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Chapter V. The American English Language
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Read and translate the following words and word combinations:
Landmark to ascert
To set about a coat of arms
To fill the gap to be fascinated
Runaway bestseller a coinage
To mortgage to lay the grouds
Detachment runaway bestsellar
To lay the groundwork royalties
To mortgage retain-retention
A high pitch to be nasalized
Cluster compandium
Frontier men-переселенцы; bonanza-богатая золотоносная жила;
pan out-намывать золото; stake a claim-«застолбить» участок..
The linguistic history of the American English Language is quite complicated. Having acquired numerous component elements of American culture the American English language can be rightly called “a linguistic melting pot”. Which linguistic processes have occurred in American English language to make it different from its British origin? As words are often called “windows into our past” we can say that American vocabulary reflects all events of American history.
One of the main features of the American language is derivation. The migration of the English colonists to North America created the needed vocabulary added to the 17-century British English that the earliest immigrants brought with them. In the formation of American English a lot of words were derived from the languages of the different peoples with whom the English got into contact.
First in importance came the words derived from the languages of various Indian tribes. The English immigrants met in America with the nature, plants and animals unlike anything they had seen before in Europe. The landscape was completely different from the neatly tailored English countryside. Words had to be provided for all aspects of their new life: names of rivers, mountains, lakes, plants and animal world, for implements and food. The Indian languages gave the colonists a lot of such words and thousands of geographical names all over the USA. The names Palmyra, Washington, Alabama, Alaska, Chicago, Idaho, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Manhattan (island of hills) and many others are of the Indian origin. Such words as canoe, moccasin, wigwam, toboggan, tomahawk, squaw, raccoon, opossum, skunk, moose, caribou, totem, etc. were also borrowed from the Indians.
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Besides the Indian influences, American English reflects the other non-English cultures, which the colonists and frontier men met in their conquest of the continent. As we know, in the expansion of their territory, the English-speaking colonists came into contact with the French and Spanish. Some of the borrowings from these languages proved to be very productive in American English. Words like liaison, rendezvous, silhouette, prairie, chowder and rapids came from French. Creole, mulatto, canyon, ranch, sombrero, rodeo, mosquito, lasso cafeteria, hammock, stampede, vigilante were acquired from Spanish. Opera, pizza, dominoes are of Italian origin.
The Dutch settlers also contributed some words to American English. Among the widely used words of the Dutch origin are Yankee, boss, roster, cookie, Santa Claus.
The words of German origin found their way into the American vocabulary as well: frankfurter, hamburger, semester, seminar are among them.
The black slaves from Africa brought to North America not only their culture, songs and music but also words: jazz, hippie are probably African in origin.
Linguistic Nationalism
The American Revolution marked the turning point in the creation of new, American variant of the English language. For Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, and the other leaders of the American Revolution, American English was one of the weapons for independence, for forming national consciousness. After the Revolution the problem of having a national language acquired great political significance. The extent to which the English language became a political problem is illustrated by the curious procession, in New York on July 23, 1788, which coincided with the ratification of the new American Constitution. An association of young men, called the Philological Society, carried the coat of arms and a book inscribed “Federal Language”, emphasizing the strong desire of many Americans to break with the classical British English.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson made the first attempts to renovate the English language. Jefferson was fascinated by words and liked to invent the new ones. “Belittle” was one of his most famous, much laughed at in London at his time. Benjamin Franklin, who founded the first free public library in the USA, was also interested in the reform of the English language. In 1768, he published a paper entitled “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling”. His ideas were not adopted, but made a profound influence on further US linguists. One of the first to publish the Grammar book in New York was Lindley Murray (1745-1826), the author of “English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners” (1795).
All revolutionary ideas of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Murray were implemented in the works of the greatest America’s lexicographer Noah Webster (1758-1843).
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Noah Webster’s Language Reforms
The most famous of all American dictionary-makers, Noah Webster was as influential in the history of American English as George Washington in the American Revolution. From his Dissertations on the English Language in 1789 to his great monument of 1828, an American Dictionary of the English Language (referred to simply as “Webster’s”), his work was the real landmark in American language history.
Webster was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and, like many other American revolutionaries, started teaching as a means of living.. During the war for independence, schoolbooks, traditionally imported from London, were in short supply. Besides, in Webster’s view, they were unsatisfactory for American children. He complained that the English language used in such books had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, who set its own standards for proper spelling and pronunciation. He claimed to “save our native tongue from the clamor of pedantry” surrounding the English language and provide a specific American approach to training children. So, still in his twenties, Webster set about filling the gap and published three-volume compendium “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language”, consisting of a Speller(1783), a Grammar (1784) and Reader(1785).
The " Speller" had the greatestsuccess andsold more than 80 million copies, turning out to be a runaway bestseller. It was written so that it could be easily taught to elementary pupils, and it progressed by age. Most people called it the " Blue-Backed Speller" because of its blue cover, and for many years it was the main textbook in American elementary school.
The royalties gave Webster the money to continue working on his political activity and linguistic reforms. Webster toured the United States, convincing that " America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms”, and to accomplish this she must protect the literary products of her countrymen by copyright. Webster also wrote his vigorous Federalistic work Sketches of American Policy (1785). In Philadelphia, where he paused briefly he published his politically effective An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787).
In 1806, Webster published his first Dictionary, the next step in his program to standardize the American language The following year, at the age of 43, Webster began writing an expanded and comprehensive dictionary, " An American Dictionary of the English Language" , which took him twenty-seven years to complete. To supplement the etymology of the words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including old Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit.
He completed his two-volume Dictionary after returning from European tour and published it in 1828, when he was already 70. His book contained seventy thousand words and became the culmination of Webster’s efforts on Americanization of the English language.
The dictionary was not sold well at Webster’s lifetime and to bring out his second edition Webster had to mortgage his house. On May 28, 1843, a few days after he had completed revising an appendix to the second edition, Noah Webster died. in debt and poverty.
Though not all Webster’s ventures were recognized at his time, his contribution in the creation of American language is hard to overestimate. His name became synonymous with the word “dictionary”, and. his works on linguistics had an enormous influence on American standards of spelling and writing. By including thousands of technical and scientific terms, Webster laid the groundwork for modern lexicography and very many dictionaries published in the USA still bear his name.
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