110. [Perhaps the most notable of all the contributions of Knickerbocker Dutch to American is the word Yankee.] The etymology adopted in AL4, to wit, that Yankee comes from Jan and kees, signifying John Cheese, is not approved by the DAE, but it has the support of Dr. Henri Logeman of the University of Ghent, and it seems likely to stand. In its original form the term was Jan Kaas, and in that form it has been a nickname for a Hollander, in Flanders and Germany, for a great many years. In the days of the buccaneers the English sailors began to use it to designate a Dutch freebooter, and in this sense it became familiar in New York. Presently the New York Dutch, apparently seizing upon its opprobrious significance, began to apply it to the English settlers of Connecticut, who were regarded at the time as persons whose commercial enterprise ran far beyond their moral scruples. A little while later it came into general use in the colonies to designate a disliked neighbor to the northward, and there was a time when the Virginians applied it to Marylanders. In the end the New Englanders saw in it a flattering tribute to their cunning, and so not only adopted it themselves, but converted it into an adjective signifying excellence. The DAE’s first printed example of Yankee, then spelled Yankey, is dated 1683, at which time the term still meant a pirate, and was applied as a proper name to one of the Dutch commanders in the West Indies. By the middle of the Eighteenth Century it had come to mean a New Englander, and by the Revolutionary period the English were using it to designate any American. During the Civil War, as everyone knows, the Southerners used it, usually contemptuously, of all Northerners,1 and in consequence its widened meaning became restricted again, but in World War I it underwent another change, and since then, though they objected at first, even Southerners have got used to being called Yankees, e.g., by the English. The shortened form Yank is traced by the DAE to 1778. The adjective yankee, signifying good or superior, had a vogue in the Boston area at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, but soon passed out of use, and has not been found in print for many years. To yankee, a verb signifying to cheat, followed a century later, but is also now obsolete. So is yankee as the name of a drink made of whiskey sweetened with molasses, recorded for 1804, but forgotten by the Civil War era.2
Many derivatives are listed by the DAE, e.g., Yankee-trick, traced to 1176; -land, to 1788; -ism, to 1792; -like, to 1799; -phrase, to 1803; -notions, to c. 1851; ish, to 1830; -dialect to 1832; -peddler, to 1834; -made and -clock, to 1839; -dorn, to 1843; -grit, to 1865; -twang, to 1866; to catch a Yankee (to catch a tartar), to 1811 and to play Yankee (to reply to a question by asking one), to 1896. Yankee Doodle as the name of a song is traced to 1767. Its history was detailed at length in a report by the late O. G. T. Sonneck, then chief of the music division in the Library of Congress, in 1909.1 In the same document he discussed at length the various etymologies proposed for Yankee, Dr. Logeman also deals with some of them in the paper lately cited.2 Said Sonneck:
The word gradually came to fascinate the historian of words until about 1850 fascination reached its climax. Since then the craze has subsided, yet any number of explanations are still current and proposed as facts, usually on the presumption that embellished reiteration of statements correctly or incorrectly quoted produces facts.
Some of the etymologies still floating about are the following:
1. That Yankee is derived from the name of the Yankos, a tribe of Massachusetts Indians. In their language Yanko meant invincible, and they transferred it to the New Englanders on being defeated in battle by them. Unfortunately, no such tribe is recorded by the early historians, nor is any word resembling Yanko found in any known Indian dialect.
2. That Yankee comes from yonokie, an Indian word signifying silent, and was bestowed upon the whites satirically because they seemed very garrulous to the reticent Indians. No such word can be found.3
3. That Yankee comes from a Cherokee word eankkle, signifying coward, and was bestowed upon the New Englanders by the Virginians on the failure of the former to lend aid in a Cherokee war. No such word is in the Cherokee language.
4. That Yankee was derived from the adjective yankee. The latter word was made popular among the Harvard students of c. 1713 by a farmer of Cambridge named Jonathan Hastings, who used it so often, e.g., in yankee horse, yankee cider, etc., that he acquired Yankee as a nickname.
5. That Yankee represents an Indian attempt to pronounce the word English. The Indians, in fact, did not use English, but had a much different word of their own to designate Englishmen.
6. That it represents an Indian attempt to pronounce the French Anglaise. See No. 5.
7. That it is a Lincolnshire dialect word meaning gaiters or leggings made of undressed leather, and was brought in by the immigrants from that region.
8. That it is a Scots dialect word, yankie, signifying “a sharp, clever, forward woman.”4
9. That it is from a Scots word, yanking, signifying “active, forward, pushing.”1
10. That it is from Janke, a diminutive of the Dutch given-name Jan. But, as Logeman shows, the Dutch diminutive for Jan is actually Jantje. “This Janke,” he says, “is most likely, like the famous Peter kin of ‘Hohenlinden’ fame, nothing but the product of the brain of the author, who fondly imagined he was using a Dutch name.”
11. That Yankee comes from the aforesaid Jantje.
12. That it comes from the Dutch janker, signifying, “howler, yelper, whiner, squaller.”2
13. That it comes from the Swedish enka, a widow, and was applied to the English because they had either been banished from England or had left “for political or religious reasons.”3
14. That it comes from the Danish janke (pronounced yank-keh), a word used to designate “the savage habit some mothers have of jerking or lifting unruly babies by their hands or wrists.”4
15. That it comes from the Dutch jonkheer.5
16. That it comes from the Persian word janghe or jenghe, meaning a warlike man or a swift horse.
The last etymology, though it has been taken seriously, was actually proposed as a hoax. It first appeared in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review for 1810,6 where it was presented in the form of a letter allegedly copied from “the Connecticut Herald, a paper printed in New Haven,” and signed W. It was intended to be a burlesque upon the philological writings of Noah Webster, and the Monthly Anthology pretended to be “credibly informed” that it was “from the pen of N— W—, jun., Esq.” himself. It was as follows:
As the origin of the word Yankee has been a subject of much inquiry, and no satisfactory account of it appears to have been given, I send you the following history of the word.
Yankee appears to have been used formerly by some of our common farmers in its genuine sense. It was an epithet descriptive of excellent qualities — as a Yankee horse — that is a horse of high spirit and other good properties. I am informed that this use of the word has continued in some parts of New England till within a short period.
In the course of my inquiries I have discovered what I presume to be the same word in the Persian language, in which the whole family of words is preserved. It is a fact well known that the people of Europe, from whom we descended, are the posterity of the tribes which emigrated from the ancient Media, and northern part of Persia — and if not known, it is a fact capable of being proved. In the Persian language, let it be observed that in the place of our y authors write letters whose powers correspond nearly to the English j and ch, as in joy and chess. Thus the word which we write yoke, which the Latins wrote jugum and the Greeks zeugus, and which without the final article would be jug and zeug, the Persians write chag, and it may be equally well written jag; for throughout the Persian these sounds are used promiscuously in words from the same root. Hence we see the name of the Asiatic river Yenesei written also Jenesei, and we write the word, from our Indians, Gennesee. Thus also the name of the great Asiatic conqueror is written Genghis Khan or Jenghis Khan, and Tooke1 writes it Tschingis Khan. Thus Jenghis is not his name, but a title.
Now in the Persia
n language, Janghe or Jenghe — that is, Yankee — signifies “a warlike man, a swift horse; also, one who is prompt and ready in action, one who is magnanimous.” This is the exact interpretation as given in the lexicon. The word is formed from jank, jenk, battle, contest, war; and this from a like word signifying the fist, the instrument of fighting; like pugna, from pugnus, the fist. In Persian jankidan (yankidan) is to commence or carry on war.
We hence see the propriety of the use of yankee as applied to a high spirited, warlike horse.
The word Yankee thus claims a very honorable parentage; for it is the precise title assumed by the celebrated Mongolian khan, Jenghis; and in our dialect his titles, literally translated, would be Yankee King, that is, Warlike Chief.
This is not the only instance in which one of the oldest words in the language has lost its dignity. We have many popular words which have never found admission into books, that are among the oldest words ever formed. I can prove some of them to have been used before the dispersion of men; for they are found in Asia, Africa and Europe, among nations which could have no intercourse after that event.
New Haven, March 2, 1810.
It will be noted that Jan Kaas, to English ears, must have seemed like a plural. “The loss of the s,” says Logeman, “cannot cause the slightest difficulty; … the change would be on a par with that in Chinee, pea and cherry, from Chinese, pease and cherries.”2 Mr. H. de Groot of Los Angeles tells me that when he was a boy in Holland a popular juvenile book was “De Zoon van den Berendooder” (The Son of the Bear-Killer), and that in it the plural of Yankee was given as Yankeezen. This indicates that the Dutch author thought of the second element of Yankee as kees, which Logeman describes as “a dialect form of Kaas,” for the plural of kees is keezen.
Many of the early loans from the French, e.g., caribou and to-boggan, had been borrowed in turn, as we have seen, from the Indian languages. To these, perhaps, bayou may be added, for it seems to have been influenced by the Choctaw bayuk, a small stream. But there were also direct borrowings, e.g., chowder (from chaudière, a kettle or pot), traced by the DAE to 1751;1 batteau, traced to 1717; calumet (a tobacco pipe), to 1705; carryall (from cariole, by folk-etymology), to 1714; gopher (possibly from gaufre, a honeycomb, though this is doubted by the DAE), to 1791; levee, to 1719; portage, to 1698; and prairie, to 1773.2 Most of these came in along the Canadian border, but others were picked up in the West or South, e.g., voyageur, bagasse, and crevasse. Those of the latter class are mainly unrecorded before the Nineteenth Century, though they were probably in local use before. A number of French terms found in proper names, e.g., sault, meaning rapids in a river, were taken over in the West, and the later colonists made large use of a French suffix for town names, to wit, -ville, that had been used very rarely in England. Buccaneer, from the French boucanier, is chiefly associated with American history, and in consequence it is sometimes reckoned an Americanism, but the DAE shows that it was in use in England seventy-five years before its first recorded appearance in America. A number of familiar terms came into American from the Spanish by way of Louisiana French, e.g., calaboose, which the DAE traces to 1792, and quadroon, which is discussed in Chapter VI. Direct loans from the Spanish were very rare before 1800; indeed, I can find none that were not anticipated in English use, though they may have been borrowed independently here. Even mosquito, palmetto, banjo and key belong to that category. Banjo is traced by the DAE to 1774 and marked an Americanism, but it was preceded by the West Indian banshaw, and both represent corruptions of the Spanish bandurria. Such familiar Spanish loans as lasso, mustang, plaza, corral, canyon, bronco and ranch, now almost as thoroughly American as ambulance-chaser or to hitch-hike, did not come in until after the beginning of the movement into the West. The early Americans, in fact, had very little contact with the Spaniards; they knew the Dutch and French much better. Of the early Germans they knew still less, for the Germans had a numerous colony only in Pennsylvania, and there they kept to themselves. It is commonly assumed by lexicographers that sauerkraut, smearcase and noodle are American loans from the German, but the evidence is not too clear. Two of them, sauerkraut and noodle, are recorded in England before their first apparent appearance in print in America, and smearcase may have been borrowed from the Dutch. All the other German words in the American vocabulary seem to have come in after the War of 1812.
Very few words were borrowed from the languages of the Negro slaves, even in the South. Buckra, meaning a white man, is derived from an African word, makana or mbakana, of the same meaning, by Webster 1934, and traced to 1795 in white American use by the DAE, which notes that it was reported from the island of Antigua about six years earlier. Save in a few areas it never spread from Negro speech to that of the whites, and at the present day it is unknown to most Americans.1 Cooter, a name applied to a box turtle (Costudo Carolina) in the Carolinas, is derived from an African word, kuta or nkuda, by the DAE, but is not traced before 1832. Goober, a Southern name for the peanut, is derived by Webster from the African nguba, but the DAE’s first example of its printed use is dated so late as 1848. Gumbo, the common Southern name for Abelmoschus exculentus, is derived by the DAE from an Angolan word, kingombo, and traced to 1805. In the sense of a Negro patois of French both the DAE and Webster 1934 say that it may be derived from a quite different word, nkombo, used by the tribes of the Congo region. The original significance of the latter was a runaway slave. Okra, another name for the gumbo, is derived by Webster from nkruman, a loan from the Tshi people of Africa. Gumbo has produced a number of derivatives, e.g., gumbo-ball, a kind of harlequinade, traced by the DAE to 1835; gumbo-box, a drum, derived from nkumbi, of the same meaning, and traced to 1861; gumbo limbo, a small tree found in Florida; and gumbo-soup, traced to 1832. In 1939 Dwight L. Bolinger suggested that bozo, which has puzzled the etymologists, may be derived from bozal, “a term applied in the African slave trade to a Negro recently brought from the country of his origin.” This term also had the sense of a halter, and bozo exists in Cuban Spanish in that significance.1 Voodoo seems to be derived from the African vodu, but it got into American English from the French of Haiti, and on its first appearance in print was spelled vaudoux. Hoodoo is a later form. Juba is listed by Webster as “perhaps of Bantu origin,” but its etymology remains to be worked out. It apparently did not get into the general American vocabulary until the rise of the minstrel show, c. 1830.
But if the African languages thus left but little sediment in the common language of the United States, they undoubtedly had a considerable influence upon the dialect of the Southern Negroes, not only in phonology and syntax, but also in vocabulary. This is especially true in the remoter backwaters, for example, the Sea Islands of Georgia, where the local Negro dialect, called Gullah, is almost unintelligible to a visiting Northerner. Dr. Lorenzo D. Turner of Fisk University, who has a working knowledge of the principal West African languages, reports that no less than 6,000 African words survive among the Gullah-speaking Negroes. Most of them are personal names and all save a few of the remainder are used only in speaking to other Gullahs; in their dealings with the local whites the Negroes make a larger use of what they take to be English. But even in this polite dialect, says Dr. Turner, there are many African words that white observers have mistaken for debased forms of English words.2
2. NEW WORDS OF ENGLISH MATERIAL
The first English-speaking colonists in America found an immediate need for a large number of new words — some to designate the new objects that were presented to their sight, and some to describe the novel conditions and operations that marked their new life. Not a few of these necessary neologisms, as we have just seen, were taken from the Indian languages or from the tongues of other immigrants, but the great majority were made of English material — sometimes by giving an old English word a new meaning, but more often by arranging common English elements in new combinations. A number of examples are give in AL4, pp. 113 ff, and there are many more in the DAE. Some of these combinations
go back to the Seventeenth Century — e.g., snow-shoe, traced by the DAE to 1666; salt-meadow, to 1656, and selectman, to 1635 — but the majority date from the century following, and especially from the era of burgeoning national self-consciousness following the Revolution. It was not until the beginning of the great movement into the West that the American language really began to flower, but it was already showing many signs of a lush vitality before 1800. I turn to the letter B in the DAE and find the following examples of compounds made of English material during the Eighteenth Century:
back-country, 1755 beef-cattle, 1776
back-settlement, 1759 beef-packer, 1796
back-taxes, 1788 bee-tree, 1782
backwoods, 1784 bell-horse, 1775
bake-oven, 1777 blue-laws, 1781
bale-cloth, 1797 breadstuff, 1793
ball-ground, 1772 breech-clout, 1757
barn-swallow, 1790 broom-corn, 1781
bay-vessel, 1789 broom-straw, 1785
bear-hunter, 1765 buck-shot, 1775
I turn to the letter S and find:
salt-lick, 1751 shower-bath, 1785
sheathing-paper, 1790 sink-hole, 1749
sheet-iron, 1776 smoke-house, 1759
shingle-roof, 1749 smoking-tobacco, 1796
ship-channel, 1775 snow-plow, 1792
ship-canal, 1798 spoon-victuals, 1777
shooting-iron, 1787 spring-house, 1755
shot-gun, 1776 stamping-ground, 1786
These are only a few specimens, taken almost at random. Among the new names for natural objects there are many more, most of them meant to be descriptive. Under G, for example, I find:
gall-berry, 1709 green-snake, 1709
garden-flea, 1790 grizzly-bear, 1791
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