American languages

“ There is no reason why it should not be addressed to American languages, and we may be sure that it would be most fruitful. How valuable it would be to take even a few words, as maize, tobacco, pipe, bow, arrow, and the like, each representing a widespread art or custom, and trace their derivations and affinities through the languages of the whole continent! ”

“ Thus the great diversity of American languages came to be accepted not because any one believed it to have been really established, but because until recently no critical scholar considered himself able to establish serious connections. ”

“ If we apply what is certainly a very fair test, to wit: the uses to which a language is and can be put, I cannot see that a well-developed American tongue, such as the Aztec or the Algonkin, in any way falls short of, say French or English. ”

“ If these observations regarding the influence of acculturation upon language should be correct, then the whole history of American languages must not be treated on the assumption that all languages which show similarities must be considered as branches of the same linguistic family. We should rather find a phenomenon which is parallel to the features characteristic of other ethnological phenomena—namely, a development from diverse sources which are gradually worked into a single cultural unit. ”

“ A complete education demands that the American whose mother tongue is the English, must learn French, German, Spanish and Italian, to say nothing of the more difficult languages of eastern Europe and the Orient. ”

“ Language is itself so irrefragable a testimony of the mental affinities of nations, and so slow in the periods of its mutations, that it offers one of the most important means for studying the history of the people. Grammars and vocabularies are required of all the tribes, whose history and relations we seek to fathom, before we can successfully compare them with each other, and with foreign languages. ”

“ Therefore, we think that if the American languages can be proved closely and entirely to resemble each other in grammatical forms and general arrangement, we may safely consider them all as dialects of the same stock, though they should now present wide and apparently unaccountable diversities in the sounds of words. ”

“ They present examples of divergence of phonetic character, of differences in structure and vocabulary, that will bring us face to face with the problem of the origin of these divergent elements.
The more detailed study of American languages promises rich returns in the fields of the mechanical processes of linguistic development and of the psychological problems presented by languages of different types. In many American languages the etymological processes are so transparent, that the mechanism of phonetic adaptation stands out with great clearness. ”

“ When we close our minds to months and years and think in centuries, it is easy to understand the diversity of languages. Tribes going off by themselves, drop words from their vocabulary as time goes on, and use other words that mean the same; after the passing of generations there is an entirely new dialect. It is so in nearly all the countries of the Old World; people living under the same government, neighbors, cannot talk to each other. ”

“ He can distinguish which are the essential or desirable languages for his purposes; and the rising generation of Americans is learning those languages more generally, and in a more practical way, than is the rising generation of Englishmen. ”

“ The multiplicity of languages is a very ancient phenomenon, perhaps those which we call American, belong no more to America, than the Magyar and Choud or Finn to Europe.—Humboldt, American Researches, Introduction.
If we desire to be fully informed of a nation's history, we must not reject the fables under which the few traces that remain of its origin are concealed. ”

“ All conjectures over the origin and relationship of these peoples must await the more trustworthy conclusions which it will be justifiable to draw from the relationship of their languages; only through more exact knowledge of them can we hope to make progress in this broad and obscure field. Several of the North American dialects are already fairly well known to philologists; for a majority of the rest there are, at least, vocabularies which allow a superficial classification according to relationship. ”

“ Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.
7. Indian words.
8. Negroisms.
9. Peculiarities of pronunciation.
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work on English [58] and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:
1. ”

“ The English with others is suffering continual alterations. America, placed at a distance from those nations, will feel, in a much less degree, the influence of the assimilating causes; at the same time, numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and science, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. ”

“ But there can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret the "form and pressure" of life—the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. ”

“ For notwithstanding the disagreeable nasal tone and drawling whine in which most of them speak, and notwithstanding a few national phrases and the peculiar use and pronunciation of certain words, it must be admitted that the American people, in general, speak English without provincial dialect or vulgarisms. ”

“ If, as many prophesy, the English language becomes the standard tongue for business and diplomacy and literature, all the best products of every nation being made available by translation, at least, for those speaking English, it can become that ruling tongue only by slow degrees. Meanwhile, the chasm between citizens of a common country made by differing languages may be bridged by far greater effort on the part of older Americans gifted in the use of foreign tongues. ”

“ Each springs from its own particular source, singing its own particular tune, and each language makes its own little contribution in order to make the American language powerful and great and to give it that wonderful volume which enables it to run into the great sea of the life of nations carrying with it a blessing of wealth like no other language. And the many individual peoples will, when they hear the English language spoken from America, feel that it comprises such a strange richness and volume as they are unable to find elsewhere. ”

“ Not only are the American linguistic stocks different from each other, and fail to furnish evidence of having been derived from a single parent tongue, but, as philologists assure us, no one of them is analogous to any language spoken in other lands. ”

“ It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its own use. ”

“ The English language is spoken by more people than use either the German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, but the 150,000,000 who thus preserve the "mother-tongue" of the early American settlers have to come into intimate contact with those of far different lingual background. ”

“ Perhaps the true explanation of this variation between British and American usage is found in the fact that America is a new country, and hence tradition here does not carry such binding authority as in the Old World. There the pronunciation has been handed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation, among a people “to the manner born.” Here conditions are much altered. America has a large foreign-born element, and consequently many of the people cannot claim English as their native tongue and are compelled to learn it as a foreign language. ”

“ On the other hand, the
language of the warlike invader or peaceful immigrant may yield, in a few generations, to the tongue of the mass of the population, as the Northman s was replaced by French, and modern German gives way to English in the United States. Judging, then, by the extirpation and adoption of languages within the range of history, it is obvious that to classify mankind into races, Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Polynesian, Kafir, &c., on the mere evidence of language, is an intrinsically unsound method. ”

“ Despite the fact that our mother tongue is called English we have developed an American speech with its idiosyncrasies and idioms, a speech whose purity is not to be measured by its conformity to the speech of the British Isles. ”

“ No matter who came—Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, or French—the people of the British Islands, while adopting their terms of expression, remained true to their original idiomatic expression. As this country [Pg 140] absorbs people from the whole world and makes one homogeneous American nation of them, so has the English language absorbed, and is still absorbing, words from every other people's language, and has transformed them into one homogeneous language of its own. ”

“ For no sound of English, in a single instance, escaped their lips; the greater number spoke a rude form of Italian, the others some outland dialect unknown to me—though I waited and waited to catch an echo of antique refrains. No note of any shade of American speech struck my ear, save in so far as the sounds in question represent to-day so much of the substance of that idiom. The types and faces bore them out; the people before me were gross aliens to a man, and they were in serene and triumphant possession. ”

“ The people talk one language too—and at first view they seem one great family, descended from one parentage.
But if we visit different parts of the country, we shall begin to remark diversities in the appearance of the people, and especially in their mode of speech. Though they all speak English, yet in one part they use many strange words that are not used in another part, and so singular is the mode of speaking in some places that an American cannot well understand the people. ”

“ As there are fifty or more diverse languages, spoken by mankind, to say nothing of hundreds of different dialects, and as people now travel freely to all parts of the earth, the advantages of one common language for all nations are apparent to all who reflect on the subject. ”

“ They use the same accents as ourselves, forming their words either on the palate, the teeth, or the lips, only they have other words for things. Great is the diversity of languages, for in a hundred leagues we found such change in the language that the inhabitants could not understand each other. ”

“ Beside all the various national languages and local dialects, our language will be used as a means of universal conversation. So shall our every word, for good or for ill, be a word spoken in authority to the whole world. ”

“ That language, sir, which shall become most generally known in the civilized world, will impart great importance over the nation that shall use it. The language of the United States will, in future times, be diffused over a greater extent of country than any other that we know. ”

“ The number of those using the English language in America far exceeds the population of England, and the English speech is just as vigorous and virile in America as it is in the parent country. Indeed, it has given indubitable proof of its vitality and vigor on American lips by adapting itself to the infinite variety of new conditions in this new country and by the added flexibility, strength and richness as exhibited in its augmented vocabulary. English now is the language of the American people as well as of the English people. ”

“ I hold that the value of dialect to the American author has never yet been estimated. When a story has a lot of dialect, you never discover that it hasn’t anything else. (Laughter, and a surprised frown from Cryder.) Furthermore, as America is too young to have an imagination, the dialect is an admirable and original substitute for plot and situations. ”

“ No country can afford to neglect any of those languages, but as a matter of primary importance I would say, for the British, Hindustani, for the Americans, Russian or Spanish, for the French and Belgians and Italians, Arabic. These are the directions in which the duty of understanding is most urgent for each of these peoples, and the path of opportunity plainest. ”

“ Such a variation must, therefore, be inherent in the natural growth of the English language on American soil. For it must be borne in mind that just as the English speech, as any other [Pg 86] living organism, has been growing and developing during the centuries in England, so, likewise, in America it has been growing and developing during the last three centuries, but not necessarily in the same manner. Those employing the language in Great Britain and in the United States are no longer a homogeneous people with the same national ideals and destiny. ”

“ The English would never copy our orthography for their own use; and consequently the same impressions of books would not answer for both countries. The inhabitants of the present generation would read the English impressions; but posterity, being taught a different spelling, would prefer the American orthography.
Besides this, a national language is a band of national union. Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national; to call their attachments home to their own country; and to inspire them with the pride of national character. ”