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
/Loan-Words/--The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little
to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary
by the Algonquins of the Northeast. The American people, by the
beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew
almost all they were destined to know of the aborigine, and they had
names for all the new objects that he had brought to their notice and
for most of his peculiar implements and ceremonies. A few translated
Indian terms, /e. g./, /squaw-man/, /big-chief/, /great-white-father/
and /happy-hunting ground/, represent the meagre fresh stock that
the western pioneers got from him. Of more importance was the
suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and
particularly of his vivid proper names, /e. g./, /Rain-in-the-Face/,
/Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Wife/ and /Voice-Like-Thunder/. These names,
and other word-phrases like them, made an instant appeal to American
humor, and were extensively imitated in popular slang. One of the
surviving coinages of that era is /Old-Stick-in-the-Mud/, which
Farmer and Henley note as having reached England by 1823.
Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian border,
and with the Spanish in Texas and further West, brought many more new
words. From the Canadian French, as we have already seen, /prairie/,
/batteau/, /portage/ and /rapids/ had been borrowed during colonial
days; to these French contributions /bayou/, /picayune/, /levee/,
/chute/, /butte/, /crevasse/, and /lagniappe/ were now added, and
probably also /shanty/ and /canuck/. The use of /brave/ to designate
an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian
wars, was also of French origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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