The Early Days of American English

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-days-american-english

by samclemens • 3 years ago

116 60 3 years ago

laphamsquarterly.org

kensai• 3 years ago

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dwheeler• 3 years ago

The internet aechive comes again to the rescue, if you want to read the article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230916175256/https://www.lapha...

OfSanguineFire4• 3 years ago

sick, which referred specifically to a digestive upset, became a general term for any illness

This claim strikes me as dubious. (But it wouldn’t be a pop-sci article on linguistics without at least one factual error, so maybe this is it.) Wiktionary has a 15th-century attestation of sick meaning “ailing” more generally, and this accords with Germanic cognates (cf. Swedish sjuk “ill”). I would therefore suspect that some English dialects brought to America preserved the original meaning before UK English narrowed it. This claim is sourced neither in the linked article nor in the book The United States of English that it hawks. Would be interested if anyone has more on this.

maartenscholl• 3 years ago

This online etymology dictionary (etymonline.com/word/sick) says that: The restricted meaning of English sick, "having an inclination to vomit, affected with nausea," is from 1610s.

Usage and etymology may differ, even if over the long term there is little semantic drift, as usage may reflect context and cultural changes.

OfSanguineFire4• 3 years ago

Popular references like etymononline.com are nice and all, but I’m hoping for some scholarly literature if anyone here in the community has a good pointer.

roschdal• 3 years ago

"Color, not colour", someone in America said.

kibwen3• 3 years ago

This one's the other way around. It was spelled "color" in early English, French, and Latin. At some point the French officially added a "u" in order to make the spelling more phonetic, and the English aristocracy imitated that even though it makes no sense given English pronunciation.

tigerlily2• 3 years ago

Rather like the use of z over s, American English simply follows the ancient Greek over the French.

OfSanguineFire4• 3 years ago

Could you cite that? Sounds interesting, if somewhat contrary to expectation since Chaucer manuscripts already show -our for some words later spelled with -or.

mmmBacon• 3 years ago

Whenever I encounter an English person who laments the American spelling of color or honor, I remind them that they spell those words the French way.

FridayNightTV• 3 years ago

spelled

You have just outed yourself as American!

glandium• 3 years ago

I'm French. It's funny, because now that you mention it, the verbs "colorer" and "colorier", both related to colors, are still spelled this way, while the word for color itself is "couleur"... and I never really noticed.

chucksmash• 3 years ago

The attribution of "bushwhacker" as coming from the Dutch "forest keeper" surprised me, as the compound word bushwhack already makes sense as a description of the activity and a quick search indicates both bush and whack were already present in English prior.

The Oxford English Dictionary etymology of the word just indicates it is a compound formed from those two English words[0]. Online Etymology Dictionary does mention a possible connection to the Dutch however[1]. It would be interesting to know why etymologists make the connection to the Dutch.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/bushwhacker_n

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/bushwhacker

Edit: it seems the English sense of the word bush as meaning "the wilderness" came to it from the Dutch bosch via the American colonies[2], maybe that's the connection.

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/bush#etymonline_v_18128

oktoberpaard• 3 years ago

In Dutch we have the word “boswachter”, which means something like forest keeper. In old Dutch it was probably spelled “boschwachter” or something similar.

ycombinete• 3 years ago

South African English uses bush in this sense as well. I anssume it’s via the Afrikaans “bosveld”. In fact English speakers will often retain the “veld”, using the term bushveld. (Nobody says bushfield).

It has a specific meaning [0], but is also used generally to mean the wilderness.

I’m not sure if it has a meaning in Dutch other than as “forest field”.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushveld

throwaway154• 3 years ago

I assumed it was an Australian amalgamation of bush and whack that can be imagined to mean exactly what it means, like a lot of words do, perhaps inspired by a loose overheard memory, perhaps not.

I can't really imagine an American saying it. I can imagine an Australian.

SyzygistSix2• 3 years ago

People say bushwhack in the US. It means not using an established trail when out in the woods/wilderness.

tigerlily2• 3 years ago

Yankees my dad always joked was a concatenation of Jan and Kees.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

I feel like there’s a second facet of this. Spoken English in old interviews and movies here in the States often featured an awkward, weird hybrid accent known as “mid-Atlantic“, and it really didn’t die completely out of movies until the 1990s. Until that time, it appears that Americans had some kind of inferiority complex about their regional accents.

Since then news readers in the USA have even adopted a much more genuinely American, specifically Southern California sound, that even began to seep into UK spoken English a bit. (Since about the early 2000s the BBC has started to let newsreaders with regional English accents into the club, which I really enjoy and encourage.)

kibwen3• 3 years ago

Until that time, it appears that Americans had some kind of inferiority complex about their regional accents.

The phenomenon of Mid-Atlantic English appears to have been a class marker rather than merely people being embarrassed about having a regional accent.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent :

It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". The accent was embraced in private independent preparatory schools, especially by members of the American Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film and stage acting

tomcam7• 3 years ago

I think we’re saying the same thing but your explanation is much better. Thanks.

arrowsmith• 3 years ago

See e.g. the conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr, who spoke with a really classic example of this accent (and was alive much more recently than most people who spoke like this):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0d8mzdr4jE

It's such a weird mix of British and American locution. I've never heard anyone speak like this in real life, and they did I would look at them funny.

rootusrootus• 3 years ago

He had an interesting history. I guess English wasn't his first language. And he spent some time going to school in England in his early teens. I'd guess he came by that fascinating accent honestly. Not quite British, not quite American. And he spoke with a melody, very flowing from one word into the next. It does make him sound a bit aristocratic.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

He pulled it off better than anyone though

bentley4• 3 years ago

Buckley is one of Robin Williams’s impressions as Genie that I was too young to get. https://youtu.be/RBUSp7LglJg?t=36

molsongolden• 3 years ago

Not to be confused with the actual mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia/Baltimore) accent which is basically the aggressive opposite of the transatlantic accent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_accent

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_English

tomcam7• 3 years ago

Yeah, not exactly our greatest cultural contribution to the language.

Sorry, people of Philly ;)

thebruce87m• 3 years ago

I’m convinced the BBC actively hunts down the most aggressive form of each accent specifically to put them on air now.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

I was going to add something about how I sometimes don’t even understand them, but thanks for getting the point across for me!

AdamN• 3 years ago

I find the number of accents kind of exhausting tbh. But the real reason I turn off BBC is because of the fact that it's sports news half the time ... or a feel good story about a barber in Kibera ... or meta-news (we're in the news room and this is how we put together our stories). I wish there was just a radio station with news. BBC has the people to do it but they just don't do it. I'd much rather have inside politics about Zambian carbon credits but that's the type of thing that's like <1% of the programming.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

Still laughing my butt off at this perfect comment

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

Period piece movies tend to use modern slang and ways of speaking, which is just lazy on the part of the scriptwriters.

Mark Twain's books give a taste of how people actually talked then.

tomcam7• 3 years ago

Yes. So do old court transcripts. It is amazing how modern some of the participants of the Salem witch trials sounded.

bentley4• 3 years ago

One that sticks out in my mind is the Coen brothers’ True Grit (with dialogue largely taken from the 1968 novel), which consciously avoids contractions—not entirely, but enough to result in a noticeable (though pleasing) aesthetic. Except that’s more of the opposite case—false archaism, rather than false modernity.

Exoristos• 3 years ago

Mid-Atlantic/Trans-Atlantic was a status marker, educated into the upper class similarly to Received Pronunciation in the UK.

woodruffw• 3 years ago

For instance, corn meant wheat in England, but usually referred to oats in Ireland.

No combined reference to both oats and the English language is complete without Johnson's definition[1].

[1] https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=o...

bentley4• 3 years ago

I update diction in open source docs periodically, but avoid Americanizing the text (unless the project I’m working on has a policy of doing so). Sometimes, though, I don’t realize something’s an Americanism.

One US–UK difference I hit last week was the mandative subjunctive. A sentence went: “…to request that it adds such‐and‐such…”. My instinct was to use: “…to request that it add such‐and‐such…”, but a contributor told me introducing the mandative subjunctive here would feel archaic in British English, and the former wording is typical there.

Sure enough, I found some quotes from UK papers (cribbed from a Reddit post) that seem to demonstrate the practice. In the US I think I’d expect a newspaper or other formal writing to use the subjunctive in these cases, even though it’s often dropped in casual speech.

Fidel Castro has demanded that the USA stops [stop] invading Cuban airspace (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013wwyx)
MPs have demanded that the Government reconsiders [reconsider] its decision to allow Huawei to help build the UK’s 5G networks (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/02/12/mps-demand...)
Last month it demanded that trading positions are [be] disclosed (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jul/03/regulators....)

PrimeMcFly2• 3 years ago

but avoid Americanizing the text

So you UKize it instead? Not sure one is better than the other, and would argue US English is more widespread.

irrational• 3 years ago

Is Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand English closer to UK or America? I assume Canada is closer to the US while those down south are closer to the UK.

bentley4• 3 years ago

I leave it unchanged. The result is stylistic variation across sections of the codebase based on the nationality of the writer, but that’s fine—my focus is on fixing unclear or outright incorrect writing, not necessarily forcing every tense or mood to be consistent with my own regional dialect.

tragomaskhalos• 3 years ago

The real surprise, given the distances in miles and time, is how similar American and British English are - compare with Afrikaans vs Dutch for example, or how much (at least according to Wikipedia) Cypriot Turkish and Greek have both diverged from their mainland forms.

davidw• 3 years ago

Along those lines, I have always found this map fascinating: https://roaringbrookmaps.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/what-do-yo...

We have quite a mix here in Oregon.

watersb• 3 years ago

An English watershed is a line or ridge separating the waters that flow into different drainage areas, but in America it’s a slope down which the water flows, or the catchment area of a river.

The original English meaning of watershed is retained in American English in a metaphorical usage, such as "a watershed event", a turning point.

poulsbohemian• 3 years ago

I guess I've been using Pond and Watershed incorrectly all these years, as I have definitely referred to something artificial as a pond and have used watershed to connote drainage. Even the definition of bluff they use feels to me like something we could use in American English. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hydrok92• 3 years ago

How about how Americans say ICE cream (stress on the first word), while British say ice CREAM. There must be more examples like this.

hydrok92• 3 years ago

Someone down voted me, so here's a list and explanation about the difference in stress:

https://englishwithkim.com/words-americans-brits-stress-diff....

tetris11• 3 years ago

Americans also said mad for angry, another English usage that died out in the old country.
The expression I guess, meaning that one supposes or agrees, is often used to stereotype Americans in British books and movies, but it was current in England during the seventeenth century

My parents were refugees and survived in the country I grew up in by keeping close with the tightknit community of their fellow countrymen. They kept the language and the culture of their homeland alive, and taught it to their kids, so that they would never forget their roots.

The problem: the language of the homeland changed in those years, and what my siblings and I actually learned is outdated, funny-sounding, and almost unintelligible since bits of english are thrown in there too. A conversation with a native is hard. I guess its funny how language changes, and how it is preserved most by those who are no longer part of it's development.

derbOac• 3 years ago

Early colonial America coincided with the end of the Great Vowel Shift; my understanding is English at that time sounded somewhat more like Irish or New England (and Downeast Midatlantic?) accents today. That is, "English English" has changed more than other forms of English.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uQc5ZpAoU4c

But then again: https://daily.jstor.org/colonial-america-gain-linguistic-ind...

denton-scratch2• 3 years ago

Author's understanding of English English differs from mine.

A bluff in England denoted a high but rounded shoreline, while in America it was used to describe steep cliffs

Author uses the past tense; perhaps it did denote a shoreline, I don't know. Nowadays it refers to a "false hilltop" - what appears to be the crest of a hill while you are climbing towards it, but turns out to be elevated ground between the climber and the true peak.

In England, lumber is old, discarded furniture and other items of the sort usually found in attics

Lumber: cut wood, wood that has been prepared in a sawmill.

Timber: Wood "on the hoof" - complete with bark.

Old discarded furniture might be considered lumber; but I've never heard the term used that way.

Source: I'm English.

goosedragons• 3 years ago

These are historic definitions. You can see them in old dictionaries, e.g. the first definition of lumber is "disused furniture and the like" in the older editions of the OED. The 3rd definition is timber sawn into planks and called out as being North American usage. And the 2nd definition of "superfluous fat, Esp. In horses" seems extremely dead to me.

denton-scratch2• 3 years ago

Regarding "lumber", the author used the present tense. So old dictionaries can't support that usage.

Regarding "bluff", the author used the past tense, and may be correct.

The Early Days of American English

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