LECTURE XXX. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA. THE English language in America is necessarily much affected by the multitude of new objects, processes, and habits of life that qualify our material existence in this new world, which, with sometimes incongruous architecture, we are building up out of the raw stock that nature has given us; by the great influx of foreigners speaking different languages or dialects, who, in adopting our speech, cannot fail to communicate to it some of the peculiarities of their own ;* by climatic and other merely material causes which affect the action of the organs of articulation, and of course the form of spoken words; by the generally diffused habit of reading, which makes pronunciation and phrase *A striking instance of the transfer of accent and intonation from one speech to another came under my own personal observation some years since. While travelling in one of the long American railway carriages which convey many passengers in a single compartment, I noticed two respectably dressed women who occupied seats at some distance from my own, and who were keeping up a lively conversation in a language unintelligible to me. Many of the words they used seemed much like English, many others, though not High or Low Dutch, or Scandinavian, might possibly have been of the Gothic stock, and I concluded that the women were using some Germanic dialect not familiar to me. My curiosity was piqued, and I thought it not a breach of good manners to exchange my seat for a nearer position in order to ascertain what language they were speaking. The tones and modulations of their voices were so exactly alike that I could not distinguish between them, but after listening a few minutes I made out enough of the dialogue to learn that the two women were sisters, one just arrived from the Scotch Highlands, the other an emigrant who had been in the United States some years. The new-comer, though understanding English, did not speak it; the other, without having forgotten her native tongue, had been long enough in America to have lost her fluency in the use of it, and in their conversation each was speaking the language most familiar to her, though the native intonation and accent were no less marked in the one than in the other. more formal and also more uniform; and doubtless by other more obscure and yet undetected causes. Thus far, it can by no means be said that any distinct dialectic difference has established itself between England and the United States; and it is a trite observation, that, though very few Americans speak as well as the educated classes of Englishmen, yet not only is the average English used here, both in speaking and writing, better than that of the great mass of the English people, but there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, English is more emphatically one in America than in its native land; and if we have engrafted on our mother-speech some wide-spread corruptions, we have very nearly freed the language, in our use of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable peculiarities exceedingly common in England. So far as any tendency to divergence between the two countries exists, it manifests itself at present rather in the spoken than in the written dialect, in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary and grammatical structure. It can hardly be denied that a marked difference of accent is already observable; but, though a very few words current on one side of the Atlantic are either obsolete or not yet introduced upon the other, it would be difficult to frame a written sentence, which would be pronounced good English by competent judges in America, and condemned as unidiomatic in England. Some noticeable local and general differences between American and British English may be explained by the fact, that considerable bodies of Englishmen sometimes emigrated from the same vicinity, and that in their new home they and their multiplied descendants have kept together and continued to employ dialectic peculiarities of their native speech, or retained words of general usage, which elsewhere perished. Thus the inhabitants of Eastern Virginia were early settlers, and have intermixed little with the descendants of other colonists or strangers. Hence, they are said to retain some Shakespearean words not popularly known in other American or even English districts; and the dialect of Southeastern Massachusetts, which is inhabited by the unmixed progeny of the first immigrants, is marked by corresponding individualities. It is to the influence of such causes that we owe some excellent words that have now become universal in the United States, as, for example, the verb to wilt -a word which has strangely been suffered to perish in England without leaving any substitute or equivalent behind it. In the use of colloquialisms not only tolerated but preferred in conversation, though scarcely allowable in writing, the two nations differ considerably. What our own self-indulgences are, in this respect, it is difficult for an American to say, because he becomes conscious of them, as national peculiarities, only when his attention is called to them by criticisms which good-breeding seldom permits an Englishman to make. In England, on the other hand, an educated American hears, in the best circles, familiar expressions and grammatical licenses which he would himself not venture to employ in America. For instance, he will most frequently hear it is me, and even it is him, instead of it is I, it is he. Some English grammarians think the former of these expressions defensible; and, in the analogy of the French and Danish languages, where the corresponding forms are not merely allowable but obligatory, there lies an argument of some weight; but this apparent grammatical solecism is not sanctioned by Anglo-Saxon usage, nor by the authority of good writers. What will this cost to print? would perhaps not strike an American oddly, but he would himself say: What will it cost to print this? Blunt and dull are distinct in America, blunt being applied only to the penetrating point, and dull to the cutting edge of an instrument. They now seem to be used indiscriminately in England, though they were formerly distinguished, as appears from Shakespeare: Rich. III. IV. 4. Starve, which in England is applied to extreme suffering either from cold or hunger, is used in America only in reference to the latter. In the United States coal is employed where the English use coals. An Englishman would perhaps say: The coal in a mine, but he always speaks of this substance as coals, however great the quantity, when it is broken up so as to be ready for use. We, on the other hand, never employ the plural form except as applied to fragments in actual combustion.* * I have noticed in some rather recent English periodicals certain words which I do not remember to have seen or heard among us. In an obituary The most important peculiarity of American English is a laxity, irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. The same thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to the same extent, though some gross departures from idiomatic propriety, such as different to, for different from, are common in England, which none but very ignorant persons would be guilty of in America. These may seem trifling matters, and in languages abounding in inflections they might be so; but in a syntax, depending, like ours, so much upon the right use of participles, strict accuracy in this particular becomes seriously important. In the tenses of the verbs, I am inclined to think that welleducated Americans conform more closely to grammatical propriety than the corresponding class in England. At least, the proper use of the compound preterite is more generally with us. In English writers of some pretensions, we meet such phrases as 'this plate has been engraved by Albert Dürer,' this palace has been designed by Michael Angelo,' for was engraved, was designed. Such an abuse of the proper office of the preterite is never heard in America. In general, I think we may say, that in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England; but we do not discriminate so precisely in the meaning of words, nor do we habitually, in either conversation or in writing, express ourselves so gracefully, or employ so classic a diction as do the English. Our taste in language is less fastidious, and our licenses and inaccuracies are more frequently of a character indicative of want of refinement and elegant culture, than those we hear in educated society in England. notice of De Morgan, in the Athenæum of March 25, 1871, paradoxer and paradoxist are used for one who maintains paradoxes. In the same periodical of May 5, 1871, I find this phrase: Caligraphic evidence has seemed to demonstrate that Lady Temple at least handwrote the Junian Letters. In Nature, March, 1871, there is a notice of a Paper read before the Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, entitled: On the Racial aspects of the Franco-German War; and the word racial frequently occurs in the Abstracts of the same Scientific Journal. Most words of this kind, however, cross the Atlantic so rapidly that it is often difficult to be certain of their true nationality. Even the honor of the parentage of certain slang phrases is disputable, and many an American has been astonished to hear from an English acquaintance an expression of this character-utterly new to him, and very un-American besides followed by: "As you say in America." The causes of the differences in pronunciation are partly climatic, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to resist; and partly owing to a difference of circumstances. Of this latter class of influences, the universality of reading in America is the most obvious and important. The most marked difference is, perhaps, in the length, or prosodical quantity, of the vowels; and both the causes I have mentioned concur to produce this effect. We are said to drawl our words by protracting the vowels, and giving them a more diphthongal sound than the English. Now, an Englishman who reads, will habitually utter his vowels more fully and distinctly than his countryman who does not; and, upon the same principle, a nation of readers, like the Americans, will pronounce more deliberately and clearly than a people, so large a proportion of whom are unable to read, as in England. From our universal habit of reading, there results not only a greater distinctness of articulation, but a strong tendency to assimilate the spoken to the written language.* Thus Americans incline to give to every syllable of a written word a distinct enunciation; and the popular habit is to say dic-tion-ary, mil-itar-y, with a secondary accent on the penultimate, instead of sinking the third syllable, as is so common in England. There is no doubt something disagreeably stiff in an anxious and affected conformity to the very letter of orthography; and to those accustomed to a more hurried utterance, we may seem to drawl when we are only giving a full expression to letters, which, though etymologically important, the English habitually slur over, sputtering out, as a Swedish satirist says, one-half of the word and swallowing the other. The tendency to make the long * That this tendency exists to some extent in England also, even in the most conservative classes, I infer from the following anecdote. Some years since a letter of introduction from an English friend was handed me by another English gentleman, and in this letter the writer took the trouble to give me the proper English pronunciation of the name of the person introduced, this pronunciation not being in conformity with the spelling Of course I was careful to address my new acquaintance as advised, but, to my surprise, when this gentleman spoke of his wife, he called her Lady exactly in con formity with the spelling of the name. On my asking for an explanation, this answer was given: "Oh, yes, we were always called -formerly, but it is so unlike the spelling that it seems like an affectation in these days, and we now prefer to conform the pronunciation of our name more to its orthography." |