Authors: H.L. Mencken
At two other places under the American flag dialects of English flourish. One is Key West and the other is the Virgin Islands. The Key West dialect is Southern American showing the influence of Bahaman English and Cuban Spanish. The
i
is frequently given its Spanish sound, especially in proper names, so that
Olivia
becomes
Oleevia
. The
a
, before
g
, is transformed into a short
i
, so that
bag
becomes
big
and
rag
becomes
rig
. The
w
and
v
are exchanged, so that
west
becomes
vest
, and
visit
becomes
wisit
. The
h
is treated in the Cockney manner, so that horse becomes
orse
and the letter
l
is called
hell. Ain’t
is often used in place of
won’t
or
haven’t
. The
-ed
ending is omitted from the past tense forms of the verbs. Many Spanish idioms are translated literally,
e.g., Quantos años tiene?
which becomes “How many years you got?” There are many loan-words
from the Spanish, and the inhabitants have invented the usual opprobrious terms for one another,
e.g., conch
(a West Indian), and
saw
(a native of Nassau).
158
The Virgin Islands dialect, of course, is not American, but English. Basically, it is simply the English of the late Seventeenth Century, but there are many Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and Danish loan-words, and some vestiges of the West Coast African dialects. The phonology shows Danish influence. Among the special characters are the omission of
s
before consonants, so that
stocking
becomes
tocking
, and the use of a collective pronoun,
a-wee
, corresponding to the Southern American
us-all
.
159
This jargon is spoken not only in the Virgin Islands, but also in the British Lesser Antilles, in Dutch Saba and in French St. Martin, of course with local variations. A somewhat analogous dialect, but much less like Standard English, is spoken in Dutch Guiana, on the South American mainland.
160
1
Introduction to the Science of Language, 4th ed., London, 1900, Vol. II, p. 339.
2
For example, A Grammar of Spoken English, by H. E. Palmer; Cambridge, 1922. George O. Curme’s College English Grammar; Richmond, Va., 1925, a popular text by a distinguished American philologian, is founded on “the English language as
spoken
and written today,” p. iv.
3
Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1914, p. 1. Jones is a professor of phonetics at University College, London.
4
It is given in Ellis’s Early English Pronunciation, p. 1293
ff
., and in Sayce’s The Science of Language, Vol. I, p. 353
ff
.
5
It is given on p. xxii of Webster’s New International Dictionary, 1934, but a simpler if less scientific system of indicating pronunciations is used in the body of the work. See The International Phonetic Alphabet, by John S. Kenyon,
American Speech
, April, 1929, p. 324
ff
.
6
Every-Day English; Boston, 1881, p. 29. The difficulty is discussed, with examples, in Standards of Speech, by Elizabeth Avery,
American Speech
, April, 1926. One phonetic symbol is commonly used to represent the
e
in
met, led
and
sell
, yet the vowel differs in the three words. So with the
k
in
key, kaffir
and
kumquat
. “It is difficult if not impossible,” says W. Cabell Greet in Southern Speech (in Culture in the South, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1934, p. 601) “to obtain an idea of speech from phonetic symbols.”
7
The first experiments were made in New York at the turn of the century. In 1901 the method was adopted by the International Correspondence Schools at Scranton, Pa. The director of their School of Languages, Mr. J. Navas, tells me that it is still in use, and has been a great success.
8
For an account of the early stages of the work of Drs. Ayres and Greet see their article, American Speech Records at Columbia University,
American Speech
, June, 1930.
9
The method employed is described by C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño in The Length of the Sounds of a Middle Westerner,
American Speech
, April, 1935. The subject’s voice, picked up by a microphone, causes the oscillograph to vibrate, and the vibrations are photographed on a strip of film moving at the rate of two feet a second. Simultaneously, the vibrations of a 1000-cycle oscillator are recorded on the same film, to serve as a timer. In A Study of Dialect Differences, by H. E. Atherton and Darrell L. Gregg,
American Speech
, Feb., 1929, there is a comparison between Southern English and the pronunciation of North Carolina by a modification of this method.
10
The method used is described by C. E. Parmenter and C. A. Bevans in Analysis of Speech Radiographs,
American Speech
, Oct., 1933. See also Speech and Voice, by Dr. Russell; New York, 1931.
11
The Pronunciation of English in America,
Atlantic Monthly
, March, 1915, p. 366.
12
A Note on Language, in The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 219. Most of this chapter was printed in
Columbia
, Oct., 1924, under the title of The American Language.
13
Do Americans Speak English?, New York
Nation
, April 15, 1925, p. 410. “All speech, even the commonest speech,” said Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero-Worship, “has something of song in it.… Accent is a kind of chanting.” “If somebody asks you a question,” says P. B. Ballard in Thought and Language; London, 1934, p. 70, “and you reply ‘I don’t know’ you do not say the words at a dead level; you give them a tune. Sometimes, indeed, you give the tune without the words; you just hum them. And you are understood just the same.” See Pitch Patterns in English, by Kemp Malone,
Studies in Philology
, July, 1926: Zur amerikanischen Intonation, by Fritz Karpf,
Die neuren Sprachen
, Sept., 1926, and English Intonation, by H. E. Palmer; Cambridge, England, 1922.
14
The Standard of American Speech; Boston, 1926, p. 16.
15
George Philip Krapp in The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 50.
16
James M. Cain in Paradise,
American Mercury
, March, 1933, p. 269.
17
H. W. Seaman in The Awful English of England,
American Mercury
, Sept., 1933, p. 75.
18
The Pronunciation of English, above cited p. 60.
19
The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, above cited, p. 50.
20
“The pitch of the British English man’s voice,” he said in Words and Their Uses, new ed., New York, 1876, p. 57, “is higher and more penetrating than the American Englishman’s.” “His inflections are more varied than the other’s,” he added, “because they more fre quently rise.”
21
Lectures on the English Language, 4th ed.; New York, 1870, p. 671. Marsh had been anticipated here, though he probably didn’t know it, by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, who, in his glossary of Americanisms, printed in 1832, had said: “One striking peculiarity in American elocution is a slow, drawling unemphatic and unimpassioned manner; this, it is probable, is to be attributed, in general, to the heat of their climates, which is such as to paralyze all active exertion, even in speaking.” Boucher did not say directly that this languid style of speech made for clear utterance, but that inference may be fairly drawn from his other remarks on the English spoken in America.
22
Webster’s New International Dictionary, 1934, prefers
advértisement
, but admits that
advertísement
is American. Old Noah himself argued for the latter on the analogy of
amusement, refinement
and so on. See his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, p. 138.
23
There is an interesting discussion of such vulgarisms in Our Agile American Accents, by John L. Haney,
American Speech
, April, 1926.
24
In a letter to the New York
Times
, Dec. 20, 1931, Charlton Andrews complained that the New York radio announcers were accenting
rebound, detour, cigarette, curator, narrator, acclimated, decoy, promulgate, recluse, respiratory, insane, inclement, entire
and
tribunal
on the first syllable. The Concise Oxford accents the second syllable of all save
promulgate
and
respiratory
.
25
See American Pronunciation, by J. S. Kenyon; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1932, p. 159
ff
, for a long list of words pronounced differently in England and the United States.
26
See his discussion of the matter in The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. II, p. 14.
27
A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p.
18 ff
.
28
American Pronunciation, above cited, p. iv. But Dr. Kenyon, of course, makes no claim that this Western American is better than any other kind. See his very wise discussion of the point in Correct Pronunciation,
American Speech
, Dec., 1928, p. 150. In Practical Phonetics of the American Language, by Ralph S. Boggs; San Juan, P. R., 1927, a text prepared for students at the University of Porto Rico, “the pronunciation of the well-educated people of the Middle West in normal conversation” is accepted as “the standard of American pronunciation.”
29
The Pronunciation of English, above cited, p. 1.
30
A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 3.
31
The Superiority of Received Standard English,
S.P.E. Tracts
, No. XXXIX, 1934.
32
London, 1929.
33
The Awful English of England, by H. W. Seaman,
American Mercury
, Sept., 1933, p. 73. Perhaps the testimony of a Briton of Welsh name should be added, to complete the circle. “English as spoken in America,” said Wyndham Lewis, in The Dumb Ox,
Life and Letters
, April, 1934, p. 41, “is more vigorous and expressive than Oxford English, I think. It is easy to mistake a native from the wilds of Dorsetshire for an American, I have found: and were ‘educated’ English used upon a strong reverberant Devonshire basis, for instance, it would be all to the good, it is my opinion. Raleigh, Drake, and the rest of them, must have talked rather like that.”
34
Broadcast English. I. Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation, with an introduction by A. Lloyd James, professor of phonetics, School of Oriental Studies, London; London, 1935.
35
English, Spoken and Written, Paris
Herald
, April 9, 1925.
36
“By a Travelling Bachelor,” but later acknowledged by Cooper. It was published in London, in two volumes. The quotations are from Vol. II, Letter VII.
37
Many similar exultations might be quoted. Captain Frederick Marryat, in his Diary in America; Philadelphia, 1839, thus summed it up: “The Americans boldly assert that they speak English better than we do.” He dissented, of course. “It is remarkable,” he said piously, “how very debased the language has become in a short period in America.”
38
God’s Patience and the King’s English, New York
Herald Tribune
, Sept. 8, 1929.
39
In a letter dated May 26, 1931.
40
Letter from Jesse S. Butcher, director of public relations, May 22, 1931.
41
In Broadcasting and Pronunciation,
American Speech
, June, 1930, and again in The Radio and Pronunciation, the same, Dec, 1931.
42
Pronunciation in the Schools,
English Journal
’, Oct., 1922. See also Dr. Pound’s British and American Pronunciation,
School Review
, June, 1915, and The Pronunciation of English in America, by Robert J. Menner,
Atlantic Monthly
, March, 1915.
43
Cambridge (England), 1926; 2nd ed., 1935. Palmer is linguistic adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Education and a leading phonologist.
44
Other studies of interest and value are Early American Pronunciation and Syntax, by Henry Alexander,
American Speech
, Dec, 1925, which ante-dated the Krapp book, and Early New England Pronunciation, by Anders Orbeck; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1927, which Krapp saw in MS. A bibliography of American and English pronunciation to the end of 1922 will be found in Arthur G. Kennedy’s Bibliography of Writings on the English Language; Cambridge, Mass., 1927. For the period since 1922 the bibliographies published in each issue of
American Speech
and annually in
Publications of the Modern Language Association
may be consulted. Alexander J. Ellis’s On Early English Pronunciation, 4 vols.; London, 1869–89, is still invaluable, though in parts it has begun to date. Other useful works on the changes in spoken English are A History of English Sounds, by Henry Sweet; London, 1876; The Sounds of English, by the same; Oxford, 1908; The English Pronunciation at Shakespeare’s Time, by R. E. Zachrisson; Upsala, Sweden, 1927; Pronunciation of English Vowels, 1400–1700, by the same; Göteborg, Sweden, 1913; Select Studies in Colloquial English of the Late Middle Ages, by Gösta Langenfelt; Lund, Sweden, 1933; English Pronunciation From the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, by Constance Davies; London, 1934; and English Pronunciation as Described in Shorthand Systems of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by Helge Kökeritz,
Studia Neophilologica
, 1935. A history of Modern Colloquial English, by H. C. Wyld; London, 1920, gives an excellent account of the changes in English since 1450.
45
This
a
, of course, is really two
a’s
, the first that of
that
and the other that of
ham
. They differ, however, only in length, and for the present purpose they may be regarded as substantially identical. For a discussion of the situations in which either the one or the other is used see The Pronunciation of Short
A
in American Standard English, by George L. Trager,
American Speech
, June, 1930.
46
The Pronunciation of English, by Daniel Jones; Cambridge, 1914, p. 38.
47
Pronunciation, a Practical Guide to American Standards, by Thorleif Larsen and Francis C. Walker; London, 1930, p. 23
ff
.
48
J. S. Kenyon has calculated (Flat
A
and Broad
A, American Speech
, April, 1930, p. 324) that the number of situations in which the English and American
a’s
differ amounts to 14% of the total situations in which
a
occurs.
49
His conclusions are set forth at length in The English Language in America, Vol. II, p. 36
ff
.
50
I am indebted here to Krapp, p. 67.
51
Fashion and the Broad
A
in Old and New; Cambridge, Mass., 1920, pp. 25–30.
52
This gradual decay of the Boston
a
is also discussed in Observations on the Broad
A
, by Miles L. Han-ley,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. VIII, 1925.
53
Richard Meade Bache denounced it in
Lafayette
, in his Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1869, p. 65.
54
The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, above cited, p. 60.
55
New York
Nation
, Aug. 30, 1919, p. 290. See also
Vays, Vayz
or
Vahz
, by Janet R. Aiken,
North American Review
, Dec., 1929.
56
The Rev. W. G. Polack, of Evansville, Ind., who has made a valuable inquiry into ecclesiastical terminology in America, tells me that among the Lutherans of the Middle West,
amen
has the flat
a
when spoken and the broad
a
when sung. So with the first syllable of
hallelujah
, though the last
a
is always broad. The Baptists appear to follow the same plan. Their denominational papers print frequent notices that
amen
should have the long
a
in hymns but the short
a
in ordinary speech. See, for example, the
Baptist and Commoner
(Little Rock, Ark.), Jan. 2, 1928, and the
Western Recorder
(Louisville, Ky.), Oct. 2, 1924.