American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  89 See Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by William A. Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. VII, 1911, p. 504 ff.

  90 The late Ring Lardner once said: “I used, occasionally, to sit on the players’ bench at baseball games, and it was there that I noted the exceptions made in favor of these two words. A player, returning to the bench after batting, would be asked, ‘Has he got anything in there?’ (‘He — in there’ always means the pitcher.) The answer would be ‘He’s got everything.’ On the other hand, the player might return and (usually after striking out) say, ’ He ain’t got nothin”. And the manager: ‘Looks like he must have something’.’ ”

  91 This word, when written, often appears as ornery, but it is almost always pronounced on’ry, with the first syllable rhyming with don.

  92 Not infrequently such forms are used by the sophisticated, especially in the halls of learning, for humorous effect. See Intentional Mispronunciations, by Margaret Reed, American Speech, Feb., 1932. But in a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 1931, mayorality was printed quite seriously, and in Baltimore there is an Autogenius Company which does autogenous welding.

  93 Popular Variants of Yes, American Speech, Dec., 1926.

  94 English — According to American Skedule, London Evening Standard, Sept. 23, 1929.

  95 Quoted from the London Spectator in American Speech June, 1927, p. 413.

  96 The Druid, No. V, May 9, 1781, reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, p. 16. For the testimony of other early observers see British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, July, 1933.

  97 Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin’s Letters, Published in the Quarterly Review; Boston, 1815.

  98 A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816, prefatory essay. It is reprinted in Mathews, just cited.

  99 A Supplement to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language; London, 1832–33.

  100 Notions of the Americans; London, 1828, Vol. II, pp. 164–5.

  101 Lectures on the English Language; New York, 1860; 4th ed., 1870, Lecture XXX, pp. 666–67 and 674–75.

  102 It was set up in London in March, 1919, and ran for about two years.

  103 The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, and The English Language in America; New York, 1925, the second volume of which is devoted almost wholly to pronunciation. The quotation is from the former, p. viii.

  104 Including not only the London area, but also East Anglia and the Southwestern counties of Devon, Dorset and Somerset — in short, the whole region south of a line drawn from the mouth of the Severn to the Wash, but excluding Cornwall.

  105 Dr. Kurath discusses all these points at length in American Pronunciation, S.P.E. Tracts, No. XXX, 1928, and The Origin of the Dialectical Differences in Spoken American English, Modern Philology, May, 1928. See also The English Language in America, by G. P. Krapp, above cited, Vol. II, pp. 29–30, and Scotland and Americanisms, by William Craigie, an address delivered before the Institute of Medicine, Chicago, Dec. 4, 1928.

  106 For example, by Mary N. Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) (1850–1922) and John W. Fox (1863–1919). Miss Murfree’s first book of mountain stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, was published in 1884. Mr. Fox’s Hell For Sartain, 1897, was an immense success in its day.

  107 Old Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. IV, 1916. Dr. Combs has also published Early English Slang Survivals in the Mountains of Kentucky, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IV, 1921, and The Language of the Southern Highlanders, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1931. There is a criticism of some of Combs’s conclusions by J. M. Steadman, Jr., in Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. V, 1916.

  108 A summary of his observations is in The Ozark Dialect, in The Ozarks: an American Survival of Primitive Society; New York, 1931. He has also published A Word-List From the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IX, 1926; The Ozark Dialect in Fiction, American Speech, March, 1927; More Words From the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927; The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, American Speech, Oct., 1927; Pronunciation in the Ozark Dialect (with Anna A. Ingleman), the same, June, 1928; Literary Words in the Ozarks, the same, Oct., 1928; A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms, the same, Dec., 1928; Is There an Ozark Dialect?, the same, Feb., 1929; A Third Ozark Word-List, the same, Oct., 1929; Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks (with Patti Sankee), the same, Feb., April, and June, 1930; Recent Fiction and the Ozark Dialect, the same, Aug., 1931; and A Fourth Ozark Word-List, the same, Feb., 1933.

  109 Pronunciation in the Ozark Dialect (with Anna A. Ingleman), American Speech, June, 1928.

  110 On the Ozark Pronunciation of It, by Vernon C. Allison, American Speech, Feb., 1929. Word-lists from the Ozark dialect are to be found in A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, by J. W. Carr, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Pt. VI, 1904; Vol. III, Pt. I, 1905; Pt. II, 1906; Pt. III, 1907; Pt. V, 1909; and in Snake County Talk [McDonald county, Mo.], by Jay L. B. Taylor, the same, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923.

  111 American Speech as Practised in the Southern Highlands, Century, March, 1929.

  112 See Variation in the Southern Mountain Dialect, by Charles Carpenter, American Speech, Feb., 1933. Mr. Carpenter says that the dialect of Northern and Central West Virginia has been much modified by the opening of coal-mines. The literature down to the end of 1922 is listed in A Bibliography of Writings on the English language, by Arthur G. Kennedy, above cited, pp. 413–16. See also The Southern Mountaineer and His Homeland, by John C. Campbell; New York, 1921; Dialect Words and Phrases From West-Central West Virginia, by Carey Woofter, American Speech, May, 1927; West Virginia Dialect by Lowry Axley, the same, Aug., 1928; Elizabethan America, by Charles M. Wilson, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1929; How the Wood Hicks Speak, by Paul E. Pendleton, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Pt. II, 1930; Folk Speech in the Kentucky Mountain Cycle of Percy Mackaye, by B. A. Botkin, American Speech, April, 1931; Folk Speech of the Cumberlands, by Bess Alice Owens, the same, Dec., 1931; Remnants of Archaic English in West Virginia, by Charles Carpenter, West Virginia Review, Dec., 1934; Southern Mountain Accent, by C. G., American Speech, Dec., 1934.

  113 Southern Speech, in Culture in the South; Chapel Hill, N. C., 1934, p. 614.

  114 Southern Speech, just cited. It is the best general survey of Southern American so far published. Other papers that will be found useful are The Vowel System of the Southern United States, by William A. Read, Englishe Studien, Vol. XLI, 1910; The Southern R, by the same, Louisiana State University Bulletin, Feb., 1910; Some Variant Pronunciations in the New South, by the same, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. VII, 1911; Who Lost the Southern R? by H. P. Johnson, American Speech, June, 1928; Southern American Dialect, by C. M. Wise, the same, April, 1933; Southern Standards, by Katherine E. Wheatley, the same, Feb., 1934; Some Unrecorded Southern Vowels, by George P. Wilson, the same, Oct., 1934; Southern Long I, by Med-ford Evans, the same, Oct., 1935; and Another Note on the Southern Pronunciation of Long I, by William B. Edgerton, the same, Oct., 1935.

  115 The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain, Louisiana State University Studies, No. XX, 1935.

  116 Vol. I, p. 226.

  117 The English of the Negro, American Mercury, June, 1924.

  118 The prevailing conjugation, according to Bertram H. Brown (American Mercury, May, 1933, p. 116) is I is, you is, he is; us is, you-all (or y’all) is, they is. Mr. Brown says that he am is never heard.

  119 Dr. Krapp traces its literary development in The English Language in America, above cited, Vol. I, p. 246 ff. See also Notes on Negro Dialect in the American Novel to 1821, by Tremaine McDowell, American Speech, April, 1930; The Use of Negro Dialect by Harriet Beecher Stowe, by the same, the same, June, 1931; and The Vocabulary of the American Negro as Set Forth in Contemporary Liter
ature, by Nathan Van Patten, the same, Oct., 1931.

  120 Atlantic Monthly, April, 1904.

  121 Negro speech has been little investigated by philologians. Kennedy lists but nine discussions of it before 1922, and only three of them are of any interest. There are some intelligent remarks upon it in the preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, by James Weldon Johnson; New York, 1925. See also The Study of the Alabama-Georgia dialect by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., above cited; The Negro Dialects along the Savannah River, by Elisha K. Kane, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VIII, 1925; Negro Dialect, by C. M. Wise, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Nov., 1933; and Aesop in Negro Dialect, American Speech, June, 1926. Gullah, spoken on the Sea Islands and along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, has been described by Reed Smith in Gullah, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina, Nov. 1, 1926, and there is a glossary of it in The Black Border, by Ambrose E. Gonzales; Columbia, S. C., 1922. See also Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, S. C., by Guy B. Johnson; Chapel Hill, N. C., 1930, pp. 3 ff, and The Old Types Pass, by Mar-cellus S. Whaley; Boston, 1925. The dialect of Hatteras Island was described by one signing himself Marcel in the Nation, 1865, pp. 744–5, and his observations were reprinted in Lectures on the Science of Language, by F. Max Müller, 6th ed.; London, 1871, Vol. I, p.75 ff.

  122 There have been many studies of local pronunciation in the South, mainly divided (somewhat irrationally) by States. Most of them will be found in the files of Dialect Notes. The following are of special interest: Georgia: Provincialisms, in A Gazeteer of the State of Georgia, by Adiel Sherwood, 3rd ed.; Washington, 1837, reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931; Tales of the Okefinokee, by Francis Harper, American Speech, May, 1926 (a study of the dialect of a remote corner of Georgia); North Carolina: Early English Survivals on Hatteras Island, by Collier Cobb, University of North Carolina Magazine, Feb., 1910; South Carolina: Charleston Provincialisms, by Sylvester Primer, American Journal of Philology, Vol. IX, 1888; The Huguenot Element in Charleston’s Pronunciation, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. IV, 1889; Tennessee: A Tennesseean’s Pronunciation in 1841, by Rebecca W. Smith, American Speech, Dec., 1934; Virginia: Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech, by Bennett W. Green; Richmond, 1899; new ed., 1912; English Pronunciation in Virginia, by Edwin F. Shewmake; Charlottesville, Va., 1927; Philip Vickers Fithian’s Observations on the Language of Virginia (1774), by Claude M. Newlin, American Speech, Dec., 1929; A Phonographic Expedition to Williamsburg, Va., by W. Cabell Greet, the same, Feb., 1931; Dialect Notes on Records of Folk-Songs From Virginia, by A. K. Davis, Jr. and A. A. Hill, the same, Dec., 1933. The literature down to the end of 1922 is listed in Kennedy’s Bibliography, above cited. For the period since 1922 the bibliographies in American Speech are useful, though they are by no means complete. It is a pity that no one has ever investigated Tidewater Southern American historically, on the plan of Krapp’s investigation of New England American. The way to some promising material is pointed in E. G. Swem’s Virginia Historical Index; Roanoke, 1934.

  123 The English Language in America, above cited, Vol. I, p. 233.

  124 A chapter in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920.

  125 For publications down to the end of 1922 see Kennedy’s Bibliography, above cited, pp. 413–16. Most of those of later date are to be found in either Dialect Notes or American Speech. The following are of special interest: New England Dialect, by Windsor P. Daggett, Billboard, March 3, 1928 (a guide for actors cast for Yankee parts); The Real Dialect of Northern New England, by George A. England, Writer’s Monthly, March, 1926 (a guide for writers of fiction); Vanishing Expressions of the New England Coast, by Anne E. Perkins, American Speech, Dec., 1927; New England Words for the Earthworm, by Rachel S. Harris, the same, Dec., 1933; New England Expressions For Poached Eggs, by Herbert Penzl, the same, April, 1934.

  126 Ann Arbor, Mich., 1927.

  127 Other publications worth consulting are A Sidelight on Eighteenth Century American English, by Henry Alexander, Queen’s Quarterly (Kingston, Ont.) Nov., 1923; Early American Pronunciation and Syntax, by the same, American Speech, Dec., 1925; A Comparison of the Dialect of The Biglow Papers with the Dialect of Four Yankee Plays, by Marie Killheffer, the same, Feb., 1928; The Language of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, by Henry Alexander, the same, June, 1928; Die Volkssprache im Nordosten der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika dargestellt auf Grund der Biglow Papers von James Russell Lowell, by J. A. Heil; Breslau, 1927.

  128 The Pronunciation of English in New York State, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. IX, 1896.

  129 See The Ithaca Dialect, by O. F. Emerson; Boston, 1891; Dialect of Northeastern New York, by Gerald Crowninshield, American Speech, April, 1933; Pronunciation in Upstate New York, by C. K. Thomas, the same, April and Oct., 1935. Word-lists have appeared in Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Pt. VI, 1910, and Pt. VIII, 1912, and there is a list of colloquial expressions from Madison county in American Speech, Dec., 1929.

  130 The English of the Lower Classes in New York City and Vicinity, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. IX, 1896.

  131 Soiving the Ersters, American Speech, Feb., 1926. See also Popular Phonetics, by Robert J. Menner, the same, June, 1929, and Standards of Pronunciation in New York City, by C. K. Thomas, Quarterly Journal of Speech, April, 1935.

  132 For example, in the Chimmie Fadden stories of E. W. Townsend.

  133 The Origin of a Dialect, by Howard K. Hollister, Freeman, June, 1923.

  134 The speech of the New York Jews is discussed in Jewish Dialect and the New York Dialect, by C. K. Thomas, American Speech, June, 1932; in Re Jewish Dialect and New York Dialect, by Robert Sonkin, the same, Feb., 1933, and More on New York Jewish Dialect, by C. K. Thomas, the same, Oct., 1933. “None of the Jews who supplied my data,” says Mr. Thomas in the last article, “were immigrants; all were at least second generation, the children, in some cases the grandchildren, of immigrants; yet they retain the dialect. On the other hand, the second Gentile generation ordinarily has no trace of its fathers’ foreign dialect.” The Yiddo-American of New York has produced a considerable literature, the chief contributors to which have been Montague Glass, Milt Gross and Arthur Kober. Its peculiarities were amusingly exaggerated in various Notes For an East Side Dictionary, written for the New Yorker during 1934 and 1935 by John J. Holzinges over the signature of J. X. J. There was a time when it was heard often on the comic stage, but it has gone out of fashion there, along with the German, Irish and Scandinavian dialects. See Yiddish in American Fiction, by Alter Brody, American Mercury, Feb., 1926.

  135 Notions of the Americans, Vol. II, p. 175.

  136 Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States; New Haven, 1826, p. 58.

  137 Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, II.

  138 The Speech of South-Western Pennsylvania, American Speech, Oct., 1931.

  139 See also Provincialisms of the Dutch Districts of Pennsylvania, by Lee L. Grumbine, Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. XVII, 1886; Dialectical Peculiarities in the Carlisle, Pa., Vernacular, by William Prettyman, German-American Annals, Vol. IX, 1907; Dialects of the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, by Claude M. Newlin, American Speech, Dec., 1928; The English of the Pennsylvania Germans, by George G. Struble, the same, Oct., 1935.

  140 See Jerseyisms, by F. B. Lee, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Pt. VII, 1894, and some notes correcting and enlarging the foregoing, the same, Pt. VIII, 1895.

  141 The literature dealing with localisms, down to the end of 1922, is listed in Kennedy’s Bibliography, above cited, pp. 414–16. Later publications worth consulting include the following: Indiana: Eggleston’s Notes on Hoosier Dialect, by Margaret Bloom, American Speech, Dec., 1934 (a reprint of the short glossary published with the 1899 edition of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston); Iowa: Some Iowa Locutions, by Katherine Buxbaum, American Speech, April, 1929; Kansas: Jottings From Kansas, by J. C. Ruppenthal, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. VI, 1923; Missouri: “It’s In St. Louis Th
at Americanese is Spoken,” New York World, Nov. 9, 1928; The Strategic Position of Missouri in Dialect Study, by Allen Walker Read, Missouri Alumnus, April, 1932; Folk-Speech in Missouri, by the same, Arcadian Magazine, June, 1932; Nebraska: Nebraska Sandhill Talk, by Melvin Van den Bark, American Speech, Dec., 1928; Expressions From Boyd County, Neb., by M. A. Burwell, the same, Feb., 1931; Nebraska Pioneer English, by Melvin Van den Bark, American Speech, April and Oct., 1931, Feb., 1932, and Dec., 1933; Oregon: Wallowa County, Ore., Expressions, by T. Josephine Hausen, the same, Feb., 1931. The following more general discussions are also of interest: Westernisms, by Kate Mullen, American Speech, Dec., 1925; Some Observations Upon Middle Western Speech, by Josephine M. Burnham, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Pt. IX, 1926; The English Language in the Southwest, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932; The Length of the Sounds of a Middle Westerner, by C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño, American Speech, April, 1935.

  142 Canadian English, by W. D. Light-hall, Toronto Week, Aug. 16, 1889.