American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  The displacement of consonants by metathesis, as in prespiration, hunderd, modren, childern, calvary, neuraliga, govrenment, apurn and interduce, is not pathognomonic of vulgar American but is ancient in English and has produced a number of everyday words, e.g., third, which started out in life in the Ninth Century as thrid. Equally widespread is the intercalation of redundant vowels, though many familiar examples are probably of American origin, e.g., athaletic, reality (realty), fillum,2 Cubéan, mountainious, golluf, cruality, mayorality3 and municipial. It was apparently commoner in the earlier days than it is today. Henry Alexander, in a study of the spellings in a pamphlet by an ill-educated New England farmer, written in 1798, finds tremendious, conterary (contrary), constitutiants (constituents), docterin (doctrine), vagarant (vagrant), and cuntery (country), all of them indicative of the author’s customary speech.4 This farmer also added a g to words ending with n, and in brethering he both intruded a vowel and added a g. The addition of g to the n of unstressed syllables has been traced by Wyld5 to the Fifteenth Century. Some of his later examples are chicking, 1653; lining (linen), 1657; chapling, 1662; fashing, 1664; childering, 1692, and slouinglie (slovenly), 1549. In the American common speech such forms are still frequent, e.g., kitching, capting, leming (lemon), Sometimes a t is added, as in varmint (vermin), which is traced by Wyld to 1539 and is now reduced to dialect.1 Often the t follows an s-sound, as in the familiar wunst, twict, acrost and sinct.2 Wentworth traces grievious and bretheren to 1837, hunderd (I hear it as hundert) and childern to 1840,3 and modren to 1905. The last is undoubtedly much older. Bron-ix seems to have arisen among the Jews of that borough, and fil-lum probably comes from Hollywood. There is a story about an author who, after a year or two in the movie Zion, quit in disgust. As his train pulled out of Los Angeles he apostrophized his place of exile thus: “What a people! They know only one word of more than one syllable, and that is fil-lum.”4 Mountainious, used quite seriously, is in Harper’s Magazine for 1860,5 and Patapsico is common in Maryland. I have heard heightht many times, and lengtht, elevingtht and strengtht more than once. According to a writer in American Speech6 “intrusive n remains a recurrent phenomenon in oral and written speech,’ e.g., menance, prowness and grimance. Other familiar forms are chimbly, traced by Wentworth to 1818; conflab;7 lozenger, traced to 1850; bronichal, asthema, blasphemious, mischievious, drownded, attackted, somewheres, portry and holler.8 Such changes as those which converted licorice into likerish,9 recipe into receipt,10 jaundice into janders, picture into pitcher and larceny into larsensy have been noted in AL4.11 A lovely example of double metamorphosis is offered by savage corpse for salvage corps.12

  2 Standard English, Die neuren Sprache, 1894, p. 53. I take this from Sidelights on the Pronunciation of English, by Giles Wilkeson Gray, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Nov., 1932, p. 556. Gray’s paper gives a sympathetic and excellent account of Lloyd (1846–1906), who was a lifelong resident of Liverpool, and thus stood outside the Oxford influence that shows in nearly all other English phoneticians.

  3 Notes on American English, quoted by Gray, just cited.

  1 Postvocalic R in New England Speech, Acts of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists; Copenhagen, 1936, pp. 195–99.

  2 Early Loss of R Before Dentals, Publications of the Modern Language Association, June, 1940, pp. 308–59.

  3 Just how cott was pronounced is not clear. It may have been the remote forerunner of the Southern cote, as in co’t-house.

  4 A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 298.

  5 I take this example from Broadcast English No. II, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1930, p. 14. James does not indicate how door is here pronounced, but other British authorities clip off the final r and make it nearly identical to the doh in the Southern cracker and Negro “Shet ’at doh.”

  6 Our Spoken English; London, 1938, p. 99. James also discusses this blunder in The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 107, 108 and 183. Mr. George W. Thompson calls my attention to the fact that the Southern proletariat is lavish with redundant r’s, as in holler (noun and verb), yeller or yaller, ager, marshmeller, Ednar, Emmar, etc.

  7 Some Notes on American R, American Speech, March, 1926, pp. 329–39.

  1 AL4, p. 425, n. 1.

  2 The nature of the sound in this position is discussed in New Light on the Origin of Eastern American Pronunciation of Unaccented Final A, by James L. Clifford, American Speech, Oct., 1935, pp. 173–75. Various correspondents assure me, pace Lardner, that they have frequently heard feller. It may be a spelling-pronunciation. See Notes, by Moyle Q. Rice, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 237.

  3 The Stressed Vowels of American English, Language, June, 1935, p. 97.

  4 Henry James described it, in The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905, p. 29, as resembling “a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth,” and an editorial writer for the Hartford Courant, on July 6, 1938, accused the speakers of General American of hanging on to it “with the painful tenacity of a clumsy dentist drilling out a cavity.” The Romans called r the litera canina, the dog’s letter.

  5 Alas, even this is denied by a Southern correspondent, Lieut.-Col. F. G. Potts, U.S.A. (ret.), of Mt. Pleasant, S. C. Under date of Jan. 20, 1945 he writes: “American r, carefully sounded, tends to make words indistinct, especially when two or more r’s occur close together. Just have a Middle Westerner say Yorkshire terrier and see what you think of it. The rolled or trilled r’s of Scotland, Ireland and the Continent … are usually pleasant to listen to, and do not detract from clarity of utterance. But the American r is not only disagreeable in itself, but also the cause of modification in the pronunciation of nearby vowels, so that Mary, marry, merry and Murray are frequently pronounced alike, and heart becomes hurt.”

  1 Interesting speculations about r are in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 217–31; The Dog’s Letter, by C. H. Grandgent, in Old and New, Cambridge (Mass.), 1920, pp. 31–56; Dropping of the R, by L. A., American Notes & Queries, Sept., 1945, p. 92, and Loss of R in English Through Dissimilation, by George Hempl, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, No. VI, 1893, pp. 279–81.

  2 American Pronunciation; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. 149.

  3 The English Language in America, Vol. II, pp. 13–17.

  4 AL4, p. 352, n. 2.

  5 Private communication, Jan. 20, 1945.

  1 Private communication. Strengths, incidentally, must be a hard dose for foreigners learning English. It not only includes the difficult sound of th, but is a nine-letter word with only one vowel. But when it comes to clusters of consonants English is a relatively humane language. In his Notes on Duwamish Phonology and Morphology, International Journal of American Linguistics, Oct., 1945, p. 204, Jay Ellis Ransom says that Duwamish, one of the Indian languages of the northwest Pacific Coast, includes sxw, gwlts, gwlgw, bdtcd, sqwqw, txw, djdtcd and bdtcdz.

  2 An English Pronouncing Dictionary, p. 211.

  3 Genesis IL, 13; Acts XXVII, 12.

  4 I Kings I, 52.

  5 II Chronicles XIV, 9; do., XXVI, 11; Psalms XXVII, 3; do., XXIII, 16; Ezekiel I, 24; Daniel VIII, 12.

  6 Job I, 10; Proverbs XV, 19. But in Ecclesiastes X, 8 and Mark XII, 1 a is used before hedge.

  7 Isaiah LIX, 17; I Thessalonians V, 8. But in I Samuel XVII, 5 a is used.

  8 Isaiah LXVI, 14.

  9 Job III, 16; Proverbs XVIII, 11; do. XXI, 4; Isaiah XXX, 13; John XIX, 31; Acts XIII, 17.

  10 Psalms CI, 5; Exodus XIV, 8; Numbers XXXIII, 3; do. XV, 30.

  11 Ezekiel II, 9; do. VIII, 3; Daniel X, 10. But a is in Exodus XIX, 13.

  12 Exodus XXVIII, 32; do. XXIX, 23. But a is in Jeremiah XIII, 4, Ezekiel VIII, 7; II Kings XII, 9.

  13 II Kings IV, 9; Ezekiel XLV, 1; Acts X, 22; I Peter II, 5; Romans XVI, 16; I Corinthians XVI, 20; II Corinthians, XIII, 12; I Thessalonians V, 26; II Timothy I, 9. But a is used in Exodus XIX, 6; Isaiah XXX, 29; Romans XII, 1.

  1 Luke I, 69.

  2 Psalms XXXIII, 17.
An horseman is in II Kings IX, 17. But a horse is in I Kings X, 29 and Isaiah LXIII, 13.

  3 Exodus XII, 30; Judges XVII, 5; I Kings II, 24; do. XI, 18; do. XII, 31; Psalms LXXXIV, 3; Proverbs XVII, 1; do. XXIV, 3; Matthew X, 12. But a is in Job XX, 19 and Psalms XXXI, 2.

  4 Matthew XII, 52.

  5 An hundred occurs in the King James Bible more than seventy times.

  6 Job XIII, 16; Proverbs XI, 9; Isaiah IX, 17.

  1 A and An Before H and Certain Vowels, American Speech, Aug., 1929, pp. 442–54. See also Is It Pedantry?, by Clifford H. Bissell, Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 13, 1927; A or An?, by J. T. Hillhouse, Modern Language Notes, Feb., 1928, pp. 98–101; A and An Before H, by Steven T. Byington, American Speech, Oct., 1929, pp. 82–85, and Initial Long U, by Edwin B. Davis, the same, April, 1944, pp. 152–53.

  2 Concerning the American Language, “part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad” (1880); in A Stolen White Elephant; New York, 1882, pp. 265–69.

  3 Dissertations, p. 122.

  4 Text, Type and Style: A Compendium of Atlantic Usage, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 269.

  5 Seventh edition; London, 1933, p. 1.

  1 The Standard of Pronunciation in English; New York, 1904, p. 195. Strictly speaking, honorarium is not a derivative of honor, for the former came into English direct from the Latin, whereas the latter came from the Anglo-French onour. But onour was itself of Latin origin, and honorarium is always associated with honor in the minds of those who use it.

  2 In Talks With Ralph Waldo Emerson; New York, 1890, p. 51, Charles J. Woodberry reports that Emerson said to him of Landor: “He does not aspirate; drops his h’s like a cockney. I cannot understand it.” Thomas Adolphus Trollope said of him in What I Remember; New York, 1888, p. 440: “He was, I think, the only man in his position in life whom I ever heard do so. That a man who was not only by birth a gentleman, but was by genius and culture – and such culture! – very much more, should do this seemed to me an incomprehensible thing. I do not think he ever introduced the aspirate where it was not needed, but he habitually spoke of ’and, ’ead and ’ouse.”

  3 I do not pause over the not infrequent pedantic complaint that many Americans drop it in which, where, when, etc. As a matter of fact, sounding it there is almost beyond human power; to get it in it must be transferred to the first place in these words, so that which becomes hwich. That is where it was a thousand years ago. But it is not there today, and the effort to pronounce it is a mere affectation. See Phonetic Illusions, by Harold E. Palmer, John o’London’s Weekly, Dec. 23, 1938.

  4 The Sounds of Standard English, by T. Nicklin; Oxford, 1920, pp. 78 and 79.

  1 Wyld says that hit was in general use in England in the Sixteenth Century. I seize the chance to fill a small nook with a sentence from a London letter in the Penang Gazette, June 10, 1938: “An Hollywood seeress who is now in England has cast Mr. Chamberlain’s horoscope.” Obviously, this connotes the pronunciation of Hollywood as Ollywood.

  2 I am indebted here to Mr. Alexander Kadison. In Nov., 1946, the Rev. F. H. J. Newton, vicar of Blackheath, South England, advocated in his parish magazine that h be dropped from the alphabet. He argued that the Cockney version of “Has Herbert had his haircut?,” to wit, “Azerbert addiz aircut?,” “comes out almost as one word – and how beautiful it is, because it is effortless and not self-conscious.”

  3 Perhaps oftener yistidy. Yistidy was approved in the late Eighteenth Century by Sheridan, Kenrick and Nares, but Walker was against it.

  4 Loss of R in English Through Dissimilation, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, No. VI, 1893, pp. 279–81.

  5 Two Observations on Current Colloquial Speech, by A. R. Dunlap, American Speech, Dec., 1939, p. 290.

  6 Kiln or Kill, by Joseph Jones, American Speech, Oct., 1931, pp. 73 and 74.

  7 Bender recommends syth in the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, but Louise Pound reports (Some Folk-Locutions, American Speech, Dec., 1942, p. 247) that sy “is in rather common usage,” and “seems to have fairly wide currency” from South Dakota to Maine. In Maryland, in the 80s, I never heard anything else.

  8 Wyld shows in A History of Modern Colloquial English, p. 175, that the English formerly omitted the l from almost, almanac, falter and various other words. It is still absent from almond.

  9 I am indebted here to Miss Jane D. Shenton, of Temple University.

  10 Bender recommends awf’n. So does Jones for England, but he lists often as an admissible variant. Miss Ward presents evidence, in The Phonetics of English, p. 27, that the t was omitted in England in 1701, but the frequent newspaper discussions of the pronunciation indicate that there is now a tendency to restore it. It long ago disappeared from listen and castle.

  1 Popular Variants of Yes, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Dec., 1926, p. 132. This study was published before the great success of oh yeah. The vowel here, of course, is not that of lay, but a lengthened form of the e of yes itself. I am indebted for this to Mr. Edgar W. Smith, of Maplewood, N. J. See also Yes and Its Variants, by Albert H. Marckwardt, Words, Feb., 1936, pp. 7 and 18.

  2 Some Recurrent Assimilations, by Louise Pound, American Speech, June, 1931, pp. 347–48. When ph appears for f it is often changed to p, as in dip’theria, nap’tha, amp’theater and dip’thong. See AL4, pp. 352 and 407.

  3 The DAE gives onery and ornery, tracing the former to 1860 and the latter to 1830. It derives both from ordinary. I can only say that in the Baltimore of my youth o’n’ry was the only form in general use, and that it was understood to signify, not ordinary, but vicious. Mr. L. Clark Keating tells me that onery is heard in Minnesota.

  4 The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 225.

  5 American Pronunciation, ninth edition; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. 232.

  1 Voiced T – a Misnomer, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 18–25. Oswald objected to calling this sound a voiced t. “From the point of view of phonemics,” he said, “it is a combinatory variant of both t and d.” See also Kenyon, before cited, pp. 232–33; Notes on Voiced T in American English, by Einar Haugen, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Parts XVI and XVII, 1938, pp. 627–34; Language, by Leonard Bloomfield; New York, 1933, pp. 81 and 100.

  2 Mr. Dooley Toepel, of Detroit; private communication, Sept. 2, 1940.

  3 The contrary substitution of t for d, as in holt for hold, has been long noted, but is not frequent.

  4 Punctuation and Improprieties of Speech; Baltimore, 1856, p. 68. I take this from Pronunciation of Shrimp, Shrub and Similar Words, by George H. Reese, American Speech, Dec., 1941, pp. 251–55, in which the occurrence of s in English dialects is reviewed. Reese says it became dominant in Standard English in the late Seventeenth or early Eighteenth Century, but was subsequently replaced by sh, “probably under the influence of spelling.”

  1 The Nature and Origin of Human Speech, S.P.E. Tract No. XXII; Oxford, 1925, p. 32. Lieut. Col. F. G. Potts, of Mt. Pleasant, S. C., tells me that he believes that these sounds are more often voiced in the South than in the North. He cites explosive, exclusive, Japanese and rinse as examples. Bender ordains the unvoiced s in all of these save Japanese. Spellings, says Col. Potts, are sometimes misleading, and he reports hearing Stee-fen for Stephen instead of Stee-ven. Occasionally, he adds, one is taken aback by hearing a voiced consonant where it is not expected, as in diagnoze for diagnose. My mother (1858–1925), born and brought up in Baltimore, showed a liking for the voiced sounds, as in zinc for sink and azzembly for assembly, maybe due to Southern influence.

  2 Mrs. Pieter Juiliter, of Scotia, N. Y., says (private communication): “The correct modern Dutch pronunciation of Delft, elf, etc., has this same swarabhati vowel: Deluft, eluf, etc.”