Part 24

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 the use of /nor/. In "Richard III" one finds "I never was /nor never/ will be"; in "Measure for Measure," "harp not on that /nor/ do /not/ banish treason," and in "Romeo and Juliet," "thou expectedst not, /nor/ I looked not for." This misuse of /nor/ is still very frequent. In other directions, too, the older forms show a tendency to survive all the assaults of grammarians. "/No/ it /doesn't/," heard every day and by no means from the ignorant only, is a sort of double negative. The insertion of /but/ before that, as in "I doubt /but/ that" and "there is no question /but/ that," makes a double negative that is probably full-blown. Nevertheless, as we have seen, it is heard on the floor of Congress every day, and the Fowlers show that it is also common in England.[74] Even worse forms get into the /Congressional Record/. Not long ago, for example, I encountered "without /hardly/ an exception" in a public paper of the utmost importance.[75] There are, indeed, situations in which the double negative leaps to the lips or from the pen almost irresistibly; even such careful writers as Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Leslie Stephen have [Pg234] occasionally dallied with it.[76] It is perfectly allowable in the Romance languages, and, as we have seen, is almost the rule in the American vulgate. Now and then some anarchistic student of the language boldly defends and even advocates it. "The double negative," said a writer in the /London Review/ a long time ago,[77] "has been abandoned to the great injury of strength of expression." Surely "I won't take nothing" is stronger than either "I will take nothing" or "I won't take anything."

"Language begins," says Sayce, "with sentences, not with single words." In a speech in process of rapid development, unrestrained by critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words to the needs of the complete sentence is especially marked. One finds it clearly in American. Already we have examined various assimilation and composition forms: /that'n/, /use' to/, /would'a/, /them 'ere/ and so on. Many others are observable. /Off'n/ is a good example; it comes from /off of/ and shows a preposition decaying to the form of a mere inflectional particle. One constantly hears "I bought it /off'n/ John." /Sort'a/, /kind'a/ and their like follow in the footsteps of /would'a/. /Usen't/ follows the analogy of /don't/ and /wouldn't/. /Would 've/ and /should 've/ are widely used; Lardner commonly hears them as /would of/ and /should of/. The neutral /a/-particle also appears in other situations, especially before /way/, as in /that'a way/ and /this'a way/. It is found again in /a tall/, a liaison form of /at all/.[78]

§ 8

/Pronunciation/--Before anything approaching a thorough and profitable study of the sounds of the American common speech is possible, there must be a careful assembling of the materials, and this, unfortunately, still awaits a philologist of sufficient enterprise and equipment. Dr. William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana, has made some excellent examinations [Pg235] of vowel and consonant sounds in the South, Dr. Louise Pound has done capital work of the same sort in the Middle West,[79] and there have been other regional studies of merit. But most of these become misleading by reason of their lack of scope; forms practically universal in the nation are discussed as dialectical variations. This is the central defect in the work of the American Dialect Society, otherwise very industrious and meritorious. It is essaying to study localisms before having first platted the characteristics of the general speech. The dictionaries of Americanisms deal with pronunciation only casually, and often very inaccurately; the remaining literature is meagre and unsatisfactory.[80] Until the matter is gone into at length it will be impossible to discuss any phase of it with exactness. No single investigator can examine the speech of the whole country; for that business a pooling of forces is necessary. But meanwhile it may be of interest to set forth a few provisional ideas.

At the start two streams of influence upon American pronunciation may be noted, the one an inheritance from the English of the colonists and the other arising spontaneously within the country, and apparently much colored by immigration. The first influence, it goes without saying, is gradually dying out. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of the diphthong /oi/. In Middle English it was as in /boy/, but during the early Modern English period it was assimilated with that of the /i/ in /wine/, and this usage prevailed at the time of the settlement of America. The colonists thus brought it with them, and at the same time it lodged in Ireland, where it still prevails. But in England, during the pedantic eighteenth century, this /i/-sound was displaced by the original /oi/-sound, not by historical research but by mere deduction from the spelling, and the new pronunciation soon extended to the polite speech of America. In the common speech, however, the /i/-sound persisted, and down to the time of [Pg236] the Civil War it was constantly heard in such words as /boil/, /hoist/, /oil/, /join/, /poison/ and /roil/, which thus became /bile/, /hist/, /ile/, /jine/, /pisen/ and /rile/. Since then the school-marm has combatted it with such vigor that it has begun to disappear, and such forms as /pisen/, /jine/, /bile/ and /ile/ are now very seldom heard, save as dialectic variations. But in certain other words, perhaps supported by Irish influence, the /i/-sound still persists. Chief among them are /hoist/ and /roil/. An unlearned American, wishing to say that he was enraged, never says that he was /roiled/, but always that he was /riled/. Desiring to examine the hoof of his horse, he never orders the animal to /hoist/ but always to /hist/. In the form of /booze-hister/, the latter is almost in good usage. I have seen /booze-hister/ thus spelled and obviously to be thus pronounced, in an editorial article in the /American Issue/, organ of the Anti-Saloon League of America.[81]

Various similar misplaced vowels were brought from England by the colonists and have persisted in America, while dying out of good England usage. There is, for example, short /i/ in place of long /e/, as in /critter/ for /creature/. /Critter/ is common to almost all the dialects of English, but American has embedded the vowel in a word that is met with nowhere else and has thus become characteristic, to wit, /crick/ for /creek/. Nor does any other dialect make such extensive use of /slick/ for /sleek/. Again, there is the substitution of the flat /a/ for the broad /a/ in /sauce/. England has gone back to the broad /a/, but in America the flat /a/ persists, and many Americans who use /sassy/ every day would scarcely recognize /saucy/ if they heard it. Yet again, there is /quoit/. Originally, the English pronounced it /quate/, but now they pronounce the diphthong as in /doily/. In the United States the /quate/ pronunciation remains. Finally, there is /deaf/. Its proper pronunciation, in the England that the colonists left, was /deef/, but it now rhymes with /Jeff/. That new pronunciation has been adopted by polite American, despite the protests of Noah Webster, but in the common speech the word is still always /deef/.

However, a good many of the vowels of the early days have [Pg237] succumbed to pedagogy. The American proletarian may still use /skeer/ for /scare/, but in most of the other words of that class he now uses the vowel approved by correct English usage. Thus he seldom permits himself such old forms as /dreen/ for /drain/, /keer/ for /care/, /skeerce/ for /scarce/ or even /cheer/ for /chair/. The Irish influence supported them for a while, but now they are fast going out. So, too, are /kivver/ for /cover/, /crap/ for /crop/, and /chist/ for /chest/. But /kittle/ for /kettle/ still shows a certain vitality, /rench/ is still used in place of /rinse/, and /squinch/ in place of /squint/, and a flat /a/ continues to displace various /e/-sounds in such words as /rare/ for /rear/ (/e. g./, as a horse) and /wrassle/ for /wrestle/. Contrariwise, /e/ displaces /a/ in /catch/ and /radish/, which are commonly pronounced /ketch/ and /reddish/. This /e/-sound was once accepted in standard English; when it got into spoken American it was perfectly sound; one still hears it from the most pedantic lips in /any/.[82] There are also certain other ancients that show equally unbroken vitality among us, for example, /stomp/ for /stamp/,[83] /snoot/ for /snout/, /guardeen/ for /guardian/, and /champeen/ for /champion/.

But all these vowels, whether approved or disapproved, have been under the pressure, for the past century, of a movement toward a general vowel neutralization, and in the long run it promises to dispose of many of them. The same movement also affects standard English, as appears by Robert Bridges' "Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation," but I believe that it is stronger in America, and will go farther, at least with the common speech, if only because of our unparalleled immigration. Standard English has 19 separate vowel sounds. No other living tongue of Europe, save Portuguese, has so many; most of the others have a good many less; Modern Greek has but five. The immigrant, facing all these vowels, finds some of them quite impossible; the Russian Jew, as we have seen, cannot manage /ur/. As a result, he tends to employ a neutralized [Pg238] vowel in all the situations which present difficulties, and this neutralized vowel, supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress. It appears in many of the forms that we have been examining--in the final /a/ of /would'a/, vaguely before the /n/ in /this'n/ and /off'n/, in place of the original /d/ in /use' to/, and in the common pronunciation of such words as /been/, /come/ and /have/, particularly when they are sacrificed to sentence exigencies, as in "I /b'n/ thinking," "/c'm 'ere/," and "he would /'ve/ saw you."

Here we are upon a wearing down process that shows many other symptoms. One finds, not only vowels disorganized, but also consonants. Some are displaced by other consonants, measurably more facile; others are dropped altogether. /D/ becomes /t/, as in /holt/, or is dropped, as in /tole/, /han'kerchief/, /bran-new/ and /fine/ (for /find/). In /ast/ (for /ask/) /t/ replaces /k/: when the same word is used in place of /asked/, as often happens, /e. g./, in "I /ast/ him his name," it shoulders out /ked/. It is itself lopped off in /bankrup/, /quan'ity/, /crep/, /slep/, /wep/, /kep/, /gris'-mill/ and /les/ (=/let's/ = /let us/), and is replaced by /d/ in /kindergarden/ and /pardner/. /L/ disappears, as in /a'ready/ and /gent'man/. /S/ becomes /tsh/, as in /pincers/. The same /tsh/ replaces /c/, as in /pitcher/ for /picture/, and /t/, as in /amachoor/. /G/ disappears from the ends of words, and sometimes, too, in the middle, as in /stren'th/ and /reco'nize/. /R/, though it is better preserved in American than in English, is also under pressure, as appears by /bust/, /stuck on/ (for /struck on/), /cuss/ (for /curse/), /yestiddy/, /sa's'parella/, /pa'tridge/, /ca'tridge/, /they is/ (for /there is/) and /Sadd'y/ (for /Saturday/). An excrescent /t/ survives in a number of words, /e. g./, /onc't/, /twic't/, /clos't/, /wisht/ (for /wish/) and /chanc't/; it is an heirloom from the English of two centuries ago. So is the final /h/ in /heighth/. An excrescent /b/, as in /chimbley/ and /fambly/, seems to be native. Whole syllables are dropped out of words, paralleling the English butchery of /extraordinary/; for example, in /bound'ry/, /hist'ry/, /lib'ry/ and /prob'ly/. /Ordinary/, like /extraordinary/, is commonly enunciated clearly, but it has bred a degenerated form, /onry/ or /onery/, differentiated in meaning. Consonants are misplaced by metathesis, as in /prespiration/, /hunderd/, [Pg239] /brethern/, /childern/, /interduce/, /apern/, /calvary/, /govrenment/, /modren/ and /wosterd/ (for /worsted/). /Ow/ is changed to /er/, as in /feller/, /swaller/, /yeller/, /beller/, /umbreller/ and /holler/; /ice/ is changed to /ers/ in /jaunders/. Words are given new syllables, as in /ellum/, /mischievious/ and /municipial/.

In the complete sentence, assimilation makes this disorganization much more obvious. Mearns, in a brief article[84] gives many examples of the extent to which it is carried. He hears "wah zee say?" for "what does he say?" "ware zee?" for "where is he?" "ast 'er in" for "ask her in," "itt'm owd" for "hit them out," "sry" for "that is right," and "c'meer" for "come here." He believes that /t/ is gradually succumbing to /d/, and cites "ass bedder" (for "that's better"), "wen juh ged din?" (for "when did you get in?"), and "siddup" (for "sit up"). One hears countless other such decayed forms on the street every day. /Have to/ is almost invariably made /hafta/, with the neutral vowel where I have put the second /a/. /Let's/, already noticed, is /le' 's/. The neutral vowel replaces the /oo/ of /good/ in /g'by/. "What did you say" reduces itself to "wuz ay?" /Maybe/ is /mebby/, /perhaps/ is /p'raps/, /so long/ is /s'long/, /excuse me/ is /skus me/; the common salutation, "How are you?" is so dismembered that it finally emerges as a word almost indistinguishable from /high/. Here there is room for inquiry, and that inquiry deserves the best effort of American phonologists, for the language is undergoing rapid changes under their very eyes, or, perhaps more accurately, under their very ears, and a study of those changes should yield a great deal of interesting matter. How did the word /stint/, on American lips, first convert itself into /stent/ and then into /stunt/? By what process was /baulk/ changed into /buck/? Both /stunt/ and /buck/ are among the commonest words in the everyday American vocabulary, and yet no one, so far, has investigated them scientifically.

A by-way that is yet to be so much as entered is that of naturalized loan-words in the common speech. A very characteristic word of that sort is /sashay/. Its relationship to the French /chassé/ seems to be plain, and yet it has acquired meanings in [Pg240] American that differ very widely from the meaning of /chassé/. How widely it is dispersed may be seen by the fact that it is reported in popular use, as a verb signifying to prance or to walk consciously, in Southeastern Missouri, Nebraska, Northwestern Arkansas, Eastern Alabama and Western Indiana, and, with slightly different meaning, on Cape Cod. The travels of /café/ in America would repay investigation; particularly its variations in pronunciation. I believe that it is fast becoming /kaif/. /Plaza/, /boulevard/, /vaudeville/, /menu/ and /rathskeller/ have entered into the common speech of the land, and are pronounced as American words. Such words, when they come in verbally, by actual contact with immigrants, commonly retain some measure of their correct native pronunciation. /Spiel/, /kosher/, /ganof/ and /matzoh/ are examples; their vowels remain un-American. But words that come in visually, say through street-signs and the newspapers, are immediately overhauled and have thoroughly Americanized vowels and consonants thereafter. School-teachers have been trying to establish various pseudo-French pronunciations of /vase/ for fifty years past, but it still rhymes with /face/ in the vulgate. /Vaudeville/ is /vawd-vill/; /boulevard/ has a hard /d/ at the end; /plaza/ has two flat /a/'s; the first syllable of /menu/ rhymes with /bee/; the first of /rathskeller/ with /cats/; /fiancée/ is /fy-ancé-y/; /née/ rhymes with /see/; /décolleté/ is /de-coll-ty/; /hofbräu/ is /huffbrow/; the German /w/ has lost its /v/-sound and becomes an American /w/. I have, in my day, heard /proteege/ for /protégé/, /habichoo/ for /habitué/, /connisoor/ for /connisseur/, /shirtso/ for /scherzo/, /premeer/ for /première/, /eetood/ for /étude/ and /prelood/ for /prelude/. /Divorcée/ is /divorcey/, and has all the rakishness of the adjectives in /-y/. The first syllable of /mayonnaise/ rhymes with /hay/. /Crème de menthe/ is /cream de mint/. /Schweizer/ is /swite-ser/. /Rochefort/ is /roke-fort/. I have heard /début/ with the last syllable rhyming with /nut/. I have heard /minoot/ for /minuet/. I have heard /tchef doover/ for /chef d'œuvre/. And who doesn't remember

As I walked along the /Boys Boo-long/ With an independent air

and [Pg241]

Say /aw re-vore/, But not good-by!

Charles James Fox, it is said, called the red wine of France /Bordox/ to the end of his days. He had an American heart; his great speeches for the revolting colonies were more than mere oratory.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Sweet, perhaps the abbot of the order, makes almost indecent haste to sin. See the second paragraph on the very first page of vol. i of his New English Grammar.

[2] /Yale Review/, April, 1918, p. 548.

[3] /Yale Review/, /op. cit./, p. 560.

[4] The Difficulties Created by Grammarians Are to be Ignored, by W. H. Wilcox, /Atlantic Educational Journal/, Nov., 1912, p. 8. The title of this article is quoted from ministerial instructions of 1909 to the teachers of French /lyceés/.

[5] /Op cit./ p. 7. Mr. Wilcox is an instructor in the Maryland State Normal School.

[6] See especially chapters ix and x of Words and Their Uses and chapters xvii, xviii and xix of Every-Day English; also the preface to the latter, p. xi /et seq./ The study of other languages has been made difficult by the same attempt to force the characters of Greek and Latin grammar upon them. One finds a protest against the process, for example, in E. H. Palmer's Grammar of Hindustani, Persian and Arabic; London, 1906. In all ages, indeed, grammarians appear to have been fatuous. The learned will remember Aristophanes' ridicule of them in The Clouds, 660-690.

[7] The case is well summarized in Simpler English Grammar, by Patterson Wardlaw, /Bull. of the University of S. Carolina/, No. 38, pt. iii, July, 1914.

[8] Cincinnati, 1868; rev. ed., 1878.

[9] New York, 1903; rev. ed., 1915.

[10] Even Sweet, though he bases his New English Grammar upon the spoken language and thus sets the purists at defiance, quickly succumbs to the labelling mania. Thus his classification of tenses includes such fabulous monsters as these: continuous, recurrent, neutral, definite, indefinite, secondary, incomplete, inchoate, short and long.

[11] By W. F. Webster and Alice Woodworth Cooley; Boston, 1903; rev. eds., 1905 and 1909. The authors are Minneapolis teachers.

[12] /Op. cit./ p. 8.

[13] Bulletin No. 2; Washington, 1917.

[14] The Middle American, /American Magazine/, March, 1907.

[15] /Cf./ White: Every-Day English, p. 367 /et seq./

[16] /Cf./ Sweet: New English Grammar, vol. i, p. 5.

[17] Dr. Charters' report appears as Vol. XVI, No. 2, /University of Missouri Bulletin/, Education Series No. 9, Jan., 1915. He was aided in his inquiry by Edith Miller, teacher of English in one of the St. Louis high-schools.

[18] You Know Me Al: New York, 1916.

[19] /Saturday Evening Post/, July 11, 1914.

[20] /Bin/ is the correct American pronunciation. /Bean/, as we have seen, is the English. But I have often found /ben/, rhyming with /pen/, in such phrases as "I /ben/ there."

[21] See p. 209.

[22] Seldom used. /Get/ is used in the place of it, as in "I am /getting/ old" and "he /got/ sick."

[23] /Burned/, with a distinct /d/-sound, is almost unknown in American. See p. 201.

[24] Not used.

[25] /Cotched/ is heard only in the South, and mainly among the negroes. /Catch/, of course, is always pronounced /ketch/.

[26] But "I /drew/ three jacks," in poker.

[27] /Fotch/ is also heard, but it is not general.

[28] /Fit/ and /fitten/, unless my observation errs, are heard only in dialect. /Fit/ is archaic English. /Cf./ Thornton, vol. i, p. 322.

[29] /Glode/ once enjoyed a certain respectability in America. It occurs in the /Knickerbocker Magazine/ for April, 1856.

[30] /Hanged/ is never heard.

[31] /Het/ is incomplete without the addition of /up/. "He was /het up/" is always heard, not "he was /het/."

[32] Always so pronounced. See p. 236.

[33] See pp. 57 and 202.

[34] Always used in place of /rinse/.

[35] Always used in place of /roil/.

[36] /Sot/ is heard as a localism only.

[37] See /set/, which is used almost invariably in place of /sit/.

[38] /Thunk/ is never used seriously; it always shows humorous intent.

[39] See pp. 201 and 211.

[40] /Cf./ Lounsbury: History of the English Language, pp. 309-10.

[41] English As We Speak It In Ireland, p. 77.

[42] The Science of Language, vol. i, p. 166.

[43] The last stand of the distinct /-ed/ was made in Addison's day. He was in favor of retaining it, and in the /Spectator/ for Aug. 4, 1711, he protested against obliterating the syllable in the termination "of our praeter perfect tense, as in these words, /drown'd/, /walk'd/, /arriv'd/, for /drowned/, /walked/, /arrived/, which has very much disfigured the tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest words into so many clusters of consonants."

[44] A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 380.

[45] History of the English Language, p. 398.

[46] And still more often as an adjective, as in "it was a /boughten/ dress."

[47] You Know Me Al, p. 180; see also p. 122.

[48] /Cf./ Lounsbury: History of the English Language, pp. 393 /et seq./

[49] Remark of a policeman talking to another. What he actually said was "before the Elks was /c'm 'ere/." /Come/ and /here/ were one word, approximately /cmear/. The context showed that he meant to use the past perfect tense.

[50] These examples are from Lardner's story, A New Busher Breaks In, in You Know Me Al, pp. 122 /et seq./

[51] You Know Me Al, /op. cit./, p. 124.

[52] The Making of English, p. 53.

[53] /Cf./ /Dialect Notes/, vol. iii, pt. i, p. 59; /ibid./, vol. III, pt. iv, p. 283.

[54] Henry Bradley, in The Making of English, pp. 54-5: "In the parts of England which were largely inhabited by Danes the native pronouns (/i. e./, /heo/, /his/, /heom/ and /heora/) were supplanted by the Scandinavian pronouns which are represented by the modern /she/, /they/, /them/ and /their/." This substitution, at first dialectical, gradually spread to the whole language.

[55] /Cf./ Sweet: A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 344, par. 1096.

[56] Before a noun beginning with a vowel /thine/ and /mine/ are commonly substituted for /thy/ and /my/, as in "/thine/ eyes" and "/mine/ infirmity." But this is solely for the sake of euphony. There is no compensatory use of /my/ and /thy/ in the absolute.

[57] The Making of English, p. 58.

[58] /Cf./ The Dialect of Southeastern Missouri, by D. S. Crumb, /Dialect Notes/, vol. ii, pt. iv, 1903, p. 337.

[59] It occurs, too, of course, in other dialects of English, though by no means in all. The Irish influence probably had something to do with its prosperity in vulgar American. At all events, the Irish use it in the American manner. Joyce, in English As We Speak It in Ireland, pp. 34-5, argues that this usage was suggested by Gaelic. In Gaelic the accusative pronouns, /e/, /i/ and /iad/ (=/him/, /her/ and /them/) are often used in place of the nominatives, /sé/, /si/ and /siad/ (=/he/, /she/ and /they/), as in "is /iad/ sin na buachaillidhe" (=/them/ are the boys). This is "good grammar" in Gaelic, and the Irish, when they began to learn English, translated the locution literally. The familiar Irish "John is dead and /him/ always so hearty" shows the same influence.

[60] Pp. 144-50.

[61] Modern English, p. 300.

[62] A New English Grammar, pt. i, p. 339.

[63] History of the English Language, pp. 274-5.

[64] Modern English, p. 288-9.

[65] /Cf./ p. 145n.