The Mother Tongue (25 page)

THE MOTHER TONGUE

In early February 1884, a slim paperback book bearing the title
The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles,
containing all the words in the language (obscenities apart) between A and
ant
was published in Britain at the steepish price of twelve shillings and six pence. This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually redubbed the
Oxford English Dictionary.
The intention was to record every word used in English since 115o and to trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings, and uses to its earliest recorded appearance. There was to be at least one citation for each century of its existence and at least one for each slight change of meaning. To achieve this, almost every significant piece of English literature from the last 7 ./z centuries would have to be not so much read as scoured.

The man chosen to guide this enterprise was James Augustus Henry Murray (183 7-1915), a Scottish-born bank clerk, school-teacher, and self-taught philologist. He was an unlikely, and ap-parently somewhat reluctant, choice to take on such a daunting task. Murray, in the best tradition of British eccentrics, had a flowing white beard and liked to be photographed in a long black housecoat with a mortarboard on his head. He had eleven children, all of whom were, almost from the moment they learned the al-phabet, roped into the endless business of helping to sift through and alphabetize the several million slips of paper on which were recorded every twitch and burble of the language over seven cen-turies.

The ambition of the project was so staggering that one can't help wondering if Murray really knew what he was taking on. In point of fact, it appears he didn't. He thought the whole business would take a dozen years at most and that it would fill half a dozen volumes covering some 6,400 pages. In the event, the project took more than four decades and sprawled across 15,000 densely printed pages.

Hundreds of volunteers helped with the research, sending in citations from all over the world. Many of them were, like Murray, amateur philologists and often they were as eccentric as he. One of the most prolific contributors was James Platt, who specialized in
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obscure words. He was said to speak a hundred languages and certainly knew as much about comparative linguistics as any man of his age, and yet he owned no books of his own. He worked for his father in the City of London and each lunchtime collected one book—never more—from the Reading Room of the British Mu-seum, which he would take home, devour, and replace with an-other volume the next day. On weekends he haunted the opium dens and dockyards of Wapping and Whitechapel looking for native speakers of obscure tongues whom he would query on small points of semantics. He provided the histories of many thousands of words. But an even more prolific contributor was an American expatriate named Dr. W. C. Minor, a man of immense erudition who provided from his private library the etymologies of tens of thousands of words. When Murray invited him to a gathering of the dictionary's contributors, he learned, to his considerable surprise, that Dr. Minor could not attend for the unfortunate reason that he was an inmate at Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane, and not sufficiently in possession of his faculties to be allowed out.

It appears that during the U.S. Civil War, having suffered an attack of sunstroke, Dr. Minor developed a persecution mania, believing he was being pursued by Irishmen. After a stay in an asylum he was considered cured and undertook, in 1871, a visit to England. But one night while walking in London his mania returned and he shot dead an innocent stranger whose misfortune it was to have been walking behind the crazed American. Clearly Dr. Minor's madness was not incompatible with scholarship. In one year alone, he made 12,000 contributions to the
OED
from the private library he built up at Broadmoor.

Murray worked ceaselessly on his dictionary for thirty-six years, from his appointment to the editorship in 18 79 to his death at the age of seventy-eight in 1915. (He was knighted in 1908.) He was working on the letter u when he died, but his assistants carried on for another thirteen years until in 1928 the final volume, Wise to Wyzen, was issued. (For some reason, volume
12,
XYZ, had ap-peared earlier.) Five years later, a corrected and slightly updated version of the entire set was reissued, under the name by which it has since been known: the
Oxford English Dictionary.
The com-
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pleted dictionary contained 4 14,825 entries supported by 1,827,306 citations (out of 6 million collected) described in 44 mil-lion words of text spread over 15,487 pages. It is perhaps the greatest work of scholarship ever produced.

The
OED
confirmed a paradox that Webster had brought to light decades earlier—namely, that although readers will appear to treat a dictionary with the utmost respect, they will generally ignore anything in it that doesn't suit their tastes. The
OED,
for instance, has always insisted on -ize spellings for words such as
characterize,
itemize,
and the like, and yet almost nowhere in England, apart from the pages of
The Times
newspaper (and not always there) are they observed. The British still spell almost all such words with
-ise
endings and thus enjoy a consistency with words such as
advertise,
merchandise,
and
surprise
that we in America fail to achieve. But perhaps the most notable of all the
OED's
minor quirks is its insistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling "is perh.

Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.) In the spring of 1 989, a second edition of the dictionary was issued, containing certain modifications, such as the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet instead of Murray's own quirky system. It comprised the original twelve volumes, plus four vast supplements issued between 1972 and 1989. Now sprawling over twenty volumes, the updated dictionary is a third bigger than its predecessor, with 615,000 entries, 2,412,000 supporting quota-tions, almost 6o million words of exposition, and about 35o million keystrokes of text (or one for each native speaker of English in the world). No other language has anything even remotely approach-ing it in scope. Because of its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the world.

16o

1 1 .

OLD WORLD,

NEW WORLD

THE FIRST AMERICAN PILGRIMS HAP-pened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language—a time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was also a time of considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104 pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use the
s
form on verbs, saying
has
rather than
hath, runs
rather than
runneth.
Similarly,
thee
and
thou
pronoun forms were dying out. Had the pilgrims come a quarter of a century earlier, we might well have preserved those forms, as we preserved other archaisms such as
gotten.

The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved inland. Partly this was achieved by bor-rowing from others who inhabited or explored the untamed conti-nent. From the Dutch we took
landscape, cookie,
and
caboose.
We may also have taken
Yankee,
as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees ("John Cheese"). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an English-man, but the historical evidence is slight. Often the new immi-grants borrowed Indian terms, though these could take some swallowing since the Indian languages, particularly those of the eastern part of the continent, were inordinately agglomerative. As Mary ,Helen Dohan notes in her excellent book on the rise of American English, Our
Own Words,
an early translator of the Bible into Iroquoian had to devise the word
kummogkodonattoo-
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tummooetiteaonganunnonash
for the phrase "our question." In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called Chargog-gagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to translate as "You fish on that side, we'll fish on this side, and nobody will fish in the middle." Not surprisingly, such words were usually short-ened and modified. The English-sounding
hickory was
whittled out of the Indian
pawcohiccora. Raugraoughcun
was hacked into
raccoon
and
isquonterquashes
into
squash. Hoochinoo,
the name of an Indian tribe noted for its homemade liquor, produced
hooch.

Some idea of the bewilderments of Indian orthography is indi-cated by the fact that Chippewa and Ojibway are different names for the same tribe as interpreted by different people at different times. Sometimes words went through many transformations be-fore they sat comfortably on the English-speaking tongue. Man-hattan has been variously recorded as
Manhates, Manthanes,
Manhatones, Manhatesen, Manhattae,
and at least half a dozen others. Even the simple word
Iowa,
according to Dohan, has been recorded with sixty-four spellings. Despite the difficulties of ren-dering them into English, Indian names were borrowed for the names of more than half our states and for countless thousands of rivers, lakes, and towns. Yet we borrowed no more than three or four dozen Indian words for everyday objects—among them
canoe,
raccoon, hammock,
and
tobacco.

From the early Spanish settlers, by contrast, we took more than 50o words—though many of these, it must be said, were Indian terms adopted by the Spaniards. Among them:
rodeo, bronco,
buffalo, avocado, mustang,
burro,
fiesta, coyote, mesquite, can-
yon,
and
buckaroo. Buckaroo was
directly adapted from the Span-ish
vaquero (a
cowboy) and thus must originally have been pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. Many borrow-ings are more accurately described as Mexican than Spanish since they did not exist in Spain, among them
stampede, hoosegow,
and
cafeteria. Hoosegow
and
jug
(for jail) were both taken from the Mexican-Spanish
juzgado,
which, despite the spelling, was pro-nounced more or less as "hoosegow." Sometimes it took a while for the pronunciation to catch up with the spelling.
Rancher, a
term borrowed from the Spanish
rancho, was
originally pronounced in
OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD

the Mexican fashion, which made it something much closer to

"ranker."

From the French, too, we borrowed liberally, taking the names for Indian tribes, territories, rivers, and other geographical fea-tures, sometimes preserving the pronunciation (Sioux, Mackinac) and sometimes not (Illinois, Detroit, Des Plaines, Beloit). We took other words from the French, but often knocked them about in a way that made them look distinctively American, as when we turned
gaufre
into
gopher
and
chaudiere
into
chowder.
Other New World words borrowed from the French were
prairie
and
dime.

Oftentimes words reach us by the most improbable and circui-tous routes. The word for the American currency,
dollar,
is a corruption of
Joachimsthaler,
named for a sixteenth-century silver mine in Joachimsthal, Germany. The first recorded use of the word in English was in 155 3, spelled
daler,
and for the next two centu-ries it was applied by the English to various continental currencies.

Its first use in America was not recorded until 1782, when Thomas Jefferson, in
Notes on a Money Unit for the United States,
plumped for
dollar
as the name of the national currency on the ground that

"the [ Spanish] dollar is a known coin and the most familiar of all to the mind of the people." That may be its first recorded appearance, but clearly if it was known to the people the term had already been in use for some time. At all events, Jefferson had his way: In 1785

the dollar was adopted as America's currency, though it was not until 1794 that the first dollars rolled off the presses. That much we know, but what we don't know is where the dollar sign ($) comes from. "The most plausible account," according to Mario Pei, "is that it represents the first and last letters of the Spanish pesos, written one over the other." It is an attractive theory but for the one obvious deficiency that the dollar sign doesn't look anything like a p superimposed on an
s.

Perhaps even more improbable is how America came to be named in the first place. The name is taken from Americus Ves-pucius, a Latinized form of Amerigo Vespucci. A semiobscure Ital-ian navigator who lived from 1454 to 1512, Vespucci made four voyages to the New World though without ever once seeing North America. A contemporary mapmaker wrongly thought Vespucci
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discovered the whole of the continent and, in the most literal way, put his name on the map. When he learned of his error, the mapmaker, one Martin Waldseemuller, took the name off, but by then it had stuck. Vespucci himself preferred the name Mundus Novus, "New World."

In addition to borrowing hundreds of words, the Mundus Novians (far better word!) devised many hundreds of their own.

The pattern was to take two already existing English words and combine them in new ways:
bullfrog, eggplant, grasshopper, rat-
tlesnake, mockingbird, catfish.
Sometimes, however, words from the Old World were employed to describe different but similar articles in the New. So
beech, walnut, laurel, partridge, robin,
oriole, hemlock,
and even
pond
(which in England is an artificial lake) all describe different things in the two continents.