The Beginnings of American

1: The first loan words

The earlieast Americanisms were probably words borrowed bodily from the Indian languages-words,in the main ,indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England.In 1902 the late Alexander F. Chamberlain, professor of anthropology at Clark University, compild a list of 132 words borrowed from Algonquian dialects,of which 34 survives today; caribou pokechinquapin raccon powwow pone chipmunk toboggan totem sachem mackinaw Tammany.menhaden scuppernong moccasin skunkmoose squashmugwump squawmaskinonge succotash opossum terrapinpapoose tomahawkpecan wigwam pemmican woodchuckpersimmonpodunk

"The Indian element in American English,"said Chamberlain,"is much larger than is commonly believed to be the case.In the local speech of New England,especially among the fishermen of its coasts and islands,many words of Algonquian origin,not familiar to the general public,are still preserved,and many more were once current,but have died out within the last 100 years. Tte Indian loans in American English are by no means confined to terms borrowed from the languages of Indians inhabiting the present territory of the United States.Through the Spanish a great many words Nahuatl words from Mexico have come in,and not a few of them have gone over into British English.George Waston,of the University of Chicago,listed a large number,e.g., "chocolate",in English use, traced to 1604; "tomato" to the same year.From West Indian dialects,also through the Spanish,have come a number of words."Barbecue"is derived from the Spanish "barbacoa",itself loan from Haitian dialect.A curious phenomenon is presented by "maize",which came into colonial speech from the West Indies by way of the Spanish,went over into orthdox English into French,German and other Continental languages,and was then abandoned by the Americans,who substituted "corn",which commonly means "wheat" in English.[But "maize" survives in American to designate a shade of

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yellow; e.g. the colors of the University of Michigan are oficially "maize and blue".Finally, new words were made by translating Indian terms,whether real or imaginary; e.g. the phrase "Indian summers" was used in America,in order to describe the climate.Also this phrase was used in American litriture as a figurative phrase, but in England this phrase is still regarded as an Americanism, for the difference between the climate in the USA and in England.The names of two American Indian groups, the Mohawks and the bApaches,have acquired special meanings in British English and French, respectively. Mohawks is traced to 1711 as "one of a class of aristocratic ruffians who infested the streets of London at night in the early years of the Eighteenth Century".Apache was introduced into French about 1901 by Emile Darsy then a reporter on Le Figaro. The word then became a generic name for all Paris gangs.Direct loans from the Spanish were very rare before 1800,though some words may have been borrowed independently here and in England. A good many Spanish words,or Spanish adaptationes of native words,went into English during Sixteenth Century without any preliminary apprenticeship as Americanisms;e.g.,choclate,banana,cannibal.Very few words were borrowed from the languages of the Negro slaves,even in the South."Buckra",meaning a white man, is traced to 1736 in white American use. It was never widespread, and now it is unknown to most Americans.But the African language undoubtedly had a considerable influence upon the dialect of the Southern Negroes.

2: Changed Meanings

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The early Americans also made many new words by changing the meaning of old ones."To squat", in the sense of to "crouch", had been sound English for centures, but they gave it the meaning of "to settle on land without the authority of the owner", and from it noun "squatter" quickly emanated.Of "lot" Krapp says; The method of portioning out the common lands to the towmsmens of the first New England communiti1s has led to the general American use of "lot" to designate a limited section of land. In the Norwalk Records(1671) the agreement is recorded that "all those men that now draw "lots" with their neighbors shall stand to their "lots" thet they now draw".

Other exaples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by "freshet" and "barn". A "freshet", in Eighteenth Century English, meant "any stream of fresh water"; the colonists made it signify "an inundation". A "barn" was "a house or shed for storing crops"; in America it became " a place for keeping cattle " also.In England "college" ordinarily means one of the constituent corporations of a university, though sometimes it is also applied to a preporatory school, e.g., "Eton College".In the United States, since the Seventeeth Century, it has been applied to any degree-giving institution short of university rank.

3: American "Barbarisms"

About American "Barbarisms" were first mentioned in the English books of treval.Typical was Captain Hamilton in "Man and Manners in America". "The amount of bad grammar in circulation,"he said, "is very great; that of barbarism [i.e., Americanism] enormous." Worse, these "barbarism" were not confined to the ignorant, but came almost as copiously from the lips of the learned. Hamilton then described some of the prevalent ones:

The word "does" is split into two syllables and pronoun-ced "do-es".

But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarilyto change the meaning of certain old and establishedEnglish words. The word "clever" has here nconnexionwith "talent", and simply means "pleasant or amiable".The privilege of barbarizing yhe King's English is a-

ssumed by all ranks and conditions of men.Such words

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as "slick, kedge, boss", it is true are rarely used by thebetter orders; but they assume unlimited liberaty in theuse of "expect, reckon, guess and calculate", and perpe-trate other conversational anomalies with remorseless

impunity. Mrs. Frances Trollope reported in her "Domestic Manners of the Americans"(183e) that during her whole stay in the Republic she had seldom "heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American"; there was "always something either in the expression or the accent" that jarred her feelings and shocked her taste.Almost every English traveler between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was puzzled by the strange sings on American shops. Hall couldn't make out the meaning of "Leather and Finding Store", though he found " Flour and Feed Store " and " Clothing Store" self-explanatory, albeit unfamiliar.Hamilton failed to gather " the precise import" of " Dry Goods Store".But all this was relatively mild stuff, and after 1850 the chief licks at the American dialect were delivered, not by English travelers, most of whom had begun to find it more amusing than indecent, but by English pedants, who did not stir from their cloisters. The climax came in 1863, when the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D, Dean of Canterbury, printed his "Plea for the Queen's English." He said:

Look at the process of deterioration which our Queen'sEnglish has undergone at the hands of Americans.Look at those phrases which so amuse us in their

speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration andcontempt for congruity; and then compare the character

and history of the nation-its blunted sense of moralobligation and duty to man; its open disregard of con-

ventional right when aggrandisment is to be obtained; and I may now say, reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unpricipled war in the history of the world.

4:What Is An Americanism?

Americanisms were frist defined by Rev. John Witherspoon in 1781 as "ways of speaking peculiar to this country". Pickering in turn divided them into three categories:

1. "We have formed some new words".

2. "To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new significations".

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3."Others, which have been long obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us"

The early writers on the subject did not attempt to define categories of Americanisms.The other lexicographera of Noha Webster era attempted no categories of Americanisms. Robley Dunglison, in the articals headed "Americanisms" in the Virginia Museum for 1829-30, contented himself with setting up two classes-"old words used in a new sense", and "new words of indigenous origin".He excluded old words preserved or revived in America in their original sense. Also, he frowned upon native inventions thet were not absolutely essential. The English travelers who denounced Americanisms were negligent about defining them. William C. Fowler, in his brief chapter on "American Dialects" in "The English Language"(1850), offered the following formidable classification, the first after Pickering: 1. Words borrowed from other languages.a. Indian, as Kennebec, Obio, sagamore, succotash.b. Dutch, as boss, stoop.c. German, as spuke[?] , sauerkraut.d. French, as bayou, cache, levee.e. Spanish, ascalabuse, bacienda, rancho.f. Negro,as buckra.

2.Words "introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas".a. Words "connected with the flowing from our political institutions," as selectman, presidential, mass meeting, lynch, law, help(for servants).b. Words "connected with our ecclesiastical institutions", as assoiational, to felloship.c. Words "connected with a new country", as lot, squatter.

3. Miscellaneous Americanisms.a. Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as talented, offset(for set-off), back and forth(for backward and forward).b. Old words and phrases " which are not merely provincial in England", as bub, to wilt.c. Nouns formd from verbs by adding the French suffix "ment", as publishmen, requirement.d. Forms of words " which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved", as obligate(between oblige and obligation) and variante(between vary and variation).e. "Cetain compounds terms for which the English have different compounds", as bookstore(booksellr's shop), bottom land(interval-land), clapboard(pale), seaboard(seashore).f. "Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive", as to cave in, to fork over, to hold on, to stave off.g. Intensives often a metter of mere temporary fashion", as dreadfull, powerfull.

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h. "Certain verbs expressing one's state of mind, but partially or timidly", as tocalculate, to expect(to think or to believe), to guess, to reckon. i. "Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one's subjectine feelings in fegard to it", as clever, grand, smart, ugly. j. Abridgments, as stage(for stagecoach), spry(for sofightly). k. "Quaint or burlesque terms", as to tote, humbug, loafer, pkunder(for baggage), rock(for stone). l. "Low expressions, mostly political", as locofoco, hunker, to get the hang of. m. "Ungrammrtical expressions, disapproved by all", as do don't, used to could, there's no two ways about it.John Russell Bartlett, in the second edition of his "Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States"(1859), offered nine classes: 1. Archaisms, old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country. 2. English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. "These include many names of natural objects differently applied". 3. Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, though not in England.4. English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.5. New-coind words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country. 6. Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German. 7. Indian words.8. Negroisms.9. Peculiarities of pronounciation. Alfred L. Elwyn confined his "Gloosary of Supposed Americanisms" (1859) to archaic English words surviving in America, and sought only to prove thet they had come down "from our remotest ancestry" and were thus undeserving of English scorn. Schele de Vere's "Americanisms"(187e) followed Bartlett, concentrating on borrowings from the Indian languages and from the French, Spanish and Dutch. But John S. Farmer, in his "Americanisms Old and New" (1889) , ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the folliwing definition:

An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language.... However, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and usages, to the survivals of an older type of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life .

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He then proceeded to this classification:

1. Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:a. Indian and aboriginal life.b. Pioneer and frontier life.c. The church.d. Politics.e. Trades of all kinds.f. Travel, afloat and ashore.

2. Words brought by colonists, including:a. The German element.b. The French.c. The Spanish.d. The Dutch.e. The Negro.f. The Chinese. 3. Names of American things embracing:a. Natural products.b. Manufactured articles. 4. Perverted English words.5. Obsolete English words still in good use in America.6. English words, American by inflection and modification.7. Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms and colloquialisms, cant and slang.8. Individualisms.9. Doubtful and miscellaneous. Sylva Clapin's "New Dictionary of Americanisms"(190e) reduced these categories to four: 1. Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United Stetes.2. English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.3. Words introduced from other languages than the English: French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.4. Americanisms proper: words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar product.Richard H. Thornoton's "American Glossary"(191e) substituted the following: 1. Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in the United States, such as allow, bureau, fall, gotten, guess.2. Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as belittle, length, lightning, rod, to darken one's door, to bark up the wrong tree, blind tiger, cold snap.3. Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that are distinctively American, such as ground bog, hangbird, hominy, live oak, locust, opossum.

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4. Names of persone and classes of persons, and of places,such as Buckeye, Hoosier, Old Hickory, Dixie, Cotham, the Bay State, the Monumental City.5. Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as card, clever, fork, help, penny, plunder.In addition, Thornton added a provincial class of "words and phrases of which I have found earlier examples in American than in English writers;...with the "caveat" that further research may reverse the claim" -a class offering specimens in alarmist, capitalize, horse of another colour[sic!], the jig's up, omnibus bill and whitewash. Gilbert M. Tucker's "American English"(19e1) attemped to reduce all Americanisms to two grand division:

1. Words and phrases that originated in America and express something that the British have always expressed differently if they have mentioned it at all.2. Words and phrases thet would conveyn to a British ear a different meaning from that which they bear in thes country.To this he added seven categories of locution not to be regarded as Americanisms:1. Words and phrases stated by the previous compiler himself to be of foreign(chifly in English) origin, like Farmers hand-me-down.2. Names of things exclusively American, but known aboard under the same name, such as moccasin.3. Names of things invevted in the United States, like drawing-room car.4. Words used in this country in a sense hardly distinguishable from that they bear in England, such as force for a gang of laborers.5. Nonce words like Mark Twain's cavalieress.6. Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like officeholder, planing machine, ink alinger and flytime.7. Purely technical terms, such as those employed in baseball. Sir William Craigie, went into rather more detail in a paper published in 1940. After excluding loan words, the topographical terms derived from them, and "composite names of plants and trees, animales, birds, fishes, of the type black alder, black bear, black bass, etc", he listed the following categories: 1. Words showing "the addition of new sense to 1xisting words and phrases".2. "New derivative forms and attributive collocations or other compounds".3. "Words not previously in use, and not adapted from other languages of the American continent".[Finally, in the Preface to the "Dictionary of Americanisms", M.M. Mathews defines an Americanism as a word or expression or meaning that originated in what is now the United States".American's difference from Standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in an alphabetical list; it is also a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of useing words. The vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earlist American divergences are embalmed, and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, but attention must be paid to materials and ways of speech that are less obvious, particulary to tendencies in vulgar American, the great reservior of the language, and

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perhaps the forerunner of what it will be on higher levels in the years to come.

American and English Surviving Differences

Despite the heavy American influence upon English in recent years, the two languages still show many differences. The English often use different words

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for the same common objects, they make frequent use of words and phrases that are seldom or never heard in America, they have different repertoires of everyday intensives and cuss words, they pronounce many words differently and their talk is based upon different speech tunes. The same thing, of course, runs the other way, but Englishmen probably find American considerably less difficult than Americans find English, if only because they have become so familiar with large numbers of American terms and idioms. Each preceding edition of "The American Language" included lists of the surviving differences between the current vocabularies of American and English, and in every instance that list had become archaic in some details before it could reach print. The English reviewers had their sport demonstrating thata number of Americanisms were really in wide use in England, but all they usually proved was that the exotic had become familiar. Often it is genuinely difficult to establish the facts, for a great many Americanisms have got into English use in recent years, and not a few terms thet seem distinctively American today are actually English archaisms. It is easy for the English guardians of the language to produce evidence that these archaisms were used, say, by Chaucer or Shakespeare, and to argue thereby that they are not Americanisms at all. That there are still wide divergences between American and English usage on the level of everyday speech was demonstrated beyond cavil by Horwill in his "Dictionary of Modern American Usage" and again in his "Anglo-American Interpreter". In those books he included lists of words and phrases, used by Americans and by Englishmen.All the words had different forms, but the same meanings.

American English

ale beer, or bitterapartmen flatbillfold walletbillion milliardbill (money) banknote, or notebiscuit scone, or teacakeblank (noun) formcarnival fun faircheck (restaurante) billcigar store tobacconist's shopcity hall town hall, or guildhallclosed season (for hunting) close seasondelegation deputationdining car, or diner restaurant carcorner (street) turningcrystal (watch) watch glassdomestic mails inland mailsdry-goods store draper's shopfall (season) autumnfilling station petrol pumpelectric heater radiator, or electric fireFrench fries chips

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full time full outgiven name, or first name Christian namehighway patrolman mobile policeice cream icemaster of ceremonies comp`ere (of a show)movies cinema, films, flick(er)s, or picturesone-way ticket single ticketorchestra seat (theater) stallovercoat greatcoatvacationist holiday maker white-collar (worker) black-coatwitness stand witness box T.V. telly

Conversely, a number of very common words, entering into many compounds and idioms in the United States, are known in England exoticisms, e.g., "swamp". It may have been in use in some English dialects before it was adopted in this country, but the first example so far unearthed is from Captain John Smith's "General History of Virginia"(1624). The word is old in English as an adjective meaning "lean", "unthriving", and it is possible that the American noun was derived from this adjective, but Weekley prefers to connect it with the German noun "Sumpf", which means "precisely" what American call a "swamp". "Swamp" has produced many derivatives in the United States, e.g., "to be swamped" in the sense of "to be overwhelmed", traced to 1646 ;"swamp angel" and "swamper", "a dweller in a swamp", traced to 1857 and 1735, respectively; "swamp land", 1663; "swamp lot", 1637; "swamp oak", 1681; "swamp pine", 1731; "swamp pink", an azalea, 1784; swamp wood, 1666, etc. .Many other familiar and characteristic Americanisms have not been adopted in England and are little known there , e.g., snarl(tangle), lye(household), to hospitalize. Some of these are old English terms that have become obsolete in England.The common objects and phenomena of nature are often defferently named in England and America. The Englishman, instead of saying that the temperature is e9 degrees (Fahrenheit) or that the thermometre or the mercury is at e9 degrees, sometimes says there are "three degrees of frost".Many of our names for common fauna and flora are unknown to him saveas strange Americanisms , e.g., terrapin, ground hog, posion ivy, persimmon, gumbo, eggplant, catnip, aweet potato and yam. Te is familiar with many kinde of sea food that we seldom see , e.g., turbot, brill, raker, monkfish, coalfish, periwinkles (or just winkles), ling, dories and witches, and eats some that we reject, e.g., skate.He also knows the "hare", which is seldom heard of in America. But he knows nothing of "deviled crab, club sendwiches, clam chowder or oyster stew", and he never goes to "oyster suppers, sea-food dinners, clambakes or barbecues, or eats boiled dinners".An Englishman never lives "on a street", but always "in it", though he may live "on an avenue or road".In 1939 Stuart Robertson, of Temple University, published a disccusion of other differences in American and British usage of the minor coins of speech - a

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subject not often studied, for most observers seem to be chiefly interested in disparities in vocabulary. For example, the English rule thet "to" may be omitted when the object is a pronoun, e.g., "Give it me" instead of the usual American "Give it to me". There are also some curious differences in the use of the definite article. The English commonly insert it before "High Street", and sometimes use it in situation wherein Americans would use "a",e.g., "ten shillingsn the bushel". Contrariwise, they omit it altogether before "goverment" and "out of window ". This last struck Mark Twain as one of the salient differences between American and English usage. In late years there has been a war upon the article in American journalistic writing, chiefly under the influence of Time, and the English have begun to join it. They have also imitated the American subjunctive, as in "It was moved that the meeting 'stand' adjourned", where orthodox English usage would ordain " 'should stand' adjourned". The English plural verb following collective nouns seems to be holding out better, though even here there are some signs of yielding. Nearly all the English newspapers still use the pluar after "goverment, committee, company, ministry, versy", and even after proper names designating groups or institutions. But Americans say, these are mere dialectical differences.

The Pronunciation of American

1: Its General Characteristics

The fact that there are differences between the average literate American speaks and the way the average literate Englishman speaks has long been noted. Many of these differences have to do with vocabulary, and some are so striking that they inevitably attract attention. But these differences are not as important as they used to be.The differences in pronunciation, however, shpw a higher degree of resistance to change. They extend to many common words, e.g., "can't, deficit, and secretary". The Englishmen, using the first of these, gives it a broad 'a' that is rare in the United States save in those areas - for example, the Boston region and the swankier suburbs of New York - where emulation of English usage is still potent in speechways. In words of the 'deficit' class the difference is one of stress rather than of vowel quality, for the Englishman puts the accent on the second syllable, whereas the American commonly stresses the first. In 'secretary' what the Englishman does is to get rid of a syllable altogether, so that the words becomes, to American ears 'secretry' ;the American himself almost always gives it four syllables, and lays a slight but unmistakable second stress on the third, which he rhymes with 'care'.The last difference is typical of many others, for American speech, on the whole, follows the spelling more faithfully than English speech. Why this should be so is not known with any assurance, though a great many persons have put forth confident theories.

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John Witherspoon, writing from his rectoral stool at Princeton in 1781, had little to say about the pronunciation of Americans. And what little he said was mainly favorable, perhaps because he was a Scotsman. The true British aversion began to show itself soon after the War of 181e, when such travelers as Fravces Trollope denounced the American accent as well as the American vocabulary:

I very seldom during my whole stay in the country hearda sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced

from the lips of an American. Theres is always somethingeither in the expression or the accent that jars the

feelings and shocks the taste. The patriots of the time met these sneers with claims that the American accent was not only quite as good as the English but much better. Said James Fenimore Cooper in "Notions of the Americans" :

The people of the United States, with the exception ofa new of German or French descent, speak, as a body,

incomparably better English than the people of the mo-ther country. ... In fine, we speak our language, as a nation,

better than any other people speak their language. But after this show of independence Cooper joined the group of native Americans who set up the doctrine that the only right way to speak English was the ever-changing way of the English upper class. Benjamin Franklin seems to have inclined to this idea, perhaps because he had spent so much time in England. Irving, always eager for English notice and favor, ran the same way. Nor is there any evidence that any other American authers of the pre-Civil War era greatly resented the notion that spoken American, save for the differences in vocabulary, should conform to English standards. The first Americans to give the language of the country serious study were William C. Fowler and George P. Marsh; Fowler published "The American Language in Its Elements and Forms" in 1850, and Marsh followed with "Lectures on the English Language" in 1859. Fowler, a son-in-law of Noah Webster, was professor of rhetoric at Amherst and the first Northern pedagogue to undertake courses in Old English. Marsh was a Vermonter who went in for politics and rose to high office, but he had many outside interests. Fowler distinguished between the language ofNew England, that of the South and that of the rising West, but predicted that "the system of school education, and the use of the same textbooks in the institutiones of learning, and of the same periodicals and reading books in families - in short, the mighty power of the press" would eventually iron out these differences and make "the people of America one in language as one in goverment".He was willing to be polite to English example on the higher levels of speech, but he argue that "the great mass of the people of the United States speak and write their vernacular tongue with more correctness than the common people of England".Marsh took much the same position, but he noted and deplored "a marked difference of accent" already separating the speech of the two countries.

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But it would be unjust to accuse Marsh of advocating the abject conformity to English standards. The first to do that in an all-out and uvdisguished manner was Richard Grant White, who apologized most humbly for occasional criticisms of English usage, saying that "no insinuation of a superiority in the use of their mother tongue by men of English race in 'America' is intended, no right to set up an independent standard is implied".White was challenged by a number of other writers on speech, but the most refind opinion of his time seems to have supported him, and his books remained authorities for many years. He received a heavy reinforcement in 1905, when Henry James, the novelist broke his voluntary exile in England long enough to harangue the year's graduating class at Bryn Mawr College on the evils of American speech. James was no phonologist, and it was apparent that his notion of the speechways of his native land was picked up, not by direct observation, but by a study of the barbarisms credited to Americans in the English comic papers, e.g., 'popper, vanillar, vurry, Amurrica, tullegram' and even 'Philadulphia'. He had, however, high prestige as a writer and imitated very effectivly the lofty air of an Oxford don, so his ill-natured remarks made a considerable impression.So late as 1916, Fred Newton Scott was telling the National Council of Teachers of English that "almost everyone who touches upon American speech assumes that it is inferior to British speech".Scott was wrong here, as he was wrong in other matters, for philologians of more weight than he were already declaring for American autonomy in pronunciation. Louis Pound had noted the plain fact that English and American had already developed too many differences to "be treated as orally identical". she expressed the pious hope that these differences would not lead, at least in the near future, to a conplete separation of the two tongues, but she saw clearly that they were bound to "increase, not lessen".Other experts on the national speechways soon joined her, and in recent years nearly all the better texts on pronunciation accept American English as it is, and avoid any vain attempt to bring it into harmony with current English standards. Krapp declared: "It seems scarcely credible that one who knows the facts should think it impossible to impose British standards upon American speech". To which may be added the verdict of a special committee appointed by the Modern Language Associated to draw up a report on "The English Language in American Education" :

Contemprary linguistic science views ... American En-glish not as a corruption but as the accepted Englishof the United States. ... The most practical pedagogical

conclusion involved is that wherever the spelling, pro-nunciation, vocabulary and usage of the two great bran-ches of the language differ, American students shouldbe taught the American rather than the British form. ...The English our American students should be helped

to master is the standard English spoken and written in conpemprary American. In 1927, C. K. Thomas of Cornell, now of the University of Florida, aummarized professional opinion under five headings:

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1. Is there a world standard of English pronunciation? 2. What claim has the speech of southern England to be cosidered a world standard? 3. What claim has the speech of southern England to be considered the standard for America? 4. Is there a distinct American national standard? 5. What are the criteria of a good standard?

Thomas found that the answer to the first question was no. He could find no trace of a generally acknowledged world standard. To the second question the answer was none. There were English authorities, to be sure, who defended standard English as superior to any other form of the language, but there were other auothorities, greater in number and fully equal in learning, who denounced it as noe of the worst. The answer to the third question was likewise none. "The preponderance of authority", concluded Thomas, "is strongly against community of standard for British and American pronunciation". in answer he described the tree major varieties of American then recognized - the Boston-New York, the Southern and the Wesrern or General - and agreed with Kenyon and Krapp that the last-named was already dominant and showed the plain indication of increasing its area and authority. The answer to the last question resolved itself into a plea for letting nature take its cours. "A good standard", said Thomas, "is a natural growth, not a manufactured article, and attempts to improve on this standard are like atempts to graft wings on human shouldars". In other words, the voice of the people, in the last analysis, must decide and determine the voice of the people.Unconscious of the monotony, of their speech tunes and of the nasalization which offends Englishmen, Americans today clearly believe that their way of using English is bettter than the English way. In consequence, there is little imitation of the English usage, which the average American regards as effeminate and absurd. There was a time when all American actors of any pretensions employed a dialect that was a heavy imitation of the dialect of the West End actors of London. It was taugh in all the American dramatic schools, and at the beginning of the present century it was so prevalent on the American stage that a flat 'a' had a melodramic effect almost equal to that of 'damn'. But the rise of the movies broke down this convention. They attracted actors from all parts of the world, to many of whom the English was a foreign language, and when the talkies followed it was found that most of these newcomers had picked up ordinary American. Morever, the native-born recruits were mainly without formal proffesional training, so the majority of them also spoke the vulgate. From time to time Hollywood has made some effort to model its speech on that of its English-born luminaries, but never with much success.In the early days of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), most of its announcers and commentators affected a somewhat extreme from of Oxford English. There were, in consequence, a great many protests from listeners in the North of England and in Scotland and Ireland, to whom this dialect was as strange, and indeed as offensive, as it would have been to Americans. In response to their protests the BBC appointed, in 19e6, an Advisory Committee on Spoken English headed by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, organizer in 1913 of the Society for Pure English and a diligent student of speechways.

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Among the Committee's members were George Bernard Shaw, H. C. K. Wyld, Dame Rose Macaulay, Lord David Cecil, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Lascelles Abercrombie and I. A. Richards.Nearly all the accepted speech experts of England stand up bravely for Oxford English, or for something closely resembling it. Daniel Jones, proffesor emeritus of phonetics at University College, London, describes it complacently as the Received Pronunciation (RP), and says that it is the form "usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English people who have been educated at the public schools", among "those who do not come from the South of England but who have been educated in these schools" and, "to an extend which is considerable thougt difficult to specify, from natives of Southern England who have not been educated in these schools". Henry Cecil Wyld, proffesor of the English language and literature at Oxford and author of many books on the history of English speech, said that it might be called Good English, Well-Bred English or Upper-Class English, but he preferred to call it simply Received Standard English. He described it as "easy, unstudied, and natural", with "sonorous" vowels, each of them clearly differentiated from all the others, diphthongs of high "carry-power and dignity" and clearly articulated consonants.The nature of the differences between Wyld's Received Standard English and American have been discussed at length by various authorities, particularly by Palmer, Martin and Blandford in their "Dictionary of English Pronunciation with American Variants".They distinguished twelve major variantes and fourteen minor ones, and for the e0000-odd terms (including inflections and derivatives) that they list in their vocabulary they note differences in more than 5000. Their twelve major variants may be reduced to six classes, as followes;

1. The English 'o' in such words as 'bot', 'box' and 'stop' becomes 'a' vowel more or less approximating' the broad English 'a' of 'oak' and 'path'.

2. This English 'a' is replaced by flat 'a' in both of these words, and also in many others, e.g., 'half, brass, last'.

3. The 'r' following vowles, whether or not it is itself followed by consonants, is pronounced more clearly than in English.

4. There is a difference between the English 'u' in such words as 'hurry, worry, thorough' and the prevaling American 'u'.

5. The '-ary' at the end of a word has a clear 'a' sound, wheres the English reduce it to the neutral vowel or omit it altogether.

6. So with '-ory'. Palmer and his collaborators also note many minor variants, e.g., the English pronunciation of 'clerck' as 'clarck', of 'ate' as 'et' (a vulgarism in the United States expect among the proper Charlestoniasm). Finally, they show that it is sometimes diffecult to find any logical pattern or general tendency in a major variation between English and American speech. Thus, if we take the phrase "Mr. Martin of Birmingham", and ask an Englishman and an American to speak it, the Englishman will reduce the '-ham' of 'Birmingham' to a short of " 'm" but pronounce the second syllable of 'Martin' distinctly, wheres the American will reduce 'Martin' to 'Mart'n' but give a clear pronounciation of

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'-ham'. Here Englishman and American head both ways, and without apparent rhyme or reason."Language", said A. H. Sayce in 1879, "does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an exercise in memory".The bare sounds of spoken speech, of course, constitute onlt one of its characteristics, and that characteristic is a variable quality. Even syllable stress changes more or less with the position of a word in a sentence and with the mood and intend of the speaker. There are students of speech who hold that neither is as important, in distinguishing one dialect from another, as intonation and pitch pattern. When an American hears a strange Englishman speaking it is not the unfamiliar pronounciation that chiefly warns him to be on his guard, nor even the occasional use of unintelligible words; it is the exotic speech tune. "What does the Englishman first notice on landing in America", asks Hilaire Belloc, "as the contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic so far as the 'spoken' language is concerned?". The answer is: "The first thing which strikes him is the violent contrast in intonation". "Though they use the same words", says John Erskine, "the Englishman and the American do not speak the same tune".

2: Dialects

All the early writers on the American language remarked its strange freedom from dialects. This dreedom, of course, was only relative, for differences were noted even before the Revolution. But both local residents and the English travelers who tourd the country between the Revolution and the War of 1812 were right in reporting that the linguistic differences they found among Americans were vastly less than one could find in Britain.The first writer to deal with this fact at length, the Rev. John Witherspoon, explain it as due to the mobility of the American people.In 1919 Krapp declared: Relativily few Americand spend all their lives in one lo- cality, and even if they do, they cannot possibly escape co- ming into contact with Americans from other localities. ... We can distinguish with some certainty Eastern and Wes- tern and Southern speech, but beyond this the author has little confidence in those confident experts who think they can tell infallibly, by the test of speech, a native of Hartford from a native of Providence, or a native of Philadelphia from a native of Atlanta, or even, if one insist on infallibility a native of Chicago from a native of Boston.

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Krapp was discussing Standard American, but on the plane of the vulgate the leveling is almost as apparent. That vast uninformity which marks the people of the United States in general information, in reaction to new ideas, in deep-lying prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic costom and dress, is nowhere more marked than in their speech habits. The differences in pronunciation between American dialects seldom impede free communication.The differences in vocabulary are sometimes more puzzling, but they are not very numerous, and a strenger quickly picks them up. A newcomer to Maryland soon abandons 'faucet', or 'tap', or whateverit was that prevailed in his native wilds, and turns easily to the local 'spigot'. In the same way an immigrant to the Deep South is rapidly fluent in the use of 'you-all, yonder, to carry in yhe sense of to convey'. Even differences in intonation are much less marked between any two parts of the United States than they are between any two parts of England, or than between England and this country as a whole. "The differences in speech between Boston and San Francisco", says the Eneyelopaedia Britannica, "is less than what may be observed between two villages in Great Britain that are only a few miles apart". The railroad, the automobile, the mailorder catalogue, the moive and, above all, radio and television have promoted uninformity in even the most remote backwaters.Nevertheless, there are dialectical differences in American English, and they have been observed and recorded by a multitude of investigetors, professional and lay. Louise Pound has shown that the study of dialects, in both England and the United States, came in later than the study of folklore. In the United States as elsewhere, dialect is mainly a function of the lower orders of the population. Persons of the educated class, though they show influence of the circumambient patois, nevertheless approach the standard speech of the region whenever any care in speaking is indicated. Individuals of this class, living in the country, says Wyld, will "gain invariably a very fair knowledge of the local dialect in all its aspects". Yet they do not use this dialect in conversation among themselves, and seldom if ever in speaking to "their humbler friends", for if they did so "it would be felt as an insult". Wyld is discussing Englishmen, but the same thing is true of Americans [except for the more backward Southern politicians in rural areas]. The plain people, save on their lowest levels, understand "good English" quite well, and many of them make not unsuccessful attempts, on occasion, to use it.The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, launched in 19e8, does not meet the need for the dialectical dictionary, for it naturally confines itself to showing the distribution of a relatively small numbers of items. It offers the only feasibly way to determine dialect boundaries with any precision, for the mere accumulation of terms is likely to lay too much stress upon those that are only aberrant and curious, and the collector has no means of checking their distribution.The Linguistic Atlas was originally suggested by two linguistic scholars of eminence, Edword Spair and E. H. Sturtevant, both of Yale and neither primarily a dialectologist. Hans Kurath, then of Ohio State University, later of Brown and now of Michigan, was in charge of it from the start, and his extraordinary learning and energy vitalized the whole enterprise.

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How many major dialect areas exist in the United States is still a matter of dispute.Hans Kurath published "Word Geography of the United States" and included in it three major dialectical regions: New England, Southern and so-called General American or Western.Western American, considered as the tongue which the overwhelming majority of Americans speak and the one that Englishmen always have in mind when they discuss American English.Its terriory was defined to include all of New England west of the Connecticut River, the whole of the Middle Atlantic area save the lower Estern Shore of Maryland and lower Delaware, and all the region west of the Cotton Belts of Texas and Arkansas and north of central Missouri and the Ohio River, with the moutain country of the South as an exclave. No other group of American dialects is no widspread, and none other is still spreading. [Because of its spread it was usually called General American. Its territory was so large that there was little surprise when subsequent research enabled Kurath and others to divide it into an Inland Northern area, derived from western New England by way of upstate New York, and a very different Midland area, derived from Pennsylvania. Southern mountain speech is a subvarienty of the South Midland area, which has spread southwestward from Pennsylvania, infiltrated the southern part of Ohio, Indian and Illinois and become the basis of the speech of Texas].Southern American marches with Kuarth Midland along the Potomac and the Blue Ridge, shows a few dips across the latter into the plantation country of the Kentucky bluegrass and the Tennessee Valley, and leaps the Mississippi into southern Missouri, Arkansas and eastern Texas. The people of the lower classes, whever white or black, still cling to their ancient speechways, and as a result "cultivated speech and dialect are more clearly separated than in the North". Greet distinguishes the coastel or Tidewater type from the general lowland speech. " The speech of the Virginia Tidewater", he says, "has been transplantedt successfully to the Northern Stenandoah region and to Charlottesvilly, but outside of Virginia it has made no headway against the General Southern of the lowlands".This General Southern is spoken in "the plantation Up Country of Georgia and South Calorina, the cotton country of Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana in so far as the speech without French influence", and the Piedmont of Virginia. The speech of the hill people is quite different from both dialects of the Southern lowlands, [for it is basiclly derived from the Scotch-Irish of western Pennsylvania]. "There is no sharper speech boundary in the United States:, says Kuarth, "than that following the Blue Ridge from the Potomac to the James". This mountain speech is also to be found in the Ozarks, which lie in the corner where Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma meet. It was taken there by immigrants from Appalachia and has filtred into the adjacent lowlands.But of all the ethnic dialects on exhibition in the United States the one that has got the most attention, both from the literati and from students of linguistic, is that of Southern Negroes. Tremaine McDowell says that it made its first appearance in American fiction in Part I of Hugh Henry Brackenridge's satirical novel "Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain Farrago and Teague O'Regan, His Servant", published in 1792, but it had been atttemped

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in plays so early as 1775 and there were traces of it in other writings even before. Then, as ever since, Negro speech has shown a simplified - or at list different - grammatical stracture. The origins of that stracture were described by Krapp as the development of a dialectical comparable to Pidgin English or Beach-la-Mar; and this dialect survives more or less in the Gullah of the sea island of Georgia and South Calorina. But its vestiges are also to be found in the speech of the most ignorant Negroes of the inland regions, which still shows grammatical peculiarities seldom encounted in white Southern speech, however lowly, e.g., the confusion of persons, as in 'I is', 'Do she?', 'Does you?', 'Am you de man?', 'He am' ;the frequent use of present forms in the past, as in 'He been die', He gone show me' ;and the tendency to omit all the forms of "to be", as in 'He gone' and 'Where you at?'. The phonology of this mudstill Negro speech greatly resenbels that of the lowest class of whites, so much so many competent observes have declared that it is substantually identical, but in intonation, at least, it shows special characteristics.Even the educated South3rn Negro seldom loses this intonation, though in vocabulary and pronunciation his speech is indentical with that of the corresponding class of whites. Indeed, he tends to speak a shade "better", in the schoolma'am's sense, than whites on his own level. The representation of Negro speech in literature has always been imperfect and often absurd.The Gullah or Geechee dialect of the Gorgia and South Calorina coast is an anomaly among American Negro dialects, as it is indeed among American dialects in general, for it is the only one that is not easily intelligible in far parts of the country. Krapp was of the opinion that "very little of it, perhaps none, is derived from sources other than English", and not a few white linguists have supported him, notably John Bennett, an Ohio-born Charlstonian. But this theory has now been considered weakened by the studies of Lorenzo D. Turner, of Roosvelt University, a Negro linguist who prepared himself for his task by acquiring a working knowledge of the principal West African languages. He began work between Georgetown, S.C., and the Georgia-Florida boarder in 1930, and by 1944 had assembled no less than 6000 loans from twenty-eight languages and dialects. Of these about a thousand came from Kongo, spoken in Angola and the former Belgian Congo, and another thousand from Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria. About four-fifths of them appear today only as personal names, and other are used only in traditional African songs, mostly unintelligible to the singers, but the rest "are used daily in conversation". Some of Turner specimens from the surviving vocabulary follow, with the African terms from which they come:

Bong. A tooth (Wolof bong.)Bubu. Any insect, but usually one whose sting in poisonous.

(Fula 'mbubu', a fly; Hausa 'bubuwa'; Bambare 'buba'; Kongo'mbu')

Buckra. A white man. (Efik and Ibibio 'mbakara', white man,from 'mba', he who, and 'kara', to govern.)Da or dada. Mother. (Ewe 'da' or 'dada'.)

Det. A hard rain. (Wolof 'det'.)Dindi. A small child. (Vai 'din din'.)

Enufole. Pregnant. (Ewe 'fo le enu', she is with child.)Fukfuk. The viscera of an animale. (Mende 'fukfuk'.)

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Guba. A peanut. (Kongo 'nguba', a kidney.)Gumbo. Okra. (Tshiluba 'tshinguhmbuh'; Unbunda 'otshingumbo'.)Hudu, v. To bring bad luck to. (Hausa 'hudu', a form of gambl-ing; Ewe 'hododo', lending or borrowing; 'hodada', a dice game.)Kuta, A torttoise. (Bambara and Malinke 'kuta'; Dahomean 'kulo';

Efik 'ikut'; Buluba-Lulua 'nkudu'; Djerma 'ankura'; Hausa 'kun-kura'.)

Na. And. (Ttwi and Ibo 'na'.)Nanse. A spider. (Twi and Fante 'ananse'.)

Nyamnyam or nyam, v. To eat. (Wolof 'nyamnyam'.)Pojo or ojo. A heron. (Mende 'podzo'.)

Tot, v. To carry. (Umbundu 'tuta', to carry; Kikongo 'tota', to pickup; Mandingo 'ta', to carry on the head or in the hand.)

Ula. A louse or bedbug. (Umbundu 'ola' or 'ona', a louse;'ula', a bed; Yoruba 'ola', a moth.)

Vudu. Sorcery. (Dahomean 'vodu', a spirit or fetish; 'vodudoho',a curse; 'vuduna', a cult or religion; Ewe 'vodu da', a snake

that is worshipped; 'vodusi', a priest.) Some of these have got into the general American vocabulary, especially in the South, e.g., buckra, gumbo, vudu, budu, guba and kuta. In Gullah the conjugations of verbs are disregarded, so that "the simple form 'run' does duty for 'run, runs, is or are runnlng, has or have run, ran, etc., singular and plural of all tenses"; the possessive is indicating by juxtaposition, as in 'Billy gun, we hat'; adjectives and nouns are turned into verbs, and verbs into nouns; "there is no distinction of pronouns with regard to sex; the feminine form is practically unused"; and the singular of nouns commonly, though not invariably, also does duty for the plural. [Turner presents evidence that these and other features of Gullah grammar reflect the underlaying structure of most West African languages, where changes in syllable pitch do the work that in Indo-European languages is performed by inflectional endings. It is also possible that the peculiar intonation of Gullah - and even of the white speech of the same region - owes sometthing to the same source, but conclusive evidence is lacking].The popular belief ascribes some of the characteristics of Southern American - for example, the elision of the 'r' before consonants and the intrusion of the 'y' before certain vowels - to Negro influence. This belief is not of recent origin, for on April 15, 184e, Charls Dickens, who was then in the United States, wrote home to his wife: "All the women who have been bred in slave States speak more or less like Negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurses".But Greet argues convincingly that the thing has really run the other way. "When the slaves were brought to America", he says, "they learned the accent of their masters. There is literally no pronunciation common among Negroes, with possible exceptions in Gullah, that does not occur generallyin vulgar or oldfashioned American speech". Krapp arhued that the common belief that the voice of the Negro differs from that of the white man is unsupported by the facts. He was even indisposed to grant that the use of 'I' is for 'I am' among the lower orders of Negroes is a true Negroism: he tracked it down in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, and found that it was common in England so long ago as the Thirteenth Century. Nevertheless, there is a

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conventionalized Negro dialect, perhaps launched by the minstrel shows of the past generation, that all Americans recognize, and it plays a large part in American literature.

English or America?

As English speards over the world, will it be able to maintain its present form? Probably not. But why should it? The notion that anything is gained by fixing the language is cherished only by pedants. Every successful effort at standardization, as Ernest Weekly has well said, results in nothing better than emasculation. "Stability in language is synonymous with 'rigor mortis' ". It is the very anarchy of English, adds Claude de Crespingy, that has made it the dominant language of the world today. In its early forms it was a highly inflected tongue - indeed, it was more inflected than modern German, and

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almost as much so as Russian. The West Saxon dialect, for example, in the days before the Norman Conquest, had grammatical gender, and in addition the noun was inflected for number and for case, and there were five cases in all. Morever, there were two quite different declensions, the strong and the weak, so that the total number of inflections was immense. The same ending, of cours, was commonly used more than once, but that fact only added to the difficulties of the language. The impact of the Conquest knocked this elaborate grammatical structure - already weakning - into a cocket hat. The upper class spoke French, and so the populance had English at its mercy. It quickly wore down the vowels of the endings to a netrual 'e', reduced the importance of their consonants by moving the stress forward to the roof, and finally lopped off many inflections into 'toto'. By the time of Chaucer(1340?-1400) English was moving rapidly toward its present form. It had already come to depend heavily upon word position for expressing meanings, and meanwhile the inflection of French, which had been official from 1066 to 136e, had left it full of new words and made its vocabulary hybrid. To this day, indeed, in its vocabulary the likeness of English to French, Italian and Spanish is often more marked than its likeness to German. Once its East Midland dialect had been given pre-eminence over all other dialects by the importance of the city London, it began to develop rapidly, and in the time of Shakespeare it enjoyed an extraordinarily lush and vigorous growth. New words were taken in from all the other languages of Europe and from many of those of Africa and Asia, other new words in large number were made of its own materials and almost everything that remained the old inflection was sloughed off. Thus it gradually took on a singularly simple and flexible form, and passed ahead of the languages that were more rigidly bound by rule.The American of today is much more honestly English, in any sense that Shakespeare would have understood, than the so-called Standard English of England. It still shows all the characteristics that marked the coman tongue in the days of Elizabeth I, and it continuse to resist stoutly the policing the ironed out Standard English in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Standard English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious. Its vocabulary is less abundant than tis own, it has lost to an appreciable extent its old capacity for bold metaphor and in pronunciation and in spelling it seems to him to be extremely uncomfortable and not a little ridiculous. When he hears a speech in its Oxford (or Public School) form he must be a Bostonian to avoid upon mirth. He belives, on very plausible grounds, that American is better on all counts - clearer, more rational and, above all, more charming. And he holds not illogically that there is no reason under the sun way the dialect spoken almost uniformly by nearly 180000000 people should yield anything to the dialect of a small minority in a nation of 50000000. He sees that whever American and this dialect come into fair competition - as in Canada, for example, or in the Far East - American tends to prevail, and that even in England many of its reformsand innovations are making steady headway, so he concludes that it will probably prevail everywhere hereafter. "When two-thirds of the people who use a certain language", says one of his spokesman, "decide to call it a 'freight train' instead of a 'goods train' they are 'right'; and the first is correct English and the second a dialect".

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Nor is the American, in entertaining such notions, without English support. The absurdities of Standard English are denounced by every English philologian, and by a great many Englishmen. Those who accept it without cavil are simply persons who are unfamiliar with any other form of the language; the Irishman, the Scotsman, the Canadian and the Australian laugh at it along with the American - and with the Englishman who has lived in the United States. H. W. Seaman, a Norwich man who had spent ten years on American and Canadian newspapers and was in practice, when he wrote, as a journalist in London, says:

We are as sick and tired of this so-called English as youAmericans are. It has far less right to be called Standard

English speech then Yorkshire or any other country dialecthas - or than any American dialect. It is as alien to us as itis to you. True, some of my neighbors have acquired it - forsocial or other reasons - but then some of the Saxon pea-

sants took pains to acquire Norman French, which also wasimposed upon them from above.

Seaman describes with humor his attempts as a schoolboy to shed his native Norwich English and to acquire the prissy fashionable dialect that passes as Standard. He managed to do so, and is thus able today to palaver on equal terms with "an English public-school boy. an Oxford man, a clergyman of the Establishment, an announcer of the British Broadcasting Company, or a West End actor", but he confesses that it still strikes him, as it strikes an American, as having "a mauve, Episcopalian and ephebian ring". And he quotes George Bernard Shaw:

The English have no respect for their language. ... It isimpossible for an Englishman to open his mouth withoumaking some other Englishman hate or despite him. ...

An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable thanthe attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the

vulgar dialect of the golf club.

Basil de Selincourt, author of "Pomona, or The Future of English", and J. Y. T. Greig, author of "Breaking Priscian's Head", both hope that some form of English denizened in England may eventually become the universal form of the language, but both are plainly upset by fears that American will prevail. "Right and wrong in such a matter", says de Selincourt, "can be decide only by the event. However it be, the United States, obviously, is now the scene of the severest ordeals, the vividest excitments of our language. ... The contrasting and competitive use of their one language by the English and Americans gives it a new occasion for the exercise of its old and noble faculty of compromise. In a period of promise and renewal, it was beginning to grow old; the Americans are young. ... Its strong constitution will assimilate tonics as fast as friends can supply them, and take no serious harm. Changes are certainly in store for it". Mr. Greig is rather less sanguine about the prospects of compromise between English and American. "It is possible", he says gloomily, "that in fifty or hundred years. ... American and not English will be the chief foreign language

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taught in the schools of Asia and the Europian Continent. Some Americans look forward to this without misgiving, nay, with exultation; and I for one would rather have it fall out than see perpectuated and extended that silliest and dwabliest of all the English dialects, Public-School Standard".The defects of English, whever it is American or its British form, are almost too obvious to need rehearsal. One of the worst is that the two great branches of the language differ not only in vocabulary but also in pronunciation. Thus the foreigner must make his choice, and though in most cases he is probably unconscious of it, he nevertheless makes it. The East Indian, when he learns English at all, almost always learns something approximating Oxford English, but the Latin American is very apt to learn American, and American is what the immigrant returning to Sweden or Yugoslavia, Israel or Syria, Italy or Finland, certainly takes home with him. In Russia, American has begun challenge English, and in Japan and elsewhere in the Far East the two dialects are in bitter compatition, with American apparently prevaling. This compatition, which has been going on in Europe since World War I, presents a serious problem to foriegn teachers of the language.Unluckily, neither of the great dialects of English may be described as anything approaching a perfect language. Within the limits in both there are still innumerable obscurities, contraditions and irrationalities. Those in spelling are especially exasperating. "But spelling", says Krapp,

would be only the beginning of the general house-cleaningfor which our precious heritage of English speech as we

know it today provides a profitable opportunity. The langu-age is burdened with quantities of useless lumber, which

from the point of view of common sense and reasonmight just as well be burned on the rubbish heap.

... Why should we permit an exceptional plural 'feet' or'teeth' when we possess a perfectly good way of makingplurals by adding 's'?. And why should verbs like 'write'

have two past forms, 'wrote' and 'written', when most verbsof the language get along quite satisfactorily with only

once?

There is yet another difficulty, and a very serious one. Of it Janet Rankin Aiken says:

This difficulty is idiom - idiom observable in a large partof what we say and write, but centering particularly in

verb and preposition. It has been canculated that includingall phrase constructions there are well over a hundred diffe-rent forms for even a simple, regular verb like 'call', besides

extra oa lacking forms for irregular verbs like 'speak, be, set'.Each of these verb forms have several uses, some as high

as a dozen or more, to express permission, ability, interrogation,negation, generelization, expectation, duration, inception, and a

bewildering number of other ideas. Native speakers of Englishhave difficulty with verb constructions; how much more so the

foreign student of the language!

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Finally there are the snarls of sentence order - naturally numerous in an analytical language. Says Dr. Aiken:

Each of the sentence-type - declarative, interrogative, imperative,and exclamatory - has its own normal order, but there are manyexceptional orders as well. In certain constructions the verb mayor must come before the subject, and frequently the complement

comes before the subject, or the subject is embedded in theverb phrase. All these orders, both normal and exceptional, mustsomehow be mastered before the student can be said to use

English properly.

Efforts to remedy the irrationalities of English spelling have been under way for many years, but so far without much success. The improvement of English in other respects must await a revolutionist who will do for it what Mark Twain tried to do for German in "The Awful German Language" - but with much less dependence upon logic. "If English is to be a continuously progressive creation", said Krapp, "then it must escape from the tyranny of the reason. ...Suppose the children of this generation and of the next were permitted to cultivate expressiveness instead of fineness of speech, were praised and promoted for doing something interesting, not for doing something correct and proper. If this should happen, as indeed it is already beginning to happen, the English language and literature would undergo such a renascence as they have never known". Meanwhile, despide its multitudinous defects, English goes on.

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