American Language Supplement 2 (53 page)

2
I should add that I am not too sure. It seems to me to be quite impossible, reading such a record aloud, to effect any save the most remote approximation of the speech of the subject. This is proved every month by the Phonetic Transcriptions in
American Speech
. Indeed, I long ago offered a confidential prize of a keg of beer to any phonetician who could identify the speech of President Truman by an IPA record.

1
Norman (Okla.), 1941, pp. 121–22.

2
Duststorm Words,
American Speech
, Feb., pp. 71–72.

3
Program of the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, 1946, p. 2.

4
Supplement I, pp. 310–11.

5
Wallowa County, Oregon, Expressions,
American Speech
, Feb., 1931, pp. 229–30.

6
To jeppo
is not recorded for the Ozarks.

1
A few Oregon terms are in A Word List From Northwestern United States,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Part I, 1918, pp. 22–29.

2
A Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect; Lancaster (Pa.), 1924, p. vi.

3
Its boundaries are rather more sharply defined by Hans Kurath in German Relics in Pennsylvania English,
Monatshefte für deutsche Unterricht
, Vol. XXXVII, 1945, pp. 96–102. On the east, he says, they run from Stroudsburg through Easton to Doylestown and Norristown, where they turn westward to the dense German settlements of the Lancaster plain. The northeastern boundary runs from Stroudsburg to Lock Haven on the Susquehanna. To the west “we find no clear boundary”: German loans simply become rarer and rarer until one lands in Ohio. But some of them, as Kurath’s accompanying map shows, cover much wider areas,
e.g., smearcase
, which is found all the way north to Erie, Pa., and in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, to say nothing of speech-pockets in the Carolinas and the West.

4
Says R. Whitney Tucker in Linguistic Substrata in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere,
Language
, March, 1934: “The psychological influence of the German substrata, reflected in syntax and idiom, is very great.”

1
Dialectal Peculiarities in the Carlisle Vernacular,
German American Annals
, March and April, 1907, pp. 67–79.

2
Pennsylvania,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part II, 1914, pp. 157–58.

3
Pennsylvania,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 337–39.

4
Scranton Pronunciation,
American Speech
, Dec., 1940, pp. 368–71.

5
The Speech of South-Western Pennsylvania,
American Speech
. Oct., 1931, pp. 18–20.

6
Dialects on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier,
American Speech
, Dec., 1928, pp. 104–10.

7
Tucker says that
to leave
and
to let
, both
lassen
in German, are exchanged in meaning,
e.g.
, “
Leave
me go,” and “I
left
him do it.”

8
Outen
occurred in Old and Middle English, but not as a verb. I am indebted here to Dr. F. W. Gingrich, of Albright College, Reading.

1
Notes on the Philadelphia Dialect,
American Speech
, Feb., 1944, pp. 37–42 – a paper read at the Indianapolis meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Jan. 2, 1942.

2
Kemp Malone pointed out in
Any More
in the Affirmative,
American Speech
, Aug., 1931, p. 460, that its use in the negative, as in “He doesn’t do that
any more
,” is common English idiom. Wentworth adds that it is also used in questions, as in “Do you go there
any more?
” Most of the numerous examples that Wentworth cites come from either Pennsylvania or West Virginia, but he also has some from Iowa, Illinois, New York, Montana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Ohio, Maryland, Kansas, Indiana, and even Ontario. In all these regions there are other signs of German influence. In
Any More, American Speech
, Feb., 1932, pp. 233–34, D. W. Ferguson adds Michigan. There is a discussion of the phrase in West Virginia Peculiarities, by John T. Krumpelmann,
American Speech
, April, 1939, p. 156. In Affirmative
Any More
in England,
American Speech
, April, 1946, p. 151, Robert J. Menner calls attention to its use by D. H. Lawrence in Women in Love.

1
The Speech of South-Western Pennsylvania, before cited.

1
Dialects of the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, before cited.

2
Scranton Pronunciation, before cited.

3
Tucker, in Linguistic Substrata in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere, p. 4, describes it differently. “The voice,” he says, “is raised in the middle of the sentence and lowered at the end, in contrast to the practise, usual in American English, of raising it at the end; thus, Is your
mother
home?,’ ‘Are you going down
town
?,’ ‘Are you going down
town
today?.’ This phenomenon … seems to occur also in Pennsylvania German.”

1
Thirteen Hundred Old Time Words of British, Continental or Aboriginal Origins, Still or Recently in Use Among the Pennsylvania Mountain People; Altoona (Pa.), 1925; second ed., 1930. I am indebted for access to this work to Mr. A. Monroe Aurand, Jr., of Harrisburg.

2
Penna. Ger.
Tschechener
, a gipsy.

1
Elizabeth Jeannette Dearden, in A Word Geography of the South Atlantic States, says: “
Paper bag
occurs everywhere in Pennsylvania and Delaware, as in Virginia and North Carolina.
Paper poke
is current in southwestern Pennsylvania and western Maryland.
Paper sack
is used around the fringes of the
poke
area.… The counties as far west as Sullivan, Luzerne, Carbon, Lehigh and Berks agree with the New England counties in using
want to get off
where the rest of the State says
want off
.”

1
Supplement I, p. 140.

2
Bilingualism in the Middle Colonies, by Allen Walker Read,
American Speech
, April, 1937, pp. 93–99.

3
Isaac Hunsicker’s Copy-Books,
American Speech
, Feb., 1934, pp. 46–48.

4
W. Matthews says in Two Notes Upon Seventeenth Century Pronunciation,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
, July, 1933, p. 300, that such spellings as
Prodestant
were common in the Early Modern English period and “must represent genuine voicings.”

5
A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States; second edition, p. xix.

1
Memorandum Concerning a Book of The English of the Eastern States.

2
I am indebted for useful suggestions to the Rev. Benjamin Lotz, of Bethlehem (Pa.); Dr. F. W. Gingrich, of Reading; President David A. Robertson, of Goucher College; Mr. John Stanley Crandall, of Urbana (Ill.); Mr. Gerald G. McKelvey, of the Waynesboro Junior Chamber of Commerce; Mr. Donald M. Brown, of New York; Dr. George McCracken, of Otterbein College; Mr. Blaine A. Kelley, of Washington (D.C.); Mr. Conrad Richter, of Tucson (Ariz.); Lieut.-Col. F. G. Potts, of Mt. Pleasant (S.C.); Dr. Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University; Mr. Henry W. Edgell, of Cambridge (Mass.); and Miss Dawes Markwell, of New Albany (Pa.). See also Dutchisms in English, by Louis J. Livingood, Altoona (Pa.)
Morning Call
, Aug. 19, 1944;
Crazy Bait
, by Atcheson L. Hench,
American Speech
, April, 1942, pp. 133–34, and Provincialisms of the “Dutch” Districts of Pennsylvania, by Lee L. Grumbine,
Proceedings of the American Philological Association
, Vol. XVII, 1886, pp. xii–xiii.

3
Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England: Providence (R.I.), 1939, p. 13.

1
I take all these from the Linguistic Atlas of New England.

2
Lexical Notes From Rhode Island Town Records,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Parts XII and XIII, 1936, pp. 517–27, and Early Rhode Island Pronunciation, 1636–1700, as Reflected in Published Town Records,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Part XIV, 1937, pp. 579–82.

1
Shanghai Pierce, New Folk Hero, Had Voice One Could Hear 2 Miles, New York
Times
, Nov. 30, 1936. Shanghai was one of Hibbitt’s discoveries—the Rhode Island equivalent of Paul Bunyan.

2
In Perspective, by B. W. P., Providence
journal
, March 6, 1944.

3
McDavid was born at Greenville in 1911 and got his Ph.D. in English literature at Duke University in 1935. His interest in linguistics was aroused by attendance at the Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan, where he pursued studies under Bernard Bloch in 1936,1938,1940 and 1941. His contributions include The Pronunciation of American English at Greenville, S. C., a paper read before the Linguistic Society of America in New York, Dec. 28, 1938; Low-Back Vowels in the South Carolina Piedmont,
American Speech
, April, 1940, pp. 144–48; The Unstressed Syllabic Phonemes of a Southern Dialect,
Studies in Linguistics
, 1943, pp. 51–55; Phonemic and Semantic Bifurcation, the same, 1944, pp. 88–90, and Dialect Areas of South Carolina, a paper read before the meetings of the South Atlantic and South Carolina Modern Language Associations in 1946.

4
Southern Speech, in Culture in the South, edited by W. T. Couch; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1934, pp. 594–615.

5
Word List From Wedgefield, South Carolina, by Mary Celestia Parler,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Part II, 1930, pp. 79–85.

1
Charleston Provincialisms,
Transactions of the Modern Language Association
, Vol. III, 1887, pp. 84–99. A revision of this, under the same title, was printed in the
American Journal of Philology
, Vol. IX, 1888, pp. 198–213, and also in
Phonetische Studien
, Vol. I, 1888. Primer wrote other papers on the subject, including one on The Huguenot Element in Charleston’s Provincialisms in
Phonetische Studien
, Vol. III. He was born in Wisconsin in 1842, but removed to New York as a child. He served in the Civil War as a cavalryman under Sheridan and Custer and was wounded at Antietam. After the war he took to language studies at Harvard, Leipzig, Göttingen and Strassburg, and in 1895 was given a Ph.D. by the last-named. From 1891 until his death in 1913 he was professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas.

1
The context shows that he here had in mind the
a
of
all, war
and
law
.

1
Private communication, Feb. 5, 1937.

2
Private communication, March 11, 1943.

1
McDavid’s field-work in South Carolina and the other South Atlantic States was made possible by a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund in 1941, and later by an honorary fellowship from Duke University and a grant by the American Council of Learned Societies.

2
A South Dakota Guide, Sponsored by the State of South Dakota, n.p., 1938, pp. 81–88.

3
They include Tennessee Mountains, by H. A. Edson and others,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. I, Part VIII, 1894, pp. 370–77; Terms From the Tennessee Mountains, by Mary O. Pollard,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part III, 1915, pp. 242–43; Dialect Survivals in Tennessee, by Calvin S. Brown, Jr.,
Modern Language Notes
, Nov., 1889, pp. 410–17; Other Dialectal Forms in Tennessee, by the same,
Proceedings of the Modern Language Association
, 1891, pp. 171–75; Tennessee, by the same,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 345–46, and Tennessee Expressions, by Stuart Neitzel,
American Speech
, Dec., 1936, p. 373.

1
Terms From Tennessee, Vol. IV, Part I, p. 58.

2
Folk Speech of Middle Tennessee,
American Speech
, Oct., pp. 275–76.

3
Originally published in the Chattanooga
Times
. Reprinted as The Way They Talk in Tennessee in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
, Jan. 12, 1947. I am indebted here to Mr. James M. Bowcock, of Richmond.

4
Mynders’s article is chiefly devoted, not to speechways, but to superstitions. They are also dealt with in Tennessee; a Guide to the Volunteer State, published by the WPA; New York, 1936.

5
The Speech of East Texas,
American Speech
, Feb., 1936, pp. 3–36; April, pp. 145–66; Oct., pp. 232–51; and Dec., pp. 327–55. These papers were reprinted with the addition of a chapter on The Sources of the Population of Texas, as
American Speech Reprints and Monographs No. 2;
New York, 1937.

6
Pop. 28,279 in 1940.

7
He calls the former the Hill Type and the latter the Plantation Type.

1
I have hitherto called attention to the fact that this homogeneity is much more marked throughout the South than in the North.

1
A West Texas Word-List, Vol. IV, Part III, pp. 224–30. Rollins took his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1917. Since 1926 he has been professor of English there and since 1933 editor of the Harvard Studies in English. He edited the two volumes of poems in the Variorum Shakespeare, and is the author of many books.

2
Other Texas lexicographers reduce this to
son-of-a-gun
.

1
Texas,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. IV, Part V, 1916, pp. 347–48.

2
Some Texas Dialect Words,
American Speech
, April, 1929, pp. 330–31; Homely Words in Texas, the same, Feb., 1934, pp. 70–71, and Texas Notes, the same, Oct., 1934, p. 213.

3
A Letter From Texas,
American Speech
, April, 1940, pp. 214–15.

4
A Yankee Comments on Texas Speech,
American Speech
, April, 1944, pp. 81–84.