” by Charles H. Livingston,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, June, 1925.

2
A Maryland court record of Sept. 11, 1762, printed in Documents Concerning Charles Willson Peale,
Maryland Historical Magazine
, Dec., 1938, p. 389, includes this: “She always understood and from his speech and pronunciation of his words believes he was an Englishman.”

3
Literary Dialects, in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. I, pp. 225–73. See also The American on the Stage,
Scribner’s Monthly
, July, 1879, pp. 321–33, and Minority Caricatures on the American Stage, by Harold E. Adams, in Studies in the Science of Society, a
Festschrift
in honor of Albert Galloway Keller, edited by George Peter Murdock; New Haven, 1937, pp. 1–27.

4
The best discussions of Irish-English that I know of are in English as We Speak It in Ireland, by P. W. Joyce; second edition; Dublin, 1910, and Irish Pronunciation of English, by Alexander J. Ellis, in his Early English Pronunciation; London, 1874, Vol. IV, pp. 1230–43.

5
Cooper’s Leatherstocking was given a dialect greatly resembling that of the contemporary Yankee. See The Dialect of Cooper’s Leatherstocking, by Louise Pound,
American Speech
, Sept., 1927, pp. 479–88.

1
The Present State of New England, by a merchant of Boston; London, 1675, p. 12. I take this from Krapp, who speculates as to the meaning of
stawmerre
and concludes that it is either an Indian corruption of
understand
or an Indian term of the same meaning.

2
He was an amateur philologist of some skill, and published books on Pidgin English and the language of Gypsies. In 1889–90 he and Albert Barrère brought out A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant in two volumes; revised edition, 1897. He was born in 1824 and died in 1903. He was a native of Philadelphia, and after being graduated from Princeton, spent three years at Heidelberg and Munich. He wrote more than fifty books, including translations from Heine and other German authors. His most popular book, Hans Breitmann’s Barty, was published in Philadelphia in 1868. In the preface to a subsequent English edition it is stated that the prototype of Breitmann was “one Jost, a German trooper of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry.” I am indebted here to Judge Robert France.

3
Mine Schildhood, by Adams,
Harper’s Magazine
, May, 1880, p. 952.

4
An earlier specimen of German dialect, in prose, is in the Editor’s Drawer of
Harper’s Magazine
, May, 1857, p. 859.

1
Lewis Maurice (Lew) Fields and Joseph Weber, his most successful impersonators, first tackled him as juvenile comedians in 1877. They organized their own company in 1885, and opened their music-hall in New York in 1895. Fields was born in 1877 and died in 1941.

2
Of these only Gross was born in the United States. Glass was of English birth, Kober is of Hungarian and Rosten is of Polish. Glass (1877–1934) published his first book of Potash and Perlmutter stories in 1910. Its characters were put into an enormously successful play in 1913. Kober and Rosten printed their stories in the
New Yorker
. Kober’s first book, Thunder Over the Bronx, was published in 1935. Rosten’s first, The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n, appeared in 1937, and Gross’s first, Nize Baby, in 1926.

3
Popular Phonetics,
American Speech
, June, 1929, pp. 410–16.

1
Immigrant Speech – Austrian-Jewish Style,
American Speech
, Oct., 1929, pp. 1–15.

2
Jewish Dialect and New York Dialect,
American Speech
, June, 1932, pp. 321–26.

3
In Re Jewish Dialect and New York Dialect,
American Speech
, Feb., 1933, pp. 78 and 79.

4
Yiddish in American Fiction,
American Mercury
, Feb., 1926, pp. 206–07.

1
Manual of Foreign Dialects for Radio, Stage and Screen; Chicago, 1943, pp. 392–416.

2
The Hermans’ book also contains illuminating chapters on the Cockney, Oxford, Australian, Bermudan, East Indian, Irish, Scottish, German, French, Mexican, Filipino, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, Lithuanian, Jugoslav, Czech, Finnish Hungarian, Polish and Greek dialects, and on Pidgin English.

1
Jewish Speech in British Fiction,
American Notes & Queries
, Aug., 1941, p. 73; Dec., 1941, p. 135; Jan., 1942, pp. 158–59; April, 1942, p. 16.

2
Says Albert Jay Nock in What Are Anthologies For?,
Encore
, Nov., 1944, p. 388: “This idiom has as distinct a place in American literary history as the French-English idiom of Louisiana as Mr. Cable presents it; the Negro-English idiom of the upper South as Mr. Harris presents it; and the German-English idiom of eastern Pennsylvania as you find it in ‘Harbaugh’s Harfe.’ ”

1
Notes on Negro Dialect in the American Novel to 1821,
American Speech
, April, 1930, pp. 291–96.

2
The first two volumes of this Part I were published in Philadelphia. A third followed in Pittsburgh a year later and a fourth in Philadelphia in 1797. In 1804 and 1805 two volumes of Part II appeared in Philadelphia. Brackenridge (1748–1816) was a Scotsman who was brought to America as a child, and graduated from Princeton in 1771. He was a chaplain in the Revolution but afterward took to the law and became a judge in Pittsburgh.

3
Some specimens are given by Krapp, Vol. I, pp. 255–65.

4
The English of the Negro,
American Mercury
, June, 1924, pp. 190–95.

1
The English Language in America, Vol. I, p. 253.

2
In The Truth About
You-all, American Mercury
, May, 1933, p. 116, Bertram H. Brown, denied that
am
is ever so used. “Any Southern Negro I ever heard speak,” he said, “would conjugate the present tense of the verb
to be
as follows:
l is; you is; he, she
or
it is; us is, you-all
(or
y’all)
is, they is.”
Krapp says in his
American Mercury
paper, before cited, that these are legacies from a northern English dialect. In Eloise,
American Speech
, June, 1932, pp. 349–64, Dolores Benardete gives the following conjugation of
to pray: ah prays, she pray, he pray, we prays, yuh prays, dey prays
.

3
I am indebted here to Mr. George W. Thompson.

4
e.g.
, Krapp, p. 250; Cleanth Brooks and L. W. Payne, Jr., quoted under Alabama, and W. Cabell Greet in Southern Speech, in Culture in the South, edited by E. T. Couch; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1934, p. 614

1
Said the late Grover C. Hall in a syndicated newspaper article, Feb. 2, 1936: “There are many similarities between the dialect of the unlettered Southerner and that of the unlettered Negro, but the differences are conspicuous to all sensitive ears.”

2
This approximation was noted by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, a Virginia lawyer, so early as 1836. See McDowell, before cited, p. 295.

3
See Krapp, Vol. I, p. 249; The Use of Negro Dialect by Harriet Beecher Stowe, by Tremaine McDowell,
American Speech
, June, 1931, pp. 322–26; The Vocabulary of the American Negro as Set Forth in Contemporary Literature, by Nathan van Patten, the same, Oct., 1931; The Negro in the Southern Novel Prior to 1850, by McDowell,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
, Oct., 1926, pp. 455–73; The Negro Character in American Literature, by John H. Nelson,
University of Kansas Humanistic Studies
, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1926; Poe’s Treatment of the Negro and of Negro Dialect, by Killis Campbell,
University of Texas Studies in English
, July, 1936, pp. 107–14, and The Philology of Negro Dialect, by Earl Conrad,
Journal of Negro Education
, Spring, 1944, pp. 150–54. But James Nathan Tidwell, in Mark Twain’s Representation of Negro Speech,
American Speech
, Oct., 1942, pp. 174–76, argues that the speech of Jim in Huckleberry Finn is accurately reported. H. A. Shands says in Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi, 1893, that
uh
is universally used by Mississippi Negroes in place of
er
, and that it is also the form of the indefinite article. “No sound of
r
,” he adds, “is ever apparent in the Negro pronunciation.”

4
It extends up the rivers for twenty miles or more. The origin of
Gullah
is disputed. It may come from
Gola
, the name of a tribe and language of the Liberian hinterland, or from
Ngola
, the name of a tribe in the Hamba basin of Angola.
Geechee
is probably from the name of another tribe and language of Liberia.

1
For example, W. Cabell Greet in Southern Speech, in Culture in the South, edited by W. T. Couch; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1934, p. 612; Reed Smith in Gullah,
Bulletin of the University of South Carolina
, Nov. 1, 1926, p. 32, and John Bennett in Gullah: a Negro Patois, Part I,
South Atlantic Quarterly
, Oct. 1908, p. 33.

2
Notes on the Sounds and Vocabulary of Gullah,
Publication of the American Dialect Society No
. 3, May, 1945, p. 23.

1
The difficulties that etymologists have had with
to tote
are described in Supplement I, pp. 208–10. Webster 1934 derives
buckra
from the Efik
mbakara
or
makara, yam
from the Senegal
inhame
, and
goober
from the Kongo
nguba
. It says that
canoe
is “of Arawakan or Cariban origin” and
chigger
“of Cariban origin.” It derives
voodoo
from the Ewe
vodu
through Creole French, and calls
hoodoo
an apparent variant.

2
Part I, p. 346.

3
The same, Part II, Jan., 1909, p. 52.

1
Linguistic Persistence,
American Speech
, Dec., 1930, p. 149.

2
Gullah, before cited, p. 22. The substance of this paper seems to have been presented to the American Dialect Society at its 1923 meeting.

3
Other testimonies to its difficulty are provided by Bennett, lately cited, Part I, pp. 336 and 340, and by Annie Weston Whitney in Negro American Dialects,
Independent
, Aug. 22, 1901, p. 1980. Both say that this difficulty once made it necessary to employ interpreters in the Charleston courts. Mrs. Whitney adds that, in the great days of the dialect, it threw off many subdialects. “Every large plantation,” she says, “had its own. So distinct were these that a planter, by engaging a Negro in conversation, would tell at once who was his owner.”

4
Gullah, before cited.

5
Notes on the Sounds and Vocabulary of Gullah, before cited.

6
Origin, Dialects, Beliefs, and Characteristics of the Negroes of the South Carolina and Georgia Coasts,
Georgia Historical Review
, Vol. X, 1944, pp. 186–95.

7
Gullah, in Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1930, pp. 3–62.

8
Negro English,
Anglia
, Vol. VII, 1884, pp. 232–79.

9
Negro Dialect,
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Nov., 1933, pp. 522–28.

10
Gullah
versus
Grammar,
North American Review
, Dec., 1933, pp. 539–42.

11
The Speech of the Negro, in Folk-Say: a Regional Miscellany; Norman (Okla.), 1930, pp. 346–58.

1
Smith, before cited, p. 26.

2
Bennett, before cited, Part II, p. 50.

3
e.g., to t’ief
for
to steal
.

4
Bennett, as before, p. 49.

5
Johnson: Folk Culture, before cited, p. 35.

6
Apparently from the
enu
or
yenu
of Umbundu or the
yeno
of Kisikongo.

7
Gullah was admirably reported in the stories and sketches of Ambrose E. Gonzalez (1857–26), author of The Black Border (with glossary), 1922; With Aesop Along the Black Border, 1924; The Captain, 1924, and Laguerre, 1924. It was used in the character of Daddy Jake by Joel Chandler Harris, but not very effectively, for Harris knew best the Negro dialect of upland Georgia. See also Flaming Youth: a Story in Gullah Dialect, by John M. Rhame,
American Speech
, Oct., 1933, pp. 39–43. The first writer to attempt the dialect successfully was Charles Colcock Jones, Jr., whose Negro Myths of the Georgia Coast was published in Boston in 1888, but some notes on it by one subscribing himself Marcel were printed in the
Nation
, Dec. 14, 1865, pp. 744–45. A bibliography is in
American Speech
, July, 1926, pp. 559–61.

1
New York, 1944, Vol. II, pp. 773–76.

2
American Speech
, April, 1940, p. 131.

3
Some discussions of Negro speech other than those already mentioned: The Lingo of the Kentucky Negro, by John Uri Lloyd,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Part III, 1901, pp. 179–84; The Negro Dialects Along the Savannah River, by Elisha K. Kane, the same, Vol. V, Part VIII, 1925, pp. 354–67; Aesop in Negro Dialect, by Addison Hibbard,
American Speech
, June, 1926, pp. 495–99; Negro Speech of East Texas, by Oma Stanley, the same, Feb., 1941, pp. 3–16; Survivals in Negro Vocabulary, by Morton Seidleman, the same, Oct., 1937, pp. 231–32; Some Negro Terms, by Norman E. Eliason, the same, April, 1938, pp. 151–52; Idioms of the Present-Day American Negro, by Ruth Banks, the same, Dec., 1938, pp. 313–14; Slang Among Nebraska Negroes, by Merle Herriford, the same, Dec., 1938, pp. 316–17; Negro-American Vocabulary, by A. D. Faber,
Writer
, July, 1937, p. 239; Story in Harlem Slang, by Zora Neale Hurston,
American Mercury
, July, 1942, pp. 84–96, with a glossary, and Negro Slang at Lincoln University,
American Speech
, Dec., 1934, pp. 287–90