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optimistic, to be sure, in the assumption of relationships) and a splendid bibliography. It seems incredible that one man can have read and can know so much. In a human and manly way Father Schmidt speaks (p. iv) of the devoted labor of his predecessors; for fear of seeming thankless, one scarcely dares express the wish that all these workers had used less of sentiment and philosophy and more of the simple methods of science.

LEONARD BLOOMFIELD

The English Language in America. Pp. xiii +377 and 355. By GEORGE PHILIP KRAPP. New York: The Century Company, for the Modern Language Association of America, 1925.

It is not easy to arrive at a clear conception of the merits of these two large volumes, the first to be published on the Rotary Fund of the Modern Language Association. There is a vast amount of material gathered here, much of it new; there are courageous, if somewhat loosely connected, attempts to interpret the material which in spite of its fulness gives us only a fragmentary account of past usage; and there is the serious attempt to correlate the history of the language with the ethnic, the social, and the cultural history of the country. The undertaking is so daring and accomplishes so much in the face of the deplorable lack of earlier systematic investigation, especially on the historical side, that we are under great obligation to the author for having so arduously and courageously performed this pioneer work. And if we do not agree with him in one point or another, or if we should disagree with him even on fundamentals, we are nevertheless deeply indebted to him. It is to be hoped that some of the problems formulated and tentatively treated by the author will engage the attention of other investigators. Much investigation is needed before we shall be able to outline the history of our language with a sure hand.

The book is somewhat loosely organized. The first volume deals with the general historical problems, vocabulary, literary dialects, and style; the second with pronunciation and, rather summarily, with inflections and syntax. A good bibliography, an index of subjects and names, and a very helpful index of the words treated are appended to the second volume.

The author records (II 8) the conviction that American English of the present day is more homogeneous than our English of a hundred years ago or of the time of the Revolution; that there has been in progress since colonial days a standardization of the language, although there has

been no such definite ideal of good usage in America as in England. 'Good English in America has always been a matter of the opinion of those who know, or think they know, and opinion on this point has always been changing', and, of course, has never been the same in the East, the West, and the South. Since no one section of the country has ever for any length of time dominated the others either culturally or politically, no one standard, even of the shifting and elusive kind defined by the author, ever came into existence, with the result that we now have an Eastern, a Western, and a Southern type of polite speech, each of some degree of uniformity. The Western type, one should add, is current from the Hudson River to the Rocky Mountains.

Krapp gives (I 37-40) convenient lists of the distinctive features of these three types. To the Eastern characteristics there should be added (a) the closer and more diphthongal articulation of the vowel sounds in bay and toe, and (b) the preference for unstressed [1] in houses, naked. For the Southern there should be recorded (a) the tendency to pronounce the vowels in bad, bed, bid, bud overlong and tense, (b) the still widely current close [o] in four and afford (closer than in the Western type), and (c) the slighting of weak vowels and whole syllables when unstressed; moreover, [ju] is nearly universal after dentals, as in new, duty, tune. As for the Western type, the common distinction between mid-slack long [o] of four, hoarse and low-slack short [5] of forty, horse, which the author claims (II 137) to be 'rarely maintained in practice', should be added; see Kenyon, American Pronunciation 120. The author calls these three types the 'New England Local Type', the 'Southern Local Type', and the 'General or Western Type' which (I 35) covers 'the rest of the country, and also all speakers in New England and the South at the moments when their speech is not local in character'. Do the Bostonians, the New Yorkers, and the cultured Southerners really have 'moments when their speech is not local in character', and do they really ever speak the General or Western type of American English? Hardly! There is no such generally recognized standard in America, although the Western type has made effective inroads on the Eastern (Grandgent, Old and New 27) and the Southern, as one can observe in the Blue Grass of Kentucky.

Krapp's General Type is fictitious at least insofar as pronunciation is concerned, and leads him to assume much more uniformity than actually exists and to make indiscriminate assertions. Witness the following statements. (a) 'In this matter of cadence, it is quite obvious to one familiar with various types of British speech, that the

cadences of speech in the north of England are on the whole much closer to those of American speech than are the cadences of the speech of the south of England' (II 23). This does not hold good of the Eastern and the Southern type of our speech. (b) 'In the word leisure pronunciations with [i] and [e] are current in standard usage and it would be difficult to determine which is the more common' (II 129). As for the Western type, the pronunciation with [e] is rare indeed. (c) With respect to the common Western distinction between mid-back [o] and low-back [ɔ] in mourning and morning, respectively, Krapp says that it is 'rarely maintained in practice, either in American or in British English. It is observed by some speakers who make a special effort to do so' (II 137). This statement holds for the East, but not for the South (see Read, JEGP 22. 220ff.) and the West (see Kenyon, AP 120); nor is it true of northern British English (see Grant, The Pronunciation of English in Scotland, 58–9).

Our information on American spoken English is so fragmentary that it is the part of wisdom to avoid sweeping claims; on the other hand, we should not be too caustic (II 249) in commenting on such slips, for even the most competent observer has his weak moments.

As regards the relation existing between the English of educated Americans and Englishmen, Krapp rightly emphasizes the essential unity of their idioms without ignoring Americanisms in vocabulary and pronunciation, or being intolerant of them. Mencken and other investigators who are primarily interested in finding differences overlook the practical identity in sentence structure and vocabulary. America's close contact with English literature and English culture has preserved this original identity, although, to be sure, certain terms preserved in AE were lost in BE, and vice versa, and certain new terms were coined in AE that have not found their way into BE, and vice versa.

The main differences between AE and standard BE, as also between the American East, West, and South, are in the spoken language, in pronunciation, where the printed page is ineffective as a leveler. Here there are many historical problems, as interesting as they are perplexing in our ignorance of present-day pronunciation. The two main problems, or group of problems, are: (a) What is the historical connection between the various types of American English, on the one hand, and standard British English and the British dialects of English on the other? (b) What is the relation of the Western type of American English to the English of New England, the Middle Atlantic States, and the South Atlantic States, whence much of the western population came? What is the contribution of the Irish and the non-English-speaking elements?

As regards the first, Krapp defines his stand (II 28–9) in the following words: 'If one did not fear to affirm a universal positive, one might say that in every case the distinctive features of American pronunciation have been but survivals from older usages which were, and in some instances still are, to be found in some dialect or other of the speech of England. . . The student who would explain American speech as derived from British speech has an inexhaustible store of variations to draw upon, and it is only when the probabilities in all directions have been exhausted that one may turn to the theory of independent and original development of speech sounds in America'. This is a sound

working principle.

Many connections are pointed out by the author. (a) In general, Eastern American English stands nearer to Southern BE, and Western stands nearer to Northern BE. Eastern American and Southern British share the loss of post-vocalic r, as in far, the low vowel in force, the distinctly diphthongal vowel sounds in made and mode, the retracted vowel in pass, dance (II 29-30); also the rather common [a] for [ɔ] in laundry (II 78), [ar] in either, and the older dialectal [w] for [v] in vessel (II 241) might be added. Western American and Northern British, on the other hand, have in common their characteristic cadences (II 23), the distinct post-vocalic r as in far, the mid-vowel in mourning, and the only slightly diphthongal vowels in made and mode (II 29–30). In most of these peculiarities, if not in all, common origin accounts for the similarity. (b) The [x] in the earlier New England pronunciation of angel, recommended and defended by Webster, may be, according to Krapp (II 121) ‘an authentic instance of the influence of the west of England pronunciation upon New England pronunciation'; and in the common early New England pronunciation of the vowel in deceit as [e] 'we seem to have' another instance of such agreement (II 125). However, the latter is more probably a survival, in New England, of an older standard Southern English usage, for 17th century English Poets (Pope) frequently have the mid-vowel [e] (see Wyld, Hist. of Mod. Coll. Eng. 210-11). Similarly, the dialect forms crap, drap for crop, drop, attributed by Webster to the 'middle states' or the Scotch-Irish (II 142), now, it seems, heard only in the South, but found also in early New England town records, are probably rather Scotch in origin than from the west of England.

Krapp overlooks the clear traces of Scotch-Irish (northern English) pronunciation in our rather heterogeneous South. Thus, for instance, the regular variation [ar] [ǝ1] and [au]: [ou] before voiced and voice

less sounds, respectively, as in a fine night [ǝ fain nǝit], down and out [daun and ǝut]. Is the preservation of the voiceless w-sound in wheat, especially in the Western type, not also due to northern English influence, that is, the presence of the Scotch, the Irish, and the Quakers? It is of interest to note in this connection that Krapp recognizes the influence of the Scotch and the Irish in preserving and strengthening the post-vocalic r in the West.

The history of the Western type of speech, which Krapp also calls the General type, is even less clear. To be sure, the resemblance between this type of American pronunciation and the Northern English type is very striking; but how are the two linked together? It is also apparent that Western American is spoken by the descendents of New Englanders, of Southerners, and, last but not least, of Pennsylvanians, as well as by the descendents of the Irish and the non-English-speaking immigrants, and must therefore, in its striking uniformity, be the product of leveling and compromise; but what was the speech of these heterogeneous masses leveled to? Can we trace the contributions of New England, the South, and the Middle Atlantic States? Or that of the Irish that poured in during the forties and after? Are all the features of Western pronunciation inherited or are there also new developments?

Krapp does not rest satisfied with his general statement (I 41-2) that Western American English is 'racy of the life of the race. It has grown, and is growing, in a thousand different places, by mixture, by compromise, by imitation, by adaption, by all the devices by which a people in changing circumstances adapt themselves to each other and to their new conditions'. He points out (II 121) for instance, that (a) the victory, in the West, of [e'nd31] over the New England [ænd31] championed by Webster is 'another indication that the general standard of pronunciation in America has been determined more by Webster's "middle and southern states" than by his New England', and (b) he concedes (II 231) a share in the preservation of the post-vocalic r to the 'Scotch, Irish, and northern British' who came to the West either from the East or from overseas. But he should have brought out the fact that the pronunciation of Pennsylvania is typically 'Western', i.e. that the Western type has inherited much from the speech of the Atlantic Middle States where the Scotch-Irish and the northern British (Quakers) predominated. On this point Krapp shares the common bias of our historians in favor of New England and overlooks the fact that much of the population of the Middle West came from Pennsylvania,

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