EModE_6_America_2

November 17, 2008

HOW ENGLISH CAME TO AMERICA --

1607 (1620) -- 1790: BRITISH TO THE SOUTH AND NEW ENGLAND

1607 -- SOUTHERN ENGLAND --> VIRGINIA

HEAVY "R" AND "OI" FOR "AI"

1620 -- EASTERN ENGLAND --> NEW ENGLAND

MISSING "R" AND BROAD "A" FAST, FAHST

1790 -- 1865: SCOTS-IRISH, GERMANS TO PHILADELPHIA AND OUT; SOUTHERN MIDLANDS AND APPALACHIAN DIALECTS

MIDWESTERN DIALECTS – country music speak

1849 -- AMERICANS MOVE OUT WEST

1865 -- PRESENT: MIGRATIONS FROM ITALY, IRELAND, AND GERMANY CONTINUING IN MAJOR CITIES --

NYC, CHICAGO, BOSTON

NON-EUROPEAN MIGRATION --

AFRICAN MIGRATION; SOUTH AND NORTH

1562-1807 12 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic

POST 1865 MIGRATION NORTH: ST. LOUIS, CHICAGO, DETROIT, NEW YORK CITY, ETC.

SOUTH AMERICAN, CARRIBBEAN MIGRATIONS -- FLORIDA, NYC, SOUTHWEST

ASIAN MIGRATIONS -- SOUTHWEST, MAJOR CITIES, ATLANTA

http://www.westga.edu/~mcrafton/American_English_Maps.htm

Dialects and Romanticism and Victorianism

THE 19TH CENTURY

Dialect and Democracy

This is the 19th Century: Romantic (and Victorian) period, and this period is characterized by revolutions against established order and reforms of established order. So in other words there is not so much the rage for order as before and language rather than prescribed could become described.

1770's; 1776, 1789, 1798 -- Four Revolutionary Dates of the Romantic period; they are respectively – the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the poetic revolution by Wordsworth and Coleridge when they published their radical volume Lyrical Ballads.

Two major results of these revolutions:

1. Expanding vocabulary:

Science, medicine, colonial expansion

2. Changing attitude toward language --

Sir William Jones 1786 – discovered Indo-European

Jacob Grimm 1822 – Grimm’s law

Wordsworth's definition of a poet, an ordinary man speaking to ordinary men in their language.

There is a new appraisal of history, antiquarian societies pop up

For example, F.J. Furnival E.E.T.S (Early English Text Society) (1864)

1850's philological societies

There is a new appreciation for local dialects

New Dictionaries

It is in this milieu that the OED, arguable the world’s greatest dictionary grew up.

Details of the 1858 “Proposal”

As Albert C. Baugh tells the story in A History of the English Language:

In 1857 at a meeting of the Philological Society in London a committee was appointed to collect words not in the dictionaries, with a view publishing a supplement to them. ... The most important outcome of the committee’s work was a paper read to the Society by Dean Trench, “On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries.” In it he laid down the historical principles on which a dictionary should be compiled. As a result of this paper the society decided that a supplement would not be satisfactory, and in January 1858 it passed resolutions calling for a new dictionary. A formal “Proposal for the Publication of a new English dictionary by the Philological Society” was issued the following year. The two principle aims of the new project were to record every word which could be found in English from about the year 1000 and to exhibit the history of each—its forms, its various spellings, and all its uses and meaning, past and present. The last-named feature was especially to be shown by a full selection of quotations from the whole range of English writings.

The Society issued a call for volunteers to send in slips of paper with quotations on them; in short order, they had more slips of paper than they could manage and thus they found themselves in dire need of an editor and savior. That person came in the name if Sir James A.H. Murray, who took on the job and got a contract with Oxford University Press to bring out the dictionary. The first publication was not until 1884. It covered part of the letter A. By 1900 installments were published up to H. The final installment was published in 1928; unfortunately, the editor Sir James died in 1915 and did not see his great work complete.

The work has been supplemented several times; a second edition was brought out a few years ago; and now the OED is on-line and working toward a new edition still and has issues another call for volunteers.

Question for Today on Chapters 14 and 15

1. What reasons might explain the claim by Rev. Boucher in 1832 that there is no dialect in America?

p. 192: Dialect leveling caused by mobility and fluidity of early colonists in terms of class, location, economics, vocation; also the relatively few dialects to start with; and the newness of the identity with the region.

But look at the few dialects the Reverend does recognize – quote.

2. What are the five or six original settlement regions?

p. 192-193: Eastern and Western New England; NYC; Mid-Atlantic States; inland Mid-Atlantic; South Midland – Appalachian; Southeastern

3. Why was there a growth in regional dialects and dialect literature?

p. 194: Post Civil War particularly there became a greater sense of identity with regional dialect and it took on a nationalistic fervor, part of the States Rights issue but also the greatness and copiousness of America.

American Dialect Society founded in 1889.

p. 196: There grew not only a celebration of these dialects but a desire to record them in a atlases as well as literature driven by an interest in realism, local color, it was called.

4. Pick one of the literature samples a make a case that it both does and does not represent actual dialect.

p. 197-200: Jewett’s pretty good, Harris exaggerated, Rawlings good too.

Pick up five things: spelling, sound, grammar, words, syntax.

5. How does William Labov’s work counter that of the regional or areal dialect specialists?

p. 203: Focus on sound more than words and social class rather than just region.

Points out the problem with the regional dialects – shifting sands.

See the DARE project and regional mapping.

Chapter 15

6. Why does Lerer consider Twain a good philologer?

p. 207: He of course was a student of dialects in order to write dialect and he also wrote about language – German in particular, but also Middle English.

p. 208: As America and American English moved West, which is what Twain did, there was a fear that English would become unmoored. There was fear of loss. This is somewhat like the repetition of the anti-inkhorn movement.

New territory, new technology, new words.

Also, he is one of the six most quoted authors in the OED (p. 218) 1,700 words.

7. Where did the word hello come from?

p. 208: Hello and Dude are two new words – both appear first in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee.

p. 210: A. Graham Bell adopted Ahoy from the nautical term used one boat to signal another. Edison preferred Hello which came from Hallo or Halloa – nautical terms.

8. What is a hello-girl?

p. 210-211: These are switchboard operators for phone companies.

Or p. 211 private alarm clocks.

9. Is being a dude in Twain’s world a good thing or bad? How do you know?

p. 212: Well is depends – the allures of aestheticism tempted manhood to be a dandy, a dude. Could be a sissy; could be cutting edge.

Notice that both British and American dictionaries blame the other country for it.

10. What is “eye-spelling”?

p. 219: Encores --

Homework Turn In

Questions for chapter 16:
1. Lerer’s passage from Douglass represents two modes of African American literary modes. What are they?

2. What are Labov’s four points about AAVE?

3. What is the creole hypothesis?

4. List the phonological features of AAVE in the text.

5. What is the idea of verb aspect in AAVE?

6. In what ways might the poem Hog Meat be offensive?

7. What does food and identity have to do with anything in language?

8. Describe Lerer’s treatment of the “I Have a Dream” speech?

9. What is “signifyin’”?

10. What is the American legacy of certain Wolof words?

From HEL Site:

Early American English

The greatest linguistic influence results from first period of immigration and the establishment of the settlements of the original thirteen colonies:

• Northern

o New England was first settled by English speakers between 1620-1640. After the Puritans settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620, a second settlement center is established in 1635 in the Lower Connecticut River Valley (on the western side of the river). Even today, the Connecticut River is an important regional dialect boundary, separating the r-less dialect of Boston from the more r-ful dialects in western New England. Religious dissenters from the Massachusetts Bay Colony found the Rhode Island Colony in 1638, and the Narragansett Bay area forms another distinctive dialect subregion.

o The Mid-Atlantic States: New York was first settled by the Dutch in 1614, but the colony was seized by the British in 1664, when fewer than 10,000 Dutch settlers were living there; Pennsylvania was settled by a mix of English, Welsh, Scots-Irish, and Germans (the Pennsylvania "Dutch"). From Philadelphia, Scots-Irish immigrants spread westward, settling extensively in the Appalachians.

• Southern

o Virginia was the first area to be settled in the South Atlantic States. The region attracted a variety of social outcasts of one kind or another: criminals, royalists, indentured servants, and Puritans from England; religious and political refugees from France (Huguenots/Calvinists); and inland, Scots-Irish, and Germans. One kind of argument for the distinctive character of Southern speech, then, is that it was peopled by inhabitants from the "fringes" of the British insular domain, and thus, perhaps, those with less standardized pronunciations and usages. Black English is increasingly regarded as another influence on the development of Southern speech (see especially Dillard's chapter on "The Development of Southern").

3. The forced settlement of West Africans in the Caribbean and Southern colonies (page 194-195, 205-207).

From the text and videotape, we have learned that the slave trade in the 16th century resulted in, most likely, the development of pidgins amongst the slaves who were forcibly placed in mixed language environments.

These pidgins, then, creolized into Caribbean Creoles, such as Jamaican English Creole, as well as Creoles in the States, such as Gullah and Plantation Creole.

These Creoles doubtless affected Southern English, perhaps contributing the loss of post vocalic r which is so often seen as the mark of Southern aristocracy: “Daddy died in thuh [the] wo-uh [war].”

Furthermore, these Creoles decreolized over time into what is known as Black English today.

More on creoles from the HEL web site: Click here.

The evidence for this claim lies in the pronounced used of “d” for “th”; use of habitual “be”; dropping the verb “to be” in certain instances; and the unmarking of verbs in present.

See Ebonics web link: http://www.cal.org/ebonics/wolfram.html

More on Ebonics grammar below in Appendix A.

Furthermore, this variety was carried north after the Civil War to the major cities that attracted African-Americans at the time, Chicago, Detroit, New York City. It is from here and from the various arenas of entertainment that Black English influenced Standard American English and English worldwide (e.g. ok, hip, boogy-woogy).

Scots-Irish in America

The Scottish Presbyterians who settled Ulster (Northern Ireland) in the 1600's became known as Ulster-Scots. Those Ulster-Scots who left the north of Ireland to settle America a century later became known as the Scots-Irish (or Scotch-Irish).

Northern Irish Presbyterian families had been sailing from Ulster to America since the 1690's, but in the year 1717 the trickle became a torrent. In a fifty year period in excess of 250,000 Scots-Irish Presbyterians had left Ulster to make a new home in America.

The reason so many left their homeland in the north of Ireland is due both to religious persecution and economic hardship. The Scots-Irish Presbyterians were often viewed by the Anglican landowners in Ireland as more of a threat than the local Irish Catholic population

The Test Act of 1704 was particularly hard on Presbyterians. Marriages conducted by Presbyterian ministers were invalid and they were unable to worship in churches or hold public office. In addition tariffs were imposed on the north of Ireland linen industry to stop the Ulster-Scots from competing on an equal footing with the linen industry in England. In this climate it is no surprise that over a quarter of the north of Ireland's Scots-Irish Presbyterian population opted for a new life in the new world.

It was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Francis Makemie who organized the first Presbyterian Church in America in 1693. The Scots-Irish are credited with the spread of Presbyterianism across the US. The fact that Presbyterian ministers were required to be university educated and bible school trained meant there was a shortage of Presbyterian clergy for the growing population.

As Baptist pastors at the time did not need the same degree of formal training, they were more readily available and this led to the Baptist Church eventually overtaking the Presbyterian Church as the main Protestant denomination in America.

The Scots-Irish settlers made superb frontiersmen in early Colonial America. Their experiences over the previous few centuries, first in the Scottish Borders and then fighting the Irish Catholics in the north of Ireland had created a race of hardy unyielding people who were ideally suited to clearing the forests to build farms and pushing the borders further and further west.

Their experience of religious discrimination in Ulster by their Episcopal English landlords meant the Scots-Irish had no hesitation in taking the side of the rebels in the War of Independence. In the words of Professor James G. Leyburn "They provided some of the best fighters in the American army. Indeed there were those who held the Scots-Irish responsible for the war itself".

No less a figure than George Washington once said "If defeated everywhere else I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scots-Irish of my native Virginia".

The Scots-Irish provided 25 Generals and about a third of the revolutionary army. The Pennsylvania Line was made up entirely of Ulster-Scots emigrants and their sons. The Battle of Kings Mountain was a Scots-Irish battle where a militia of mainly Scots-Irish Presbyterians defeated an English army twice its size.

President Theodore Roosevelt said of the Scots-Irish "in the Revolutionary war, the fiercest and most ardent Americans of all were the Presbyterian Irish settlers and their descendants"

The Declaration of Independence was printed by an Ulster-Scot, John Dunlop, read in public by a first generation Scots-Irish American Colonel John Nixon and the first signature came from another Scots-Irish Presbyterian, John Hancock.

The Scots-Irish embraced America and gradually lost their distinct Scotch-Irish identity to be Americans period. The name Scotch-Irish fell out of use for a period of time until the arrival of the Catholic Irish almost a century later following the potato famine. In order to differentiate themselves from the famine refugees who were Catholic Gaelic Irish, the term Scots-Irish was reintroduced.

The Irish tended to congregate in Catholic Irish communities in cities such as New York, Chicago and Boston and maintained their Irish identity, while the Scots-Irish population was spread throughout America, particularly in the American Mid West and the Southern States. Today there are approximately 27 million Protestant Scots-Irish Americans and 17 million Catholic Irish Americans (although a fair percentage of those from Protestant backgrounds and bearing Scottish surnames wrongly regard themselves to be Irish-Americans).

Famous Scots-Irish Americans including Andrew Jackson, Davy Crocket, Sam Houston, Stonewall Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and John Wayne are testament to the great influence of the Scots-Irish in the formation and development of the United States.