American Language Supplement 2
Page 34
1 i.e., by what I have called General American.
2 A Standard American Language?, New Republic, May 25, 1938, p. 68.
1 A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee; second edition; London, 1935, Vol. II, pp. 311–12. See also Vol. I, pp. 466–67.
2 Poor Relations in America, by Looker-on, Glasgow News, Sept. 17, 1934. For the immigration of the Scotch-Irish see The Scotch-Irish in Colonial Pennsylvania, by Wayland F. Dunaway; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1944.
1 See The Many-Sired Lincoln, by J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton, American Mercury, June, 1935, pp. 129–35. Lincoln was not a hillman, but the stock from which he issued was almost as deteriorated as that of the high Appalachians.
2 See The Hills of Zion in my Prejudices; Fifth Series; New York, 1926, pp. 75–86.
3 Dialectal Survivals in Tennessee, Modern Language Notes, 1889, pp. 400–16, and Other Dialectal Forms in Tennessee, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1891, pp. 171–5.
4 Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, Vol. IV, Part IV, 1916, pp. 283–97.
5 “The dialect,” says Horace Kephart in Our Southern Highlanders; New York, 1921, p. 279, “varies a good deal from place to place, and even in the same neighborhood we rarely hear all families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are prone to err by making their characters talk it too consistently. It is only in the backwoods or among old people or the penned-at-home women that it is used with any integrity.” See also Variation in the Southern Mountain Dialect, by-Charles Carpenter, American Speech, Feb., 1928, pp. 22–25.
1 Combs, however, sticks to his guns, and may be right. He wrote to me under date of February 7, 1944: “In all the highlands except West Virginia I have not found a single ballad which savors of the Scotch dialect. I once collected at random about 200 family names and went over them with Dr. MacKenzie of Edinburgh University; we decided that less than 15% of them were of Scottish origin. Scotch Presbyterian missionaries come evangelizing into the South the past hundred years have given undue importance to the Scottish element in the highlands.”
2 London, 1911.
3 Some examples cited by Combs: afeared, steepy, tonguey, to argufy.
4 AL4, pp. 124–29; Supplement I, pp. 224–26.
5 For example, in Dialect of the Folk Song, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 311–18; Early English Slang Survivals in the Mountains of Kentucky, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part IV, 1921, pp. 115–17; Kentucky Items, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part IV, 1921, pp. 118–19; A Word-List From Georgia, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part V, 1922, pp. 183–84; Addenda From Kentucky, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part VI, 1923, pp. 242–43; A Word-List From the Southern Highlands, Publication of the American Dialect Society No. 2, Nov., 1944, pp. 17–23. At the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in New York, Dec. 28, 1944, he entertained the members with a translation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into the vernacular of the Kentucky mountaineers. He has under way a book to be called The Language of Our Southern Highlanders. A commentary on his paper on Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, by H. M. Steadman, Jr., was published in Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 350–52.
6 Language of the Southern Highlanders, Dec., 1931, pp. 1302–22.
7 The Phonetics of the Great Smoky Mountain Speech, American Speech Reprints and Monographs, No. 4. Hall is also the author of Mountain Speech in the Great Smokies, No. 5 in a series of pamphlets entitled National Park Service Popular Study Series, issued by the National Parle Service, Department of the Interior; Washington, 1941. In The Phonetics of the Great Smoky Mountain Speech there is a bibliography, pp. 107–10.
1 Raven I. McDavid, Jr., in Language, April-June, 1943, pp. 184–95.
2 A Word List From Barbourville, Ky., by Abigail E. Weeks, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part VI, 1910, pp. 456–57; An Eastern Kentucky Word-List, by Hubert G. Shearin, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part VII, 1911, pp. 537–40; A Word-List From the Mountains of Western North Carolina, by Horace Kephart, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part VI, 1917, pp. 407–19; Appalachian Mountain Words, by L. R. Dingus, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part X, 1927, pp. 468–71; American Speech as Practised in the Southern Highlands, by Maristan Chapman, Century Magazine, March, 1929, pp. 617–23; Elizabethan America, by Charles M. Wilson, Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1929; Beefsteak When I’m Hungry, by C. M. Wilson, Virginia Quarterly Review, April, 1930, pp. 240–50; How the Wood Hick Speaks: Some Observations Made in Upshur County, W. Va., by Paul E. Pendleton, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part II, 1930, pp. 86–89; Folk Speech in the Kentucky Mountain Cycle of Percy Mackaye, by B. A. Botkin, American Speech, April, 1931, pp. 264–76; Folk Speech of the Cumberlands, by Bess Alice Owens, American Speech, Dec., 1931, pp. 89–95; Variations in the Southern Mountain Dialect, by Charles Carpenter, American Speech, Feb., 1933, p. 22; Southern Mountain Accent, by C. G., American Speech, Dec., 1934, p. 251; Remnants of Archaic English in West Virginia, by Charles Carpenter, West Virginia Review, Dec., 1934, pp. 77–95; The Language of the Tennessee Mountain Regions, by T. J. Farr, American Speech, April, 1939, pp. 89–92; How to Say It In Smoky Speech, Better English, Jan., 1940, pp. 50–52; Southern Mountain Dialect, by Lester V. Berrey, American Speech, Feb., 1940, pp. 45–54 (includes a bibliography); More Tennessee Expressions, by T. J. Farr, American Speech, Dec., 1940, pp. 446–48; The Georgia Mountaineer’s Vanishing Vocabulary, by Byron Herbert Reece, Atlanta Journal Magazine, March 3, 1946, pp. 8 and 9. (I am indebted for this last to Mr. John E. Ransom, of Atlanta.)
3 Is There an Ozark Dialect?, American Speech, Feb., 1929, pp. 203–04.
4 Mark XVI, 17.
1 A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms, American Speech, Dec., 1928, pp. 116–17.
2 The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, American Speech, Oct., 1927, pp. 1–11.
3 Pronunciation in the Ozarks (with Anna A. Ingleman), American Speech, June, 1928, pp. 401–07.
4 The Ozarks: an American Survival of Primitive Society; New York, 1931, pp. 70–71. Of these terms Wentworth finds ashamed in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Kansas, gum in southeastern Virginia and wax in western Texas, but the rest seem to be either borrowed from Appalachia or peculiar to the Ozarks.
5 Possibly by assimilation with the name of a popular brand of coffee.
1 Mostly used, says Randolph, by old women.
2 Possibly a reminiscence of an old archery term.
3 A false singular for hose.
4 This appeared in the vocabulary of variety, c, 1935.
5 A Word-List From the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part IX, 1926, pp. 397–405; More Words From the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part X, 1927, pp. 472–79.
6 Such terms are discussed at some length in AL4, pp. 300–11, and Supplement I, pp. 639–61. Beside those regarded as indecent many are frowned upon for other reasons, especially in the South. In Dialect Geography and Social Science Problems, Social Forces, Dec., 1946, p. 172, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., calls attention to the fact that Henry Wallace’s century of the common man was regarded askance south of the Potomac because common is there “a term of contempt.”
7 Verbal Modesty in the Ozarks, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part I, 1928, pp. 57–64. This paper is reprinted in Randolph’s The Ozarks; New York, 1931, pp. 78–96. His other writings include: The Ozark Dialect in Fiction, American Speech, March, 1927, pp. 283–89; Literary Words in the Ozarks, American Speech, Oct., 1928, pp. 56–57; A Third Ozark Word-List, American Speech, Oct., 1929, pp. 16–21; Dialectal Survivals in the Ozarks (with Patti Sankee), American Speech, Feb., 1930, pp. 198–208; April, pp. 264–69, and June, pp. 424–30; Recent Fiction and the Ozark Dialect, American Speech, Aug., 1931, pp. 425–28; Quilt Names in the Ozarks (with Isabel Spradley), American Speech, Feb., 1933, pp. 33–36; A Fourth Ozark Word-List, American Speech, Feb., 1933, pp. 47–53; A Fifth Ozark Word-List (with Nancy Clements), American Speech, Dec., 1936, pp. 314–18. Among the papers by other hands that contain useful information are: A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, by Joseph W.
Carr, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part VI, 1904, pp. 416–22; Vol. III, Part I, 1905, pp. 205–38; Vol. III, Part II, 1906, pp. 125–65; Vol. III, Part III, 1907, pp. 68–103, and Vol. III, Part V, 1909, pp. 392–406; Snake County Talk, by Jay L. B. Taylor, Dialect Notes, Vol. V. Part VI, 1923, pp. 197–225; On the Ozark Pronunciation of It, by Vernon C. Allison, American Speech, Feb., 1929, pp. 205–06; Ozark Words Again, by Napier Wilt, American Speech, Oct., 1937, pp. 234–35.
1 Greet says in A Standard American Language?, New Republic, May 25, 1938, p. 68: “It runs up the coast from Savannah, flourishes at Charleston, weakens in North Carolina, blooms again in the Petersburg and Richmond (Williamsburg) district [of Virginia]. Families like the Byrds carried it to Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley. It crosses the Chesapeake to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland, and in certain old families has a hold on Delaware.”
2 Southern American Dialect, American Speech, April, 1933, pp. 37–43. Wise gathered his materials in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas.
3 This glide, of course, also appears before other vowels, e.g., a, as in cyar and cyarry. But only when r follows, silent or not: Cyabell is unknown. See an editorial, Ah Declah, Doctuh!, in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec. 26, 1946, correcting some errors in a paper by Argus Tressider, a Northerner, published in the Madison Quarterly. I am indebted here to Mr. James M. Bowcock, of Richmond.
1 You-all will be discussed in Chapter IX, Section 3.
2 pp. 41–42.
3 Southern Standards, by Katherine E. Wheatley, American Speech, Feb., 1934, pp. 36–45. Miss Wheatley gathered her materials in Louisiana and southeastern Texas.
4 pp. 37–38.
1 Southern Speech, before cited, p. 610. The late W. J. Cash, a very-acute lay observer, noted in This is How We Talk: Babel in the South, Charlotte (N.C.), News, Dec. 12, 1937, a tendency among educated Southerners to drop, on informal and especially jovial occasions, into what he called cornfield nigger.
2 The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain, Louisiana State University Studies, No. XX; Baton Rouge, 1935; The English Language in the South, in A Vanderbilt Miscellany; Nashville, 1944, pp. 179–87.
3 The Unstressed Syllabic Phonemes of a Southern Dialect, Studies in Linguistics, Summer, 1944, pp. 51–55. The dialect investigated is that of the author himself, a native of Greenville, S. C., in the Piedmont. In 1941 McDavid read a paper on The Stressed Vowel Phonemes of a Southern Dialect before the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Durham, N. C.
4 Secretary-treasurer of the American Dialect Society and chairman of its committee on regional speech and localisms. In the society’s Publication No. 2, Nov., 1944, he began a series of word-lists from the South to which he contributed one from Virginia and North Carolina, The other contributors were Leah A. Dennis, Josiah Combs, Hugh C. Laughlin, Gratis D. Williams, Francis C. Hayes, Constance Bey and L. R. Dingus. Wilson is the author of Some Unrecorded Southern Vowels, American Speech, Oct., 1945, pp. 209–13.
5 Who Lost the Southern R?, American Speech, June, 1928, pp. 377–83.
6 Vowel Nasality as a Sandhi-Form of the Morphemes -nt and -ing in Southern American, American Speech, April, 1939, pp. 120–23.
7 The Survival of Start-naked in the South, in Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf, University of Virginia Studies No. I, 1941, pp. 48–64. Hench is the author of other interesting studies of Southern speech, and I am indebted to him for friendly aid with the present book.
8 Southern L Plus a Consonant, American Speech, Oct., 1940, pp. 259–61.
9 Some Remarks on Southern Dialect, a paper read before the English Lunch Club at Harvard, Feb. 12, 1944. From March 19 to July 23, 1942, Barrs contributed weekly articles on South Georgia speech to the Douglas (Ga.) Enterprise.
10 The Vowel System of the Southern United States, Englische Studien, Vol. XLI, 1910; Some Variant Pro nunciations in the New South, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part VII, 1911, pp. 497–536.
1 For example, from his colleague of the Fort Smith (Ark.) Times-Record in a powerful editorial entitled That “Southern” Accent, Oct. 21, 1944.
2 Southern Long i, American Speech, Oct., 1935, pp. 188–90.
3 For example, by William B. Edgerton in Another Note on the Southern Pronunciation of Long i, American Speech, Oct., 1935, p. 190. But Edgerton denies that the Southern long i is a simple vowel. “There is,” he says, “a scarcely perceptible glide toward i” [ee].
1 See Supplement I, pp. 227–35. Also, see West, speech of, in the Index thereof.
2 See Supplement I, pp. 228 and 330.
3 The DAE traces it to the Knickerbocker Magazine for 1838, but it is probably older. The DAE’s last example of its use is from Harper’s Magazine for Oct., 1886. By that time the Old West was fast vanishing, and Chicago, in Eugene Field’s phrase, was preparing “to make culture hum.”
4 See Toynbee, before cited, Vol. III, p. 21, n. 1.
5 A Standard American Language?, New Republic, May 25, 1938, p. 68.
1 A Word-List From the Northwest, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part I, pp. 26–28.
2 Addenda to the Word-List from the Northwest, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 162–64.
3 For example, Benjamin H. Lehman, in A Word List From Northwestern United States, Dialect Notes, 1918, pp. 22–29. One of Lehman’s entries was blue-liz, signifying a police patrol-wagon. I suggest that this may have suggested tin-lizzie for the Model T Ford, which appeared on Oct. 1, 1908, but did not reach a production of 1,000,000 until Dec. 10, 1915. See also A Word List From the Northwest, by R. M. Garrett, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part II, 1919, pp. 54–59, and Part III, 1920, pp. 80–84; Additional Words From the Northwest, by B. H. Lehman, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part V, 1922, p. 181; Westernisms, by Kate Mullen, American Speech, Dec., 1925, pp. 149–53; The Speech of the Frontier, by E. E. Dale, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Oct., 1941, pp. 353–63; and Westernisms, by Levette J. Davidson, American Speech, Feb., 1942, pp. 71–73.
4 Supplement I, pp. 312–13.
1 But see The English Language in the Southwest, by Thomas Matthews Pearce, New Mexico Historical Review, July, 1932, pp. 210–32. In this paper, which was read before the Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters of Albuquerque on May 23, 1932, Pearce takes a contrary view. A bibliography of other writings on the subject is in Supplement I, p. 313, notes 2 and 3. An early discussion, Southwestern Slang, by Socrates Hyacinth, Overland Monthly, Aug., 1869, pp. 125–31, is reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931, pp. 151–63. See also Trader Terms in Southwestern English, by the aforesaid Pearce, American Speech, Oct., 1941, pp. 179–86; and Spanish Words That Have Become Westernisms, by Florence A. Chapin, Editor, July 25, 1917, p. 121.
2 Editorial, Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, Oct. 27.
3 It has but 12,210 square miles of area, and 2319 of them are under water. Counting only dry land, Texas could hold 21.76413 + Marylands.
1 Mark Twain defined it, in Roughing It, 1872, as “Injun-English for very much.”
2 The question where the best American is spoken is often discussed in the newspapers. Noah Webster, after his tour of the country in 1785–86, is said to have nominated Baltimore. In 1928 a group of 100 gradute students in English at Columbia, after hearing some of the phonograph records assembled by W. Cabell Greet, chose St. Louis. (It’s in St. Louis That Americanese is Spoken, New York World, Nov. 9, 1928). Ann Royall, in her Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States, published in 1826, said: “The dialect of Washington, exclusive of the foreigners, is the most correct and pure of any part of the United States I have ever yet been in,” and this was supported 117 years later by Francis X. Welch in the New York Times. (All Speech Pure to Speakers, Sept. 17, 1943). In 1936 a writer in Business Week voted for Benton Harbor, Mich. (Editorially Speaking—, June 6, p. 51). As for me, I wobble between Baltimore and Benton
Harbor, inclining toward the former because it is my native place and fixed my own speech-habits, and toward the latter because it is in the same Sprachgebiet as Owosso, Mich., the birthplace of Thomas E. Dewey, whose General American is the clearest and best that I have ever heard from the lips of an American rhetorician.
3 The relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialect of Great Britain, Louisiana State University Studies, No. XX; Baton Rouge, 1935. There is a review by Kemp Malone in Modern Language Notes, Jan., 1938, p. 40.
4 Phonology of the Standard English of East Central Alabama, a dissertation submitted for the doctorate at the University of Chicago, 1946. I am indebted to Dr. McMillan for access to this.
1 A Word-List From East Alabama, Dialect Notes, Vol. III, Part IV, 1908, pp. 279–328; Part V, 1099, pp. 343–91.
2 A Word-List From Alabama and Some Other Southern States, Publication of the American Dialect Society No. 2, Nov., 1944, pp. 6–16.
3 p. 279.
1 New York, 1941, pp. 122–29.
1 Vol. IV, Part II, pp. 164–65.
2 A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, Vol. II, Part VI, 1904, pp. 416–22; Vol. III, Part 1,1905, pp. 68–103; Vol. III, Part II, 1906, pp. 124–65; Vol. III, Part III, 1907, pp. 205–38, and Vol. III, Part V, 1909, pp. 392–406.
1 A Word List From Southeast Arkansas, American Speech, Feb., 1938, pp. 3–7.
2 A Word-List From California, Vol. V. Part IV, pp. 109–14.
3 Supplement I, pp. 348 ff.
4 Supplement I, pp. 310 and 311.