American Language Supplement 2 (48 page)

1
i.e
., by what I have called General American.

2
A Standard American Language?,
New Republic
, May 25, 1938, p. 68.

1
A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee; second edition; London, 1935, Vol. II, pp. 311–12. See also Vol. I, pp. 466–67.

2
Poor Relations in America, by Looker-on, Glasgow
News
, Sept. 17, 1934. For the immigration of the Scotch-Irish see The Scotch-Irish in Colonial Pennsylvania, by Wayland F. Dunaway; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1944.

1
See The Many-Sired Lincoln, by J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton,
American Mercury
, June, 1935, pp. 129–35. Lincoln was not a hillman, but the stock from which he issued was almost as deteriorated as that of the high Appalachians.

2
See The Hills of Zion in my Prejudices; Fifth Series; New York, 1926, pp. 75–86.

3
Dialectal Survivals in Tennessee,
Modern Language Notes
, 1889, pp. 400–16, and Other Dialectal Forms in Tennessee,
Publications
of the
Modern Language Association
, 1891, pp. 171–5.

4
Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, Vol. IV, Part IV, 1916, pp. 283–97.

5
“The dialect,” says Horace Kephart in Our Southern Highlanders; New York, 1921, p. 279, “varies a good deal from place to place, and even in the same neighborhood we rarely hear all families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are prone to err by making their characters talk it too consistently. It is only in the backwoods or among old people or the penned-at-home women that it is used with any integrity.” See also Variation in the Southern Mountain Dialect, by-Charles Carpenter,
American Speech
, Feb., 1928, pp. 22–25.

1
Combs, however, sticks to his guns, and may be right. He wrote to me under date of February 7, 1944: “In all the highlands except West Virginia I have not found a single ballad which savors of the Scotch dialect. I once collected at random about 200 family names and went over them with Dr. MacKenzie of Edinburgh University; we decided that less than 15% of them were of Scottish origin. Scotch Presbyterian missionaries come evangelizing into the South the past hundred years have given undue importance to the Scottish element in the highlands.”

2
London, 1911.

3
Some examples cited by Combs:
afeared, steepy, tonguey, to argufy
.

4
AL4, pp. 124–29; Supplement I, pp. 224–26.

5
For example, in Dialect of the Folk Song,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 311–18; Early English Slang Survivals in the Mountains of Kentucky,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part IV, 1921, pp. 115–17; Kentucky Items,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part IV, 1921, pp. 118–19; A Word-List From Georgia,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part V, 1922, pp. 183–84; Addenda From Kentucky,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part VI, 1923, pp. 242–43; A Word-List From the Southern Highlands,
Publication of the American Dialect Society No. 2
, Nov., 1944, pp. 17–23. At the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in New York, Dec. 28, 1944, he entertained the members with a translation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into the vernacular of the Kentucky mountaineers. He has under way a book to be called The Language of Our Southern Highlanders. A commentary on his paper on Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, by H. M. Steadman, Jr., was published in
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 350–52.

6
Language of the Southern Highlanders, Dec., 1931, pp. 1302–22.

7
The Phonetics of the Great Smoky Mountain Speech,
American Speech Reprints and Monographs, No. 4
. Hall is also the author of Mountain Speech in the Great Smokies, No. 5 in a series of pamphlets entitled National Park Service Popular Study Series, issued by the National Parle Service, Department of the Interior; Washington, 1941. In The Phonetics of the Great Smoky Mountain Speech there is a bibliography, pp. 107–10.

1
Raven I. McDavid, Jr., in
Language
, April-June, 1943, pp. 184–95.

2
A Word List From Barbourville, Ky., by Abigail E. Weeks,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Part VI, 1910, pp. 456–57; An Eastern Kentucky Word-List, by Hubert G. Shearin,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Part VII, 1911, pp. 537–40; A Word-List From the Mountains of Western North Carolina, by Horace Kephart,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part VI, 1917, pp. 407–19; Appalachian Mountain Words, by L. R. Dingus,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part X, 1927, pp. 468–71; American Speech as Practised in the Southern Highlands, by Maristan Chapman,
Century Magazine
, March, 1929, pp. 617–23; Elizabethan America, by Charles M. Wilson,
Atlantic Monthly
, Aug., 1929; Beefsteak When I’m Hungry, by C. M. Wilson,
Virginia Quarterly Review
, April, 1930, pp. 240–50; How the Wood Hick Speaks: Some Observations Made in Upshur County, W. Va., by Paul E. Pendleton,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Part II, 1930, pp. 86–89; Folk Speech in the Kentucky Mountain Cycle of Percy Mackaye, by B. A. Botkin,
American Speech
, April, 1931, pp. 264–76; Folk Speech of the Cumberlands, by Bess Alice Owens,
American Speech
, Dec., 1931, pp. 89–95; Variations in the Southern Mountain Dialect, by Charles Carpenter,
American Speech
, Feb., 1933, p. 22; Southern Mountain Accent, by C. G.,
American Speech
, Dec., 1934, p. 251; Remnants of Archaic English in West Virginia, by Charles Carpenter,
West Virginia Review
, Dec., 1934, pp. 77–95; The Language of the Tennessee Mountain Regions, by T. J. Farr,
American Speech
, April, 1939, pp. 89–92; How to Say It In Smoky Speech,
Better English
, Jan., 1940, pp. 50–52; Southern Mountain Dialect, by Lester V. Berrey,
American Speech
, Feb., 1940, pp. 45–54 (includes a bibliography); More Tennessee Expressions, by T. J. Farr,
American Speech
, Dec., 1940, pp. 446–48; The Georgia Mountaineer’s Vanishing Vocabulary, by Byron Herbert Reece, Atlanta
Journal Magazine
, March 3, 1946, pp. 8 and 9. (I am indebted for this last to Mr. John E. Ransom, of Atlanta.)

3
Is There an Ozark Dialect?,
American Speech
, Feb., 1929, pp. 203–04.

4
Mark XVI, 17.

1
A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms,
American Speech
, Dec., 1928, pp. 116–17.

2
The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect,
American Speech
, Oct., 1927, pp. 1–11.

3
Pronunciation in the Ozarks (with Anna A. Ingleman),
American Speech
, June, 1928, pp. 401–07.

4
The Ozarks: an American Survival of Primitive Society; New York, 1931, pp. 70–71. Of these terms Wentworth finds
ashamed
in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Kansas,
gum
in southeastern Virginia and
wax
in western Texas, but the rest seem to be either borrowed from Appalachia or peculiar to the Ozarks.

5
Possibly by assimilation with the name of a popular brand of coffee.

1
Mostly used, says Randolph, by old women.

2
Possibly a reminiscence of an old archery term.

3
A false singular for
hose
.

4
This appeared in the vocabulary of
variety, c
, 1935.

5
A Word-List From the Ozarks,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part IX, 1926, pp. 397–405; More Words From the Ozarks,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part X, 1927, pp. 472–79.

6
Such terms are discussed at some length in AL4, pp. 300–11, and Supplement I, pp. 639–61. Beside those regarded as indecent many are frowned upon for other reasons, especially in the South. In Dialect Geography and Social Science Problems,
Social Forces
, Dec., 1946, p. 172, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., calls attention to the fact that Henry Wallace’s
century of the common
man was regarded askance south of the Potomac because
common
is there “a term of contempt.”

7
Verbal Modesty in the Ozarks,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Part I, 1928, pp. 57–64. This paper is reprinted in Randolph’s The Ozarks; New York, 1931, pp. 78–96. His other writings include: The Ozark Dialect in Fiction,
American Speech
, March, 1927, pp. 283–89; Literary Words in the Ozarks,
American Speech
, Oct., 1928, pp. 56–57; A Third Ozark Word-List,
American Speech
, Oct., 1929, pp. 16–21; Dialectal Survivals in the Ozarks (with Patti Sankee),
American Speech
, Feb., 1930, pp. 198–208; April, pp. 264–69, and June, pp. 424–30; Recent Fiction and the Ozark Dialect,
American Speech
, Aug., 1931, pp. 425–28; Quilt Names in the Ozarks (with Isabel Spradley),
American Speech
, Feb., 1933, pp. 33–36; A Fourth Ozark Word-List,
American Speech
, Feb., 1933, pp. 47–53; A Fifth Ozark Word-List (with Nancy Clements),
American Speech
, Dec., 1936, pp. 314–18. Among the papers by other hands that contain useful information are: A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, by Joseph W. Carr,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Part VI, 1904, pp. 416–22; Vol. III, Part I, 1905, pp. 205–38; Vol. III, Part II, 1906, pp. 125–65; Vol. III, Part III, 1907, pp. 68–103, and Vol. III, Part V, 1909, pp. 392–406; Snake County Talk, by Jay L. B. Taylor,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V. Part VI, 1923, pp. 197–225; On the Ozark Pronunciation of
It
, by Vernon C. Allison,
American Speech
, Feb., 1929, pp. 205–06; Ozark Words Again, by Napier Wilt,
American Speech
, Oct., 1937, pp. 234–35.

1
Greet says in A Standard American Language?,
New Republic
, May 25, 1938, p. 68: “It runs up the coast from Savannah, flourishes at Charleston, weakens in North Carolina, blooms again in the Petersburg and Richmond (Williamsburg) district [of Virginia]. Families like the Byrds carried it to Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley. It crosses the Chesapeake to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland, and in certain old families has a hold on Delaware.”

2
Southern American Dialect,
American Speech
, April, 1933, pp. 37–43. Wise gathered his materials in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas.

3
This glide, of course, also appears before other vowels,
e.g., a
, as in
cyar
and
cyarry
. But only when
r
follows, silent or not:
Cyabell
is unknown. See an editorial, Ah Declah, Doctuh!, in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
, Dec. 26, 1946, correcting some errors in a paper by Argus Tressider, a Northerner, published in the
Madison Quarterly
. I am indebted here to Mr. James M. Bowcock, of Richmond.

1
You-all
will be discussed in Chapter IX, Section 3.

2
pp. 41–42.

3
Southern Standards, by Katherine E. Wheatley,
American Speech
, Feb., 1934, pp. 36–45. Miss Wheatley gathered her materials in Louisiana and southeastern Texas.

4
pp. 37–38.

1
Southern Speech, before cited, p. 610. The late W. J. Cash, a very-acute lay observer, noted in This is How We Talk: Babel in the South, Charlotte (N.C.),
News
, Dec. 12, 1937, a tendency among educated Southerners to drop, on informal and especially jovial occasions, into what he called
cornfield nigger
.

2
The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain,
Louisiana State University Studies, No. XX;
Baton Rouge, 1935; The English Language in the South, in A Vanderbilt Miscellany; Nashville, 1944, pp. 179–87.

3
The Unstressed Syllabic Phonemes of a Southern Dialect,
Studies in Linguistics
, Summer, 1944, pp. 51–55. The dialect investigated is that of the author himself, a native of Greenville, S. C., in the Piedmont. In 1941 McDavid read a paper on The Stressed Vowel Phonemes of a Southern Dialect before the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Durham, N. C.

4
Secretary-treasurer of the American Dialect Society and chairman of its committee on regional speech and localisms. In the society’s
Publication No. 2
, Nov., 1944, he began a series of word-lists from the South to which he contributed one from Virginia and North Carolina, The other contributors were Leah A. Dennis, Josiah Combs, Hugh C. Laughlin, Gratis D. Williams, Francis C. Hayes, Constance Bey and L. R. Dingus. Wilson is the author of Some Unrecorded Southern Vowels,
American Speech
, Oct., 1945, pp. 209–13.

5
Who Lost the Southern
R?
,
American Speech
, June, 1928, pp. 377–83.

6
Vowel Nasality as a Sandhi-Form of the Morphemes -
nt
and -
ing
in Southern American,
American Speech
, April, 1939, pp. 120–23.

7
The Survival of
Start-naked
in the South, in Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf,
University of Virginia Studies No. I
, 1941, pp. 48–64. Hench is the author of other interesting studies of Southern speech, and I am indebted to him for friendly aid with the present book.

8
Southern
L
Plus a Consonant,
American Speech
, Oct., 1940, pp. 259–61.

9
Some Remarks on Southern Dialect, a paper read before the English Lunch Club at Harvard, Feb. 12, 1944. From March 19 to July 23, 1942, Barrs contributed weekly articles on South Georgia speech to the Douglas (Ga.)
Enterprise
.

10
The Vowel System of the Southern United States,
Englische Studien
, Vol. XLI, 1910; Some Variant Pro nunciations in the New South,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. III, Part VII, 1911, pp. 497–536.