VULGARISMS WITH A PEDIGREE.
Never before was there so much enthusiasm manifested in linguistic studies as during the last quarter of a century, and even yet there is no indication of a waning interest. Not only have languages been studied in their relation to one another, but dialects also have come in for their share of attention in the pursuit of these studies. Nor has our own country been backward in contributing, through its dialectal and various philological associations, its quota to the science of philology. Authors in different parts of the country have written long and (it must be confessed, sometimes) tedious stories in the individual dialects of their respective localities. There are books in the dialect of the negro, as, for example, Thomas Nelson Page’s, to mention only one writer of a large class, those in the dialect of the Tennessee mountains, as, for example, Miss Murfee’s books, those in the dialect of the “Georgia cracker,” as the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, and a host of others in various parts of the country. These books are almost like the sands of the seashore for number.
So numerous and varied are the local dialects in this country that a contributor to the North AmericanReview, some few years ago, ventured the thesis that from the very nature of the diverse and varied character of our local dialects, there can not be any such thing as a great national novel in the United States. While this, it must be admitted, is a somewhat extreme view, to which many do not feel prepared to subscribe, the fact yet remains that there are marked dialectal peculiarities in the spoken language of certain localities. These dialectal peculiarities, however, are fast disappearing before the onward march of the unifying influence of education, the printing press, and the railroad. When the leavening power of education has permeated the entire population of the country, there will result uniformity of speech, and dialectal variations from the common norm will linger but as a tradition.
The dialect authors, in the meantime, are doing the reading public a service in furnishing it with entertaining stories of an elevating character. Moreover, some of them at least, as for example, Page, Harris and others, are rendering literature and science an ulterior service, consciously or unconsciously, in preserving in their books types of a people and their speech which a wave of oblivion is rapidly sweeping away.
If one will examine the speech of the negro and the native-born illiterate white, it matters not whether the latter be from New England, or from the South, one will find that, excepting certain provincialisms peculiar to their respective homes, their language has much in common, and to the student of historic English, it exhibits indisputable evidenceof its affinity with the English of the seventeenth century. This is obvious from such words ashand-kercher,ar(air),pint(point),pison(poison),gwine(going),arrant(errand),cratur(creature),arth(earth), all of which are common alike to the “Yankee dialect” and to the negro dialect. The student who is familiar with the development of the English tongue will at once recognize these as standard, according to the received pronunciation of the seventeenth century. But in the development of the language, these pronunciations subsequently fell into disuse and were discarded by standard English. They still survived, however, in the lower stratum of society among the poor and illiterate who, denied the privileges and advantages of an education and therefore ignorant of the most elementary principles of grammar, inherited this speech from their ancestors and handed it down, with but little change, from generation to generation to their children.
The language of the seventeenth century was brought to America by the early settlers and was taught the slaves, and the tongue which the illiterate negroes then learned to speak they have preserved, without any material change, down to the present generation. Since this is the case, we can not then be surprised to find upon examination that many of their dialectal pronunciations and locutions are to be traced back to classic authors of an earlier period, yea, to Shakespeare himself. In this sense it is doubtless true that many of the fossilized pronunciations of our illiterates are much nearer the language of, and would therefore be more intelligibleto, Shakespeare and Milton than present standard English.
Every one who has ever heard the old negro preacher giving an “exhortation” at the close of his fervid “sarmon” knows very well that, though the old man’s heart was perhaps right and himself on the way to the kingdom, his conscience never for a moment troubled him about his loose grammar. Notwithstanding his sanctification and his ecstatic anticipation of the joys of the kingdom for which he was bound, he had no conscientious scruples about “axin’” his “ole marster” if the latter was at all tardy in offering him the desired help. Perhaps many of those who were so familiar with the lingo of the old preacher never reflected that his language, like his heart, was, after all, not very far wrong and entirely without precedent when he “axed” for something. He was but obeying the scriptural injunction, which, according to Tyndale’s version, reads: “Axe and it shall be geven you.” Nor do they know that he was following, all unwittingly, to be sure, the example set by the first English printer, Caxton, who, in the preface to his edition of Vergil’s Aeneid, used precisely the same expression. If then the old parson blundered, as, according to our modern standard, he did, he at all events blundered in good company.
In Chaucer, “the first finder of our faire language,” as his ardent disciple Occleve rapturously, though quaintly, called him, we find the same word. Here we find also forms long since fossilized, though still preserved in the speech of the untutored, suchaskiver,driv,holp,writ,rid, etc. In “Much Ado About Nothing” Dogberry, albeit he dislocates the dictionary in speaking of that villain who, he prophesies, would be condemned to everlasting redemption, yet uses grammar which, for his day, was above reproach, when he exclaimed: “O that I had been writ down an ass!”
So we must acknowledge that no violence was done to the language, however our sense of propriety may be shocked, when a century or so ago a Londoner remarked to his friend who had come up from his home in the country to see the play of “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and who was copiously bespattered with mud, as a result of his ride: “You came up to town, I suppose, to see Orpheus andyou rid I see.” It would be difficult to find in the literature of that period a more felicitous illustration of a perfectly legitimate play on words which the contemporary pronunciation permitted.
Shakespeare, who could not resist the temptation to make a pun whenever opportunity offered, furnishes additional evidence of his versatility and ingenuity in his apt recognition of the obsolete pronunciation of many words of his time, which he turned to good account. Hence so many of his witticisms. In “Henry IV,” for instance, Falstall says: “If reasons were a plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion,” thus playing upon the old pronunciation ofraisinswith which we are all familiar upon the lips of the unlettered. Thus he plays upon the antiquated pronunciation ofRomeasroom, when, in “Julius Caesar,” Cassiussays of Caesar’s vaulting ambition which o’erleaped itself:
“Now is it Rome indeed and Roome enough,When there is in it but one only man.”
One of the conundrums of that period, which, by the way, could only have belonged to that period, illustrates the antiquated pronunciation ofchairascheer, still current among the illiterate. “Why is a stout man always happy?” The answer was, “Because he is cheerful (chair full).”
It is needless to multiply random illustrations. We owe a lasting debt of gratitude to the philologists who have labored in this field and illuminated this subject which before was enveloped with almost Cimmerian darkness. These amenities of philology which have been mentioned above are but an incident of the arduous and laborious pursuits of those philologists. Let us consider for a while some of the results of their research which prove how the English language has changed.
Every student who has given any attention to the historical development of our speech knows that it has changed from age to age no less in form than in pronunciation. Indeed, it could not be a living tongue if it did not constantly change. The oldest form of the language which we call Anglo-Saxon gradually changed in form and sound till Middle English times, and then it continued to change even more rapidly till modern times. It has undergone no small change even since the days of Elizabeth,when our great dramatists spoke and wrote it. So great are these changes through which our vernacular has passed that a modern could not converse with one of his Saxon forebears of the time of the good and great King Alfred except through an interpreter of his own mother-tongue. If any man is skeptical on this point, let him test himself by trying to modernize offhand a passage from one of Alfred’s own works. Indeed, it is not necessary to go so far back. For Shakespeare, not to mention Chaucer, may prove a rock of offence and would no doubt appear to most of us to speak in an unknown tongue, could we hear him speak. Surely the commentators find no end of difficulties in interpreting his writings which have been preserved to us. Even were we to approach Shakespeare from the vantage ground of the famous Tieck and Schlegel translation which some patriotic German scholars with more zeal than knowledge assert is better than the original, no doubt, we should still encounter many hard sayings in the master dramatist’s language. Much less therefore should we be able to understand his spoken tongue, since spoken speech, in the very nature of things, changes far more than written language.
However, it is not our purpose here to use Shakespeare as a concrete illustration to show how our speech has changed even in the last few centuries. We have chosen two other authors who flourished long after the voice of the “sweet swan of Avon” had ceased to sing and his bones had moulded back to dust in the quaint parish church of Stratford. These writers are the distinguished satirists, the vigorousDryden and the didactic Pope. Their rhymes are a fairly accurate index to the standard contemporary pronunciation.
Dryden has often been taxed with a certain laxity in his rhymes, and to one not recognizing the difference between the pronunciation current in England in the seventeenth century and that accepted at the beginning of the twentieth century, the criticism would appear to be well founded. But it must be borne in mind that the sounds of the English vowels, especially, have undergone a considerable change since Dryden’s day. We should not be surprised then if, when we apply the present standard of English pronunciation to his rhymes, they seem somewhat imperfect. However, this is not intended to extenuate Dryden’s false rhymes, of which there are confessedly some; for he had neither a sensitive ear nor a tender conscience in his work for the stage. His motto expressed in his own words was,
“He who lives to please, must please to live.”
Yet Dryden was, after all, no greater sinner in this respect than others of his day, or even of the present day, whose verses furnish such monstrosities ashasrhyming withwas,loveconsorting withmove,—rhymes which “keep the word of promise to the eye and break it to the ear.” Let us now cite a few of the received pronunciations of the seventeenth century as indicated in the rhymes of that day. It will be observed that where these are still lingering inour speech to-day, they are regarded simply as vulgarisms.
Such words asplease,these,seize,severe,sea,speak,complete, and the like were pronounced, in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth, in a way which, to the modern ear, is decidedly suggestive of the Irish “brogue.” For both Dryden and Pope pronounced these wordsplase,thase,saze,savare,say,spake,complate: and this was the received pronunciation during that period. Pope, therefore, whose delicate ear was easily fascinated by the vigor and musical cadence of his master Dryden preserves but the aroma of the old tea, in that heroic couplet upon a mock heroic subject:
“Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.”
Likewise, again he says:
“Soft yielding minds to water glide away,And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea.”
Dryden pertinently asks, in his Absalom and Achitophel:
“But when should people strive their bonds to break,If not when kings are negligent or weak?”
So Pope likewise pronouncedweakrhyming it withtake. Both he and Dryden offer numerous examples ofspeakrhyming withwake,spherewithbear,hearwithcare,retreatandcompletewithgreat, andtreatwith the Frenchtête, as in Pope’s imitation of Horace:
“The guests withdrawn had left the treat,And down the mice sate, tête-à-tête.”
In the Hind and the Panther Dryden uses the now vulgar pronunciation ofclearthus:
“The sense is intricate, ’tis only clearWhat vowels and consonants are there.”
But this was a perfectly faultless rhyme then and was sanctioned by the best usage. So the vulgar pronunciation ofkeyis the only open sesame to this perfect rhyme in Dryden’s time:
“’Twere pity treason at his door to lay,Who makes heaven’s gate a lock to its own key.”
Here also occurs the obsolete pronunciation ofsaysrhyming withdays, andsaidis wedded tomaidand evenhaveconsorts withslaveandwave, all of which pronunciations have long ago been repudiated by standard English and survive now only in the speech of the rustics and upon Irish lips.
The story is told of an old Scotchman who, like some others not of Scotch descent, occasionally draw their inspiration from an illicit source that during a spell of serious illness he was visited by the good minister who pointed out to him his weakness andendeavored to persuade him to leave off his bibulous habit. When the minister told the erring Scotchman that in heaven whither he was going there would be no wine, he impulsively exclaimed: “I dinna ken, but I think it would be butdacent(decent) to have it on the table.” This is precisely the way Dryden and Pope pronounced the worddecent, and the pronunciation still lingers as a provincialism.
Pope rhymesnaturewithsatireand makes Craggs exclaim in a dialogue:
“Alas, if I am such a creatureTo grow the worse for growing greater.”
This rhyme at that time was perfect to the ear, though false to the eye. Again, Pope wishes—
“That all mankind might that just mean observe,In which none e’er could surfeit, none could starve.”
As for the atmosphere, Pope called itaar, making the word rhyme withstar, andareandwerehe pronounced occasionallyairandware. These pronunciations, it is interesting to note, are still heard now and then from the lips of educated men, either as an affected archaism or more probably from sheer force of a habit of utterance acquired in youth.
There is another vulgarism with a pedigree which is especially to be noted because it is never heard now except from the unlettered. Yet in the seventeenth century this was the standard pronunciation. We refer to the obsolete pronunciation of such wordsasoblige,join,poisonand the like. In his Epistle to Arbuthnot in which Pope pilloried so many of his contemporary poetasters and there left them to the vulgar gaze of all subsequent ages, among others he damned Addison with faint praise as—
“Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,And so obliging that he ne’er obliged.”
Ourjoin,poison,point,soil,spoil, and so on, would have offended the ear of Dryden and Pope, who invariably saidjine,pison,pint, etc. In this respect the speech of our rustics is the speech which Dryden and Pope spoke, though their faith and morals are probably not those which these authors held.
In the words of Pope himself:—
“Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to joinThe varying sense, the full-resounding line,The long majestic march and energy divine.”“Good nature and good sense must ever join;To err is human; to forgive, divine.”“’Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning join;In all you speak, let truth and candor shine.”“In grave Quintilian’s copious work we findThe justest rules and clearest method join’d.”
It is interesting to observe that we still saychoir. These words with theoi-diphthong are well-nigh allof Anglo-French origin, exceptboil, in the sense of tumor, where the Anglo-Saxonbyleproves that its development into the now vulgarbileis regular. But in standard English the word has been wrested from its normal course of development, probably through association in the popular mind with the verbboil, or to avoid confusion withbile(secretion of the liver), and its spelling has been changed toboilto satisfy, in Lowell’s apt phrase, the logic of the eye. But let it be said parenthetically that logic is among the least potent factors in the development of a language.
In the light of these facts, then, we appreciate more fully the significance of the words of Ellis, in his monumental work on Early English Pronunciation: “For the polite sounds of a past generation are thebêtes noiresof the present. Who at present, with any claim to “eddication” wouldjinein praising thepintsof apicter? But certainly there was a time wheneducation,join,pointsandpicturewould have sounded equally strange.”
In the Yankee dialect, as we learn from Lowell’s admirable essay on this theme in the introduction to his Biglow Papers, “theuin the endingtureis always shortened, makingventur,natur,pictur, and so on. This was common also among the educated of the last generation. I am inclined to think it may have been once universal, and I certainly think it more elegant than the vilevencher,naycher,pickcher, that have taken its place, sounding like the invention of a lexicographer to mitigate a sneeze.” When Lowell wrote these words, very little attentionhad been given to the study of dialects and their significance as exhibiting fossilized forms of a language. But since the publication of Ellis’s excellent work on the early pronunciation of our mother-tongue, a flood of light has been shed upon the tortuous path of the history of English sounds. Thus we can be sure that the speech of our illiterates, however vulgar and antiquated it may sound to our twentieth century ears, is, at least in many instances, the polite pronunciation of the seventeenth century. It is the English which the Pilgrim Fathers brought over with them when they landed on the shores of the New World.
So much for the dialect of our illiterates, thelingua rustica. Let us now consider the Irish dialect which is another fruitful source of vulgarisms with a pedigree. A moment’s reflection will suffice to convince the reader that this speech is very closely allied in origin with the English brought to America by the early settlers.
It is well known that the English language, as spoken by the Irish, has a peculiarity of utterance commonly called “the Irish brogue” and differs materially from standard English. Why this clearly marked and distinctive mode of utterance which differentiates the English speech on Irish lips from the same language as spoken in England and America? As a matter of fact the English spoken by the educated sons of Erin is the same as that used in England and America. But the language of the Irish in the rural districts of Ireland and of those who have emigrated to America is something quitedifferent, and varies considerably in idiom and pronunciation from standard English. It is this which is usually termed “the Irish brogue.”
To get at the origin of this lingo we must go back to the time when Ireland was settled by the English. The tongue originally spoken in Ireland was of course the Old Irish, or Gaelic, and this was very closely related to the Welsh and the speech of the ancient Britons who resisted the Roman invasion under Julius Caesar. This was the tongue of the whole of Britain when our Saxon forefathers first found their way across the Channel from Northern Germany. This therefore was the vernacular of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table mentioned in the Arthurian legends.
As far back as the twelfth century, history records that the English began to plant colonies on the Emerald Isle and to settle parts of it, such as Forth and Bargay. But these were unimportant from our present point of view. The English settlements in Ireland from which the English language spread and diffused itself over the country were those made in Ulster and the north during the reign of James I, in 1611. This English emigration was re-enforced by the invasion of Cromwell, in 1649. So then it was during the seventeenth century that the domain of the Irishman’s native tongue was invaded by the English speech.
It will be recalled that, inasmuch as Ireland was originally populated by the Celtic race, it follows that the genuine Irishman is really a Celt, not a Saxon, although he now speaks English as his venacular.He was therefore of the same race and blood as the ancient Britons whom our Saxon forefathers found in possession of the country when they first came to Britain from the Continent. The British people represent a fusion of these two races—Celtic and Saxon—with the Saxon element predominating. According to Matthew Arnold’s dictum, it is from the Celtic blood flowing in the veins of the Englishman that he gets his sentiment. In his composite being, the modern Englishman combines with his original steady-going Saxon temperament something of the Celt’s instinct for sentiment, love of beauty, charm and spirituality, together with something of the Norman’s tact for business. According to Matthew Arnold, therefore, there is a commingling of these three streams in the English race, the Celtic and the Norman both being merged in the Saxon. As the defect of his qualities the Celt had ineffectualness and self-will,—qualities which still mark the Irish genius. The words of that eminent nineteenth century critic are very suggestive as indicating the influence of the Celtic spirit upon the Saxon, whether we are prepared to share his opinion or not. “If I were asked,” remarks he in his admirable essay On the Study of Celtic Literature, “where English poetry got these three things—its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way—I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy froma Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all of its magic.”
But to return to the language of the Irish. When the English settlers emigrated to Ulster, they carried with them the English speech of the seventeenth century. A moment’s reflection teaches us that this was the pronunciation of the days of Milton and Dryden which was transplanted into Ireland. Now, it must be borne in mind that the English of that century was transferred to a country where the native speech and method of utterance were entirely different from those employed in England. The effect of this was to cause some modification in the transplanted language when the English speech came into actual contact with the native Irish tongue on Irish soil. When English was diffused over Ireland the native speech of which differed both in its body of sounds and in its distinctive method of enunciation from the triumphant language, the natives learned to speak the new tongue with their own characteristic mode of utterance. It was but natural therefore that the English speech should undergo a considerable alteration on Irish lips. In similar circumstances the supplanted tongue always produces a greater or less change in its victorious rival, not only in form, but also in construction and idiom. Witness here the triumph of Anglo-Saxon over the Celtic of the native Britons. As an illustration of the change in idiom take this example of “Pidgin-English,” spoken in the treaty ports of China. In one of those ports, an enterprising merchant with a keen relish for the English shillings, but with little feeling forthe English tongue, is reputed to have put out over his shop door a sign with this legend: “Groceries for sale, retail and whole-tail!” An illustration of the difference in mode of utterance between two tongues is furnished by the German, or even the French, method of pronouncing our Englishth-sound. What inherent difficulty a native German or Frenchman, in his unstudied utterance, encounters in pronouncing such simple words asthe,then,kith, etc.! On the other hand, one whose vernacular is English experiences as great embarrassment in pronouncing, without studied effort and practice, the Germanch-sound, as inBach,Ich, etc., or the characteristic Frenchusound as infût,eut,pu, etc.
When therefore the Irish began to learn English in the seventeenth century, they encountered certain difficulties peculiar to the English speech. The dental combinations in our English tongue appear to have proved a stumbling block to the Irish mode of utterance, and hence such grotesque pronunciations astthrashforthrash,stthraitchforstretch,SatthirdayforSaturdayandscoundthrelforscoundrel. In his native speech the Celt trilled hisr’s, and nothing was more natural then than that he should do the same thing when he began to speak English. So to the present day theris emphatically trilled on Irish lips, although it is decidedly un-English to trill it. These few examples will serve to indicate the character of some of the difficulties inherent in the English language which the Irishman encountered in his effort to speak it. But there were other difficultiesthan those of utterance which had to be overcome in mastering the spoken tongue.
Furthermore, the English speech on Irish soil did not develop and flourish as it did in its own habitat in England. On the contrary, it always remained an exotic and it never kept pace in its growth and development with the language on English soil. If Ireland had been first depopulated and then settled by the British, the variations in speech would have been much less conspicuous, even had they existed at all. But that was not the case. Those conditions came much nearer being fulfilled here in America when the Puritans and Cavaliers came over to the New World, bringing with them practically the same English as that carried into the Emerald Isle. For the first settlements in America by the English colonists correspond in point of time to those made in Ulster,—that is, the early seventeenth century. But the English language in America was not contaminated by contact with the Indian language and, with the exception of a few geographical names, our speech shows almost no trace of Indian influence. Consequently the English speech on American soil has had an entirely different development from that which it had on Irish soil, although it is a transplanted language in both instances. The explanation is found entirely in the difference of environment. However, there are certain fossilized phrases, provincialisms, vulgarisms, or what not, in American English, which betray the affinity of the language of the early settlers of America with that of the early settlers of Ireland. Witness here the coincidence ofour vulgarchist(chest),ingine(engine),quair(queer),hade(head),afeard(afraid),weepin(weapon),kag(keg),rassel(wrestle),arrant(errand),deef(deaf),baste(beast),sarmin(sermon), etc., with the Irish pronunciation of these words.
There is one marked Hibernicism which has now passed far beyond the Irish dialect. Probably many of those from whose delicate mouths we hear it so frequently are not aware of its Irish origin. Let it be said by way of parenthesis that the writer does not intend this remark as an impeachment of that charming pronunciation which boasts the sanction of those arriving at their conclusions by instinct rather than reason; nor is the remark made in a spirit of stoical indifference to refined and delicate feelings like that of Balthazar, the infatuated chemist in Balzac’s Search for the Absolute. When the beautiful eyes of his devoted wife filled with tears as she pleaded with him not to sacrifice all his fortune and even herself in his search for diamonds, he ruthlessly exclaimed: “Tears! I have decomposed them; they contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, mucin and water.” The Hibernicism in question is the pronunciation of “gyirl,” so wide-spread and carefully cultivated by delicate mouths in Virginia as to be regarded a shibboleth of those “to the manner born.” (It is of course the prerogative of woman to change her mind,—and her name, too, if she so elects.) Other examples of this Hibernicism arecyart,cyarve,scyar,gyarden,gyarlic,gyuide,cyowandnyow, which last approximates a feline note if uttered in a falsetto. The Irish pronunciation ofsureextends far beyond that jargon now. Perhaps the reader has heard the story of the good bishop’s wife who twitted her husband about sayingshoreforsure, and who, when reminded that she pronounced the word the same way, indignantly replied, “Why, to beshore, I do not!”
It must not be inferred from what has been said that the English spoken in all parts of Ireland is uniform. On the contrary, it differs vastly and varies with the locality. In some parts, indeed, English is not spoken at all. But where it is spoken, it bears a striking resemblance, as has been pointed out, to the English of the times of Dryden and Pope, which was fossilized by emigration. The “brogue” itself is due to the characteristic Celtic habit of utterance, and consists mostly in the intonation, “which appears,” according to Murray, “full of violent ups and downs, or rather precipices and chasms of force and pitch, almost disguising the sound to English ears.”
Thus it is evident that not a few of the expressions which now survive only as provincialisms, or vulgarisms, in the speech of the illiterate were once in entire accord with polite usage. Many of the locutions heard now in the negro dialect can boast really an aristocratic pedigree and, several generations ago, enjoyed the sanction of the highest orthoepical authority. But these pronunciations, somehow, drifted out of the main current of standard speech and at present appear only as jetsam and flotsam in the back-water of our English tongue. Yet they serve to indicate how extensively our languagehas been altered and modified even in modern times, after it found its way to the New World. The modifications and changes, however, both in idiom and pronunciation, would have taken place, even if the English speech had never been transplanted into foreign territory. Conclusive proof of this is furnished by a comparison of present-day British English with the English of two centuries ago as spoken in the mother country; and this, though not explicitly stated, is implied in the discussion of the theme in the foregoing paragraphs.