The American Language A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States

Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of the vulgar spoken language. Among all classes the everyday speech departs very far from orthodox English, and...

In the predicate relation the pronouns respond to a more complex regulation. When they follow any form of the simple verb of being they take the objective form, as in "it's /me/...

The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all a...

By the time of Shakespeare this license was already much restricted, but a good many double negatives are nevertheless to be found in his plays, and he was particularly shaky in...

This extensive use of /ain't/, of course, is merely a single symptom of a general disregard of number, obvious throughout the verbs, and also among the pronouns, as we shall see...

As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still reta...

[20] In the Appendix to the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases, London, 1916, p. iv., I find the following: "/Mr./ C. J. Symonds, F.R.C.S., M.D.; /Mr./ F....

/Foreign Observers/--What English and American laymen have thus observed has not escaped the notice of continental philologists. The first edition of Bartlett, published in 1848...

But though an Englishman, and, following him, a colonial, is thus very careful to restrict /the Hon./ to proper uses, he always insists, when he serves without pay as an officer...

The /i/-sound presents several curious differences. The English make it long in all words of the /hostile/-class; in America it is commonly short, even in /puerile/. The English...

Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing /to advocate/, gave his /imprimatur/ to /to appreciate/ (/i. e./, to rise in value), and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell[22]...

The Board proceeds to the shortening and simplification of native names by various devices. It deletes such suffixes as /town/, /city/ and /courthouse/; it removes the apostroph...

/American Slang/--This neglect of the national proverbial philosophy extends to the national slang. There is but one work, so far as I can discover, formally devoted to it,[3] a...

Original spelling and grammar has mostly been retained. Many inconsistencies in the use of hyphens and character accents have been retained; some of these were probably intentio...

Brackebusch, in the speculative paper just mentioned, came to the conclusion that the future domination of English would be prevented by its unphonetic spelling, its grammatical...

Webster's reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature of the first years of the nineteenth century sh...

The same year saw the publication of the first edition of [Pg070] Webster's American Dictionary of the English language, and a year later followed Samuel L. Knapp's "Lectures on...

The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were announced, /to hoov...

Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American D...

In this formation of the plural, as elsewhere, English regards the precedents and American makes new ones. All the English authorities that I have had access to advocate retaini...

The same caveat lies against the work of the later makers of dictionaries; they have gone ahead of common usage in the matter of orthography, but they have hung back in the far...

Constant familiarity with such contributions from foreign languages and with the general speech habits of foreign peoples has made American a good deal more hospitable to loan-w...

Some of the verbs of the vulgate show the end products of language movements that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and even beyond. There is, for example, the disappearance of...

An Englishman always calls russet, yellow or tan shoes /brown/ shoes (or, if they cover the ankle, /boots/). He calls a pocketbook a /purse/, and gives the name of /pocketbook/...

/Geographical Names/--"There is no part of the world," said Robert Louis Stevenson, "where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as in the United States of...

Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland, fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the definite article before nouns, as in French...

Such changes, in fact, are almost innumerable; every work upon American genealogy is full of examples. The first foreign names to undergo the process were Dutch and French. Amon...

After the opening of the new century all the British reviews maintained an eager watchfulness for these abhorrent inventions, and denounced them, when found, with the utmost veh...

Yule, Henry (and A. C. Burnell). Hobson-Jobson: a Glossary of Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive; new ed...

/Differences in Usage/--The differences here listed, most of them between words in everyday employment, are but examples of a divergence in usage which extends to every departme...

[67] It may be worth noting here that the misuse of /me/ for /my/, as in "I lit /me/ pipe" is quite unknown in American, either standard or vulgar. Even "/me/ own" is seldom hea...

Hale, W. G. (and others): Report of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Nomenclature Appointed by the National Education Association, the Modern Language Association of America,...

Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving shor...

Thornton, Richard H., 6n, 14n, 33, 34, 44, 46n, 49, 51, 55, 62, 74, 78, 79, 81n, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 94, 129, 148, 161, 177, 195n, 285n.

Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory dialect--already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical regularity--has attracted the professional writers of...