The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United StatesMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
General
The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Americanisms; English language; Names -- United States; Names, Personal -- United States
The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very
plainly. Even when a loan-word enters both English and American
simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other
side of the Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used
with far more self-consciousness. The word /matinée/ offers a
convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in
italics, give it its French accent, and pronounce it with some attempt
at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and
the most ignorant man [Pg154] uses it without any feeling that it is
strange. The same lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be
noticed in many other directions--for example, in the freedom with
which the Latin /per/ is used with native nouns. One constantly sees
/per day/, /per dozen/, /per hundred/, /per mile/, etc., in American
newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly /a/
is almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in /per
diem/. /Per/, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday American word.
Such phrases as "as /per/ your letter (or order) of the 15th inst."
are incessantly met with in business correspondence. The same greater
hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-English
prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, /super-/ and
/-itis/. The English accept them gingerly; the Americans take them in
with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.[51]
The same deficiency in reserve is to be noted in nearly all other
colonialized dialects. The Latin-American variants of Spanish, for
example, have adopted a great many words which appear in true Castilian
only as occasional guests. Thus in Argentina /matinée/, /menu/,
/début/, /toilette/ and /femme de chambre/ are perfectly good
Argentine, and in Mexico /sandwich/ and /club/ have been thoroughly
naturalized. The same thing is to be noted in the French of Haiti, in
the Portuguese of Brazil, and even in the Danish of Norway. Once a
language spreads beyond the country of its origin and begins to be used
by people born, in the German phrase, to a different /Sprachgefühl/,
the sense of loyalty to its vocabulary is lost, along with the
instinctive feeling for its idiomatic habits. How far this destruction
of its forms may go in the absence of strong contrary influences is
exhibited by the rise of the Romance languages from the vulgar Latin of
the Roman provinces, and, here at home, by the decay of foreign
languages in competition with English. The Yiddish that the Jews from
Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155]
Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms
from the speech of the streets. Various conflicting German dialects,
among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and in the German areas of the
Northwest, combine in a patois that, in its end forms, shows almost as
much English as German. Classical examples of it are "es giebt gar kein
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