American Language

Ading P

Vania D

Annisa A

Diana C

Aristya P

The American Language

It was a great movement to the West that finally fixed

the character of the American Language, preserving as

it did the Elizabethan boldness which characterized the

speech of the first settlers.

Our ancestor, said James Russell Lowell in his On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners

The English, once predominantly insular and

introspective, became an eager and

expensive race, full of strange curiosities and

iconoclastic enterprises.

investigate

Made contact

looked

The last of the bonds that fastened it to the other

tongues of the Indo-European family were loosed and it settled into a grammatical structure so slipshod that in more than one detail, it suggested less the related German, French, Latin, and Greek than Chinese.

Simultaneously, there was a sudden increase in its

vocabulary, with new words and idioms coming in on all levels, from that of the street boys of London to that of the court poets and university illuminati.

Shakespeare failed to find a market for his novelties

to happy to child To verse

Shakespeare introduced

To fool, disgraceful, barefaced, bump, countless, critic, gloomy and laughable

Without the Dimension, conscious, jovial, swarming coinages rascality, scientific, audacious, of his contemporary and obsccure. poets and dramatics

Tudor license began to succumb to Puritan

dogmatism, there was a tightening of the

whole English Kultur, and the language did not

escape its effects.

All novelties in speech were received hostilely,

and the doctrine was launched that there were

enough words already, and no more were

needed.

Samuel Johnson become its chief fugleman

Nor did he battle alone

Jonathan Swift had frowned upon

No man who ever undertook to write a dictionary

Chaperon and fun

Banter and sham, bubble and mob, ..

He tried to put down touchy and to coax

Stingy and to derange

Bully and to bamboozle

The tony English style became an imitation

of Johnsons quasi-Latin, and no term was

countenanced by the elegant that was not in

his dictionary

19th CENTURY

ENGLISH PURISM

AMERICAN SPEECH

FIRST AMERICANISMS

The first Americanisms borrowed from the

Indian Language some of them reached the

present bounds of the United States by older

colonies to southward or northward.

CONT..
The Indian Element in American English by Alexander F. Chamberlain in 1902.. Is much larger than is commonly believed to be caseIn the local speech of New England , especially among fishermanmany words of Algonkian origin, not familiar to the general public , are still preserved, and many more were

once current, but have died out within the last one hundred
years.

AMERICAN ENGLISH
AMERICAN ENGLISH NON-ENGLISH IMMIGRANTS

DUTCH,FRENCH,SPANISH and GERMAN

CONT.

French of Canada : Bureau, chowder, and rapids, prairrie and ghoper. Spanish and German : there was no appreciable infiltration Until the middle of the eighteenth century. Dutch : Scow, hook, sleigh, stoop, span, cooky, coleslaw, spook, cruller, waffle, boss, Santa Claus.

Basic Forming of New Words

The new word that the colonists made is mainly by compounding but also by giving old words new meaning.

The example is from the Dictionary Of American English:

- Snowshoe (1666) - Backlog (1684) - Leaf tobacco (1637) - Statehouse (1662) - Frame house (1639) - Selectman (1635)

In the middle of eighteen centuries neologisms invented to: designate natural objects not known in England. The examples are: -Bluegrass (1751) -Backwoods (1748) -Catbird (1709) -Salt lick (1751) -Tree frog (1738) -Garter snake (1775) -Slippery elm (1748)
Other were names for new artifacts. The examples are: -Smokehouse (1759) -Shingle roof (1749) -Ball ground (1772) -Sheating paper (1790) -Breechclout (1757) -Springhouse (1755) -Buckshot (1775) -Hoecake (1755)

Neologisms

is a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the

process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted
into mainstream language.

In psychiatry, the term neologism is used to describe the use of

words that have meaning only to the person who uses them,
independent of their common meaning.

In theology, a neologism is a relatively new doctrine . In this sense, a neologist is one who proposes either a new doctrine or a new interpretation of source material such as religious texts.

The colonists devised novel appellations for objects that were quite well known in England. Examples: -Broomstraw (1785) -Sheet iron (1776) -Smoking tobacco (1796) -Lightning bug (1778) -Bake oven (1777) The colonists often gave old English names to new objects. Examples: Corn, shoe, rock, lumber, store, cracker, partridge, and team.

Some of the latter were extended in meaning: -rock: a large mass of stone in England -barn: a building for storing corps, with no accommodations for cattle Some of the latter were narrowed: -corn: indicated any kind of dibble grain to the English -boot: indicated any leather footgear Yet others underwent a complete change in significance: -Freshet English: applied to a small stream of fresh water Americans: an inundation -Partridge English: applied to Perdix perdix Americans: applied to Bonasa umbrellas, Colinus virginianus, and various other birds.

The Progress

Alexander Gill (1621): Notes that some of the new words bred in
America were coming into recognition in England.

Francis Moore (1735): Denounces that one of the most vivid of new

words in the sense of a precipice or escarpment.

Richard Owen Cambridge (1754): Suggests that a glossary of the new words would soon be in order.

The philological historian as Allen Walker Read, M.M. Matthews, and

W.B. Cairns have revealed, there was no attempt at an orderly treatise upon the new words.

John Witherspoon (1781): He protested against the peculiar American

use of to notify, he said that we do not notify the person of the thing, but the thing to the person. But he didnt get attention from the Americans.

Noah Webster: He was an ardent reformer of spelling and believed in the future autonomy of American English, gave attention to Americanism but did not list them in any number until his American Dictionary of 1828

Maximilian Schele de Vere: In his book (The English of the New World in 1871), he attempted a classification of Americanism, and

was the first to give adequate attention to the loan words among
them.

John S. Farmer (1889): published Americanism, Old and New, a

useful compilation but not altogether free from English prejudice.

In 1890 the American Dialect Society was formed and the publication of Dialect Notes was begun.

Philology

Philology is the study of the historical development of languages (historical sources)

Philologians is the person who study about historical sources.

In British English usage, and in British academia,

"philology" remains largely synonymous with "historical linguistics", while in US English and US academia, the wider meaning of "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition" remains more widespread.

Richard H. Thornton

Migrated to the United States in 1874

Publish American Glossary in 1912

He produce a really comprehensive dictionary

of America

Between 1931 and 1939 the printing of his

posthumous materials went on in Dialect

Notes

Richard H Thornton

Dictionary of American English

University of Chicago Press

Sir William Craigie

US UK

Commerce and manufactures increase Agriculture and mining developed in almost geometrical progression that gave promise of new illimitable flood of wealth

Alarming menace to English world trade Contemptuous, began to view the republic with a mixture of envy and dread and most of their chosen augurs that the civil war would wreck it

The Insular Hostility to America

Every returning English traveler brought american book in the baggage Every American book bristled with them Sidney Smith could still launch his hictoric sneer at

America

The English purist successes especially against such shocking westernisms Objected in vain when they encountered the more decorous and plausible american novelties

The English plain people, ever since the civil

war era, have exhibited an increasing and, in

late years, overwhelming preference for the

novelties marked make in America

American Movie

1907 they were too few and too crude to attract

the attention
speech

of the guardians of the national

1910 protesting of new words and phrases in

the english newspaper

1927 legislation was adopted limiting the influx of american films

London Evening News

English children in the streets of London and

elsewhere talked exactly the same as

children in United States

American Spelling and Pronounciation

The efforts to simplify the American spelling were begun in early 16 century

Noah Webster, American, work for the first effective

reforms. He drop you in our words and also defent a large

number of other reformed spelling

Chemist and Neger, they willing to change the common america pronounciation, but they never got a lodgment

Cont...

In its heyday, Theodore Rosevelt and Andrew Carnegie

brought out long list of new spelling including corus, giv,

stomac,etc during 15 years following but the country not have them. After the died, it succesfully reducing the words of the programme program, cataloque catalog

John Witherspoon 1781 against the first englishmen

statement that say there were no dialects in this country

by his wrote

Three Major Speech Area

1.

Includes new england states The south All the rest of the country

2.

3.

Those three areas divided into subareas more

or less narrow

The differences has to do with the pronounciation,

but an american are really understand of an

another american

General american is much clearer and more logical than any of their dialects, either english and american

Thank You