American Language Supplement 2 (26 page)

The study of the speech of Georgia was begun during the 20s of the last century by the Rev. Adiel Sherwood (1791–1879), a New Yorker who had moved there for the benefit of his health. The State was then frontier territory, at least west of what is now Atlanta, and the last Indians were not dispossessed until 1838. When Sherwood printed a glossary of its speech in his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia,”
³
most of the terms he listed were ignorant forms common to the whole frontier,
e.g., mounting
for
mountain, Babtis
for
Baptist, bar
for
bear, cheer
for
chair, cotched
for
caught, oxens
for
oxen
, and
yaller
for
yellow
. The rest came from the Appalachian dialect or from General Southern. In a few cases he was the first to record words and phrases that have not been found elsewhere at earlier dates,
e.g., crazy
for
sickly, power of for many, mushmillion
for
muskmelon
, and
done did it
, but that fact shows only that he was one of the first lexicographers in the field.
⁴
Cleanth Brooks’s study of the dialect prevailing along the Georgia-Alabama border has been noticed under Alabama. Most of the later writings on the speech of the State are based, not on observation in the field, but on literary
sources,
¹
but there are a few exceptions.
²
The best early source is Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s “Georgia Scenes,” first published in various newspapers and brought out as a book in 1840.
³

There is a glossary of Idaho terms in “Idaho Lore,” one of the books published by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration,
⁴
but nearly all of them are common to the whole West,
e.g., bob-wire
for
barbed-wire; to high-tail
, to depart swiftly, and
sourdough
, an old-timer. The same volume lists some specimens of miners’ argot from the Pierce City area, and of railroad men’s terms. In 1931 Paul Jensen contributed a paper on the jargon of the
desert rats, i.e.
, harvest hands of Eastern Idaho, to
American Speech
⁵
and in 1944 Nancy Wilson Ross included a brief note on Idaho speech in her “Westward the Women.”
⁶
Some of the terms listed by Jensen show Mormon origin,
e.g., down home
, meaning Utah. He says:

Says Mrs. Ross:

The most interesting part of Illinois, linguistically speaking, is the lush region called Egypt, at the southern tip of the State—the northernmost extension of the coastal plain which follows the Mississippi up from the Gulf of Mexico. It was largely settled, at the time of the great movement into the West, by Carolinians who came by way of Kentucky and Tennessee, and its speech still shows Appalachian and General Southern influences. An account of this dialect was contributed to
Dialect Notes
in 1902 by William O. Rice, a native of Wisconsin who had lived in the region since Civil War times.
²
Some of the peculiarities that he noted were (
a
) the poverty of the vocabulary, so that one verb was used in a range of senses covered by many more in the general speech,
e.g., big
for all kinds and degrees of largeness; (
b
) the invariable use of
a
as the indefinite article, to the exclusion of
an, e.g., a
apple,
a
hour,
a
image; (
c
) the intrusion of
y
before
a
followed by
r
and
u
followed by
sh
, as in
gyarden
and
bryush;
(
d
) the use of a syllabic plural affix, clearly pronounced, as in
nestes
for
nests;
³
and some items of vocabulary not recorded elsewhere,
e.g., explore
for
explosion, grab-gutter
for
greedy, foot-mop
for
door-mat, livers
to designate the whole viscera, and
packwater
for
drudge
.

The same dialect was investigated again, forty years later, by Grace Partridge Smith, also a resident of the region.
⁴
“When we
come to Egypt,” she said, “we are on the edge of the South.” Most of the words and phrases she listed were obviously of Southern or Appalachian origin, but she also added a few that Wentworth, in 1944, did not report elsewhere,
e.g., frog-eye gravy
, the gravy left in the skillet after frying ham;
¹
to look the berries
, to stem them; and
shotgun-house
, a house whose rooms are all in one line. Jesse W. Harris, writing in 1946, reported that the predominant influence on Southern Illinois speech appeared to be Appalachian.
²
Geographically, he said, the region “belongs to the Ozarks, whose foothills extend across it from east to west. Most of the pioneer inhabitants came either directly from the Appalachian highlands or by way of Kentucky and inland Tennessee.” Harris cited a number of characteristic Appalachian terms, still in wide use,
e.g., feisty
, lively, frisky;
infare
, a reception given to or by a bridegroom;
fireboard
, a mantel;
budget
, a peddler’s pack, and
ham-meat
, ham or bacon. He said that German colonies in St. Clair and Monroe counties and Italian settlements in the coal-mining regions have given the local speechways “their own individual peculiarities,” but he offered no examples. The diaries and other records of the early settlers of the State are probably rich in specimens of frontier speech in the 1812–1840 era, but so far they have not been explored as Albert Matthews, M. M. Mathews, George Philip Krapp, Allen Walker Read and other philologians have explored the records of colonial and post-Revolutionary days in the East.

The study of the current speech of the State got a considerable mpetus in 1937 when Albert H. Marckwardt, of the University of Michigan, launched plans to extend the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada to the Great Lakes and Ohio valley regions, though on a scale less ambitious than that of the six volumes on New England. In a little while he had in hand field material from thirty-seven communities
in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and lower Michigan, of which ten were in Illinois.
¹
The latter ranged from the Chicago region to Egypt. In each case the informant was a native of the community, of education that did not go beyond the grade school, and seventy years old or older. This, of course, was only a preliminary survey – undertaken, in Marckwardt’s words, “to see if the result would justify going forward on a more intensive scale.” The results were duly encouraging, and by 1943 there were records in hand from fifty communities, to which Dr. Frederick G. Cassidy, of the University of Wisconsin, presently added fifty more from that State. Unhappily, World War II and its aftermath and Marckwardt’s absence on an educational mission in Mexico interrupted the work, and a great deal remains to be done. But Marckwardt has already published some illuminating discussions of the material already in hand,
²
and plans are under way to interest the State universities of the area in the project. Funds for the preliminary work were provided by the Horace H. Rackham Foundation of the University of Michigan.

In 1904 Carl D. Buck published a study of Chicago speech,
³
but it had to do with the speech of immigrant groups only. In 1935 Leonard Bloomfield published a study of American vowels devoted chiefly to those heard in Chicago,
⁴
and soon afterward the same subject was dealt with by Morris Swadesh.
⁵
In 1908 George E. Hoffman sent me some interesting observations of the speech of Chicago children. Among the terms he listed were
Polish piano
for accordion;
Halstead street
for anything inferior;
back of the yards
, of the same general meaning;
to make off
, to pretend;
aft
for afternoon; and
to
as a substitute for
in
and
on
, as in “When we lived
to
Milwaukee” and “I live over
to
Wayne avenue.”
⁶
Hoffman also noted some curious pronunciations of proper names,
e.g., Joán, Genóa
and
Devón
.

Indiana seems to have set the fashions in Western speech in the period between the War of 1812 and the War with Mexico, for in those days
Hoosierism
was used almost as frequently as
Westernism
to designate one of the novel and usually uncouth locutions that flowed eastward across the mountains.
¹
They were used freely by Edward Eggleston in “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” first published in 1871, and a subsequent generation of Indiana novelists labored them heavily. Eggleston (1837–1902) said in an edition of his book brought out in 1899 that he was encouraged to investigate and report upon the dialect by James Russell Lowell, and that “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was the first American dialect novel dealing with a variety of speech other than that of New England. He was born at Vevay, a small Ohio river town in the southeastern corner of the State, and spent some of his earlier years traversing it as an itinerant Methodist preacher. He saw the influence of Irish immigration upon the Hoosier dialect of his youth, and also that of immigrants from the Pennsylvania German country, but he seems to have been unaware of the even greater influence of Appalachia. Two of the German loans he noted were
plunder
, household goods, and
smearcase
.
²
Seven years after “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” J. H. Beadle, also a native of Indiana, described the dialect in his “Western Wilds and the Men Who Redeem Them.” His account of it was thus summarized by John S. Farmer in “Americanisms Old and New”:
³

In 1906 O. W. Hanley, a native of Vigo county on the Wabash (Terre Haute is its metropolis), contributed to
Dialect Notes
an extensive vocabulary of its speech.
¹
He noted some of the characters reported from Illinois by Rice,
²
e.g.
, the invariable use of
a
as the indefinite article, the intrusion of
y
before
a
followed by
r
, and the use of syllabic plurals, and added a number of forms that Rice had not found,
e.g., crickled
, disabled;
eye-winker
, eyelash;
hen-down
, chicken dirt, and
muckle-dun
, mouse-colored, but at least nine-tenths of the terms he listed came from the common stock of the American vulgate,
e.g., no-account, hist, to get religion, to fly the coop, bust, right smart
and
to pass the time of day
. In 1912 Rollo Walter Brown followed with another list from a region apparently a little to the northward, but with much the same result.
³
Here the investigation of Indiana speechways rested until 1937, when Marckwardt, mentioned under Illinois, undertook plans for his linguistic atlas of the Great Lakes area and the Ohio river valley. Marckwardt presented a report on his Indiana material to the Twenty-first Annual Indiana History Conference at Indianapolis on December 9, 1939.
⁴
In it he said: