[HN Gopher] The Early Days of American English
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The Early Days of American English
Author : samclemens
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-09-15 21:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| kensai wrote:
| Forbidden
|
| You don't have permission to access this resource.
| tigerlily wrote:
| _Yankees_ my dad always joked was a concatenation of _Jan_ and
| _Kees_.
| bentley wrote:
| 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....)
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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.)
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I'm convinced the BBC actively hunts down the most aggressive
| form of each accent specifically to put them on air now.
| tomcam wrote:
| I was going to add something about how I sometimes don't even
| understand them, but thanks for getting the point across for
| me!
| molsongolden wrote:
| 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
| tomcam wrote:
| Yeah, not exactly our greatest cultural contribution to the
| language.
|
| Sorry, people of Philly ;)
| Exoristos wrote:
| Mid-Atlantic/Trans-Atlantic was a status marker, educated into
| the upper class similarly to Received Pronunciation in the UK.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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_
| tomcam wrote:
| I think we're saying the same thing but your explanation is
| much better. Thanks.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| bentley wrote:
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Saw the movie recently myself, and wondered if it's really
| representative of the vernacular of rough men on the
| frontier in the 19th century. By teachers in schoolhouses,
| sure, but by bounty hunters and criminals?
| tomcam wrote:
| Yes. So do old court transcripts. It is amazing how modern
| some of the participants of the Salem witch trials sounded.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| He pulled it off better than anyone though
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| bentley wrote:
| Buckley is one of Robin Williams's impressions as Genie that
| I was too young to get. https://youtu.be/RBUSp7LglJg?t=36
| roschdal wrote:
| "Color, not colour", someone in America said.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > spelled
|
| You have just outed yourself as American!
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Not necessarily. "Spelled" as the passive participle is the
| Oxford spelling. (Oxford spelling uses "spelt" for the
| active past tense form only.)
| tigerlily wrote:
| Rather like the use of z over s, American English simply
| follows the ancient Greek over the French.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Could you cite that? Sounds interesting, if somewhat contrary
| to expectation since Chaucer manuscripts already show _-our_
| for some words later spelled with _-or_.
| kibwen wrote:
| While the part about the English aristocracy is somewhat
| glib (at the point in time when the "u" was added, arguably
| the aristocracy were still French, or at least Norman), but
| the fact that it was "color" in old French and Latin is
| indisputable, and that for a while both spellings were
| acceptable in England even as "color" become enshrined in
| America.
|
| Quoting https://www.etymonline.com/word/-or :
|
| _In U.S., via Noah Webster, -or is nearly universal (but
| not in glamour), while in Britain -our is used in most
| cases (but with many exceptions: author, error, tenor,
| senator, ancestor, horror etc.). The -our form predominated
| after c. 1300, but Mencken reports that the first three
| folios of Shakespeare 's plays used both spellings
| indiscriminately and with equal frequency; only in the
| Fourth Folio of 1685 does -our become consistent._
|
| _A partial revival of -or on the Latin model took place
| from 16c. (governour began to lose its -u- 16c. and it was
| gone by 19c.), and also among phonetic spellers in both
| England and America (John Wesley wrote that -or was "a
| fashionable impropriety" in England in 1791)._
|
| _[...]_
|
| _Fowler notes the British drop the -u- when forming
| adjectives ending in -orous (humorous) and derivatives in
| -ation and -ize, in which cases the Latin origin is
| respected (such as vaporize). When the Americans began to
| consistently spell it one way, however, the British
| reflexively hardened their insistence on the other. "The
| American abolition of -our in such words as honour and
| favour has probably retarded rather than quickened English
| progress in the same direction." [Fowler]_
| dwheeler wrote:
| The internet aechive comes again to the rescue, if you want to
| read the article:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230916175256/https://www.lapha...
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 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...
| chucksmash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In Dutch we have the word "boswachter", which means something
| like forest keeper. In old Dutch it was probably spelled
| "boschwachter" or something similar.
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(page generated 2023-09-16 23:01 UTC)