H. L. Mencken

“ There are perhaps a hundred other such words which are used daily in preference to those which mean the same in English. The immigrant in the midst of a large native population, of course, exerts no such pressure upon the national language as that exerted upon an immigrant language by the native, but nevertheless his linguistic habits and limitations have to be reckoned with in dealing with him, and the concessions thus made necessary have a very ponderable influence upon the general speech. ”

“ Since 1820 nearly 35,000,000 immigrants have come into this country, and of them probably not 10,000,000 brought any preliminary acquaintance with English with them. The census of 1910 showed that nearly 1,500,000 persons then living permanently on American soil could not speak it at all; that more than 13,000,000 had been born in other countries, chiefly of different language; [1] and that nearly 20,000,000 were the children of such immigrants, and hence under the influence of their speech habits. No other country houses so many aliens. ”

“ The Italians, the Slavs, and above all, the Russian Jews, make steady contributions to the American vocabulary and idiom, and though these contributions are often concealed by quick and complete naturalization their foreignness to English remains none the less obvious. I should worry, [2] In its way, is correct English, but in essence it is as completely Yiddish as kosher, ganof, schadchen, oi-yoi, or mazuma. ”

“ The effects of this pressure are obviously two-fold; on the one hand the foreigner, struggling with a strange and difficult tongue, makes efforts to simplify it as much as possible, and so strengthens the native tendency to disregard all niceties and complexities, and on the other hand he corrupts it with words and locutions from the language he has brought with him, and sometimes with whole idioms and grammatical forms. ”

“ A large number of Americans have an entirely wrong interpretation of the word kanaka. In its truest and only sense it means man. It can be interpreted in no other way. In Hawaiian a man is a kanaka, a woman a wahine. The word kane is also often used as man, and coupled with the word keiki—keiki kane—means boy. The Hawaiians have often been referred to as kanakas, which on the mainland has developed into more or less of a slang word to designate the people of the Hawaiian race. ”

“ The extent of such influences as those last noted upon the development of American, and particularly spoken American, is often underestimated. In no other large nation of the world are there so many aliens, nor is there any other in which so large a proportion of the resident aliens speak languages incomprehensible to the native. ”

“ The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter. [12]
The pressure of loan-words, of course, is greatest in those areas in which the foreign population is largest. In some of these areas it has given rise to what are almost distinct dialects. Everyone who has ever visited lower Pennsylvania must have observed the wide use of German terms by the natives, and the German intonations in their speech, even when they are most careful with their English. ”

“ In Great Britain the alien population, for a century past, has never been more than 2 per cent of the total population, and since the passage of the Aliens Act of 1905 it has tended to decline steadily. In Germany, in 1910, there were but 1,259,873 aliens in a population of more than 60,000,000, and of these nearly half were German-speaking Austrians and Swiss. In France, in 1906, there were 1,000,000 foreigners in a population of 39,000,000 and a third of them were French-speaking Belgians, Luxembourgeois and Swiss. In Italy, in 1911, there were but 350,000 in a population of 35,000,000. ”

“ But a preliminary bulletin shows there were 13,703,987 foreign-born whites in the country that year, of whom less than 3,000,000 came from countries of English speech.↑ In Yiddish, ish ka bibble. The origin and meaning of the phrase have been variously explained. One theory is to the effect that it is a Yiddish corruption of the German nicht gefiedelt (=not fiddled=not flustered) . But this seems to me to be fanciful. To the Jews ish is probably the first personal pronoun and ka appears to be a corruption of kann. ”