Helena weekly herald. [volume] (Helena, Mont.) 1867-1900, 1889-04-11
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE.
Much of 1t is English That Has Be-
come AbsOlete in England.

Amercanese is not mere modern i'm
pTovement or corruption whichever we
like to call it-of the language which is
spoken in these islands, says the London
Telegraph. Quite the contrary. DR.. Free
man, in one of his essays, has pointed out
that, while in some respects Americans are
a great deal newer" than ourselves, in
some others they are considerably older.
Much that has died out of our politics,
our societies, our habits and custom,
still survives in the States. So it is
with tine language. As every investigator
knows, much of it is not new English at
all, but genuine old English. Old provin-
cial forms, old local words, old dialectical
peculiarities, which have become obsolete
or mere vulgarisms with US, have kept their
freshness in the New England States, and
thence have spread over the continent-to
spread in time over the world. A good
deal of what we regard as Yankee vulgar
ism is good, honest Anglo Saxon that was
cnrrent in conversation and books for CEN
turies before the May flower sighted Ply
mouth Rock. The perpetual II guess" OF
the New Englander is a case in point.
Full twenty year he was of age, l guess, y
says Chaucer, concerning the "yoDge
squyre" of the Canterbury pilgrimage.
Hosea Biglow would hardly have used it
differently. Similarity, such words as
"peartn and "brash" and ''slick" and even
.squirm," which strike rs as specially racy
of the states, are used to this day in the
common speech of the common people in
northern and eastern England. In the
works of that eminent philologist, Sam
Slick, tns may find mention of q person
being "smok ed" that IL, made butt Of
lust as in Smollett and Fielding and others
of our last century novelists. An Ameri-
can will use "sick" or mad" just as their
orefathers would have done in places
where they should employ ill" and d''angry. y
We owe our cousins certain amount OF
gratitude tor recl0thing with conversa-
tional respectability many of the highly
convenient words which had somehow
dropped out and been replaced by much
less direct and much less expressive substi-
tutes. Whether we need be 60 much
obliged to them for the odds and ends
which they have picked up everywhere
and put into current circulation is more
questionable. For the American is
the most larcenous of linguists. He has
'been at feast of languages and stolen the
scraps" The slang OF the Chicago or San
Francisco loafer has levied contributions
on half the Aryan and two or three of the
non-Aryan tongues. All the elements that
60 to make up the cosmopolitan population
of the Union have contributed something
to the medley. There is little French, a
good deal OF Dutch, "a fair quantity ofSpan-
ish, sprinklipg of Scandinavian, Italian, a
hint at Chinese, and something more than a
perceptible dash of the tongue of the red
man. 1t is altogether strange ANAL
canaan, this American language-not un-
like the equally remarkable mixture out
of which in due course the American peo-
pie is to be evolved. But at present both
the people and the language are in the
process of making, and i: is pretty certain
that they will exhibit more remarkable
developments still before the manufacture
is completed.