Arizona republican., 1894-11-02
AMERICAN FOLK-SPEECH
Old English Words Appear in New
 Guise Here.
Local Rustic Dialects Are Composed AL m ost Entirely of Older Forms of Words Now Obsolete-Some
 Queer Phrases.

| cans differs from that of educated Eng fish people, writes Edward Eggleston | in Century, only in those superficial | traits that are the unavoidable result of | different environments and the fuctua | tions of fashion. But along the shore | of stream the current moves more l slowly, and suffers eddies and backsets. Much old English of the days of Crom- well, some that goes back farther even | than to Queen Marie's daies," will be | found in the dialect speech of rustic neighborhoods in America. There are facts in the history of English words | that will never be known until some of the younger American philologists go | afeld in search of the living forms that grow in the soil about them, and that are not less instructive than the dia- lects of England assiduously gathered | by a multitude of observers, or the i patois of the French country to which Littre was not above paying his re- | spects. Disavowing any pretension to be pathological expert, I propose to write here as an observer of American folk
 
 of the English language which has to do with it's conditions and changes in this country, and on that alone, I may claim to speak with some authority, if the lifelong habit of studying the peoples speech, exceptional opportuni- ties for observing it in many widely | separated districts, and an extensive acquaintance with writings of all sorts, printed and manuscript, of the colonial period, can give authority.
 English travellers very early mention the differences between colonial speech and that of the mother country. This arose partly from the great number of new objects and processes that must have names and partly from English provincial words adopted into general | speech in America. For example, swamp with far-reaching Scandi- navian ancestry, and no doubt long l provincial use in England, had to be explained to English readers, though it's use appears to have been general in | the American colonies. By 1876 it had 1 passed into a verb in common use in
 
 dian chief, is said to have ''swamped himself" when he had hidden in wooded mOraSs. In 1730 swamp formed part of a compound word; ''swamp-law, in Maine stood for cer- | tain eXtra-judicial methods of attain ing justice known to all rude and pio- neer lands. The word swamp like many other provincials of the time, bettered it's fortunes by immigration, and was received into good English sc- ciety when it went back
 There are indigenous words in our folk-speech, but our local rustic dia- lects are composed almost entirely of words in their older forms or older senses, of English words now quite ob- solete, and of words from provincial English dialects. When first I heard farmers in the Lake George region call a ''cowslip'' a ''cowslop,' I smiled to think how modern the corruption was, and how easy to imagine that the name had something to do with the feeding of a COW. But rash guesses in etymology are ever unsafe; ''cusloppe" is given as form of the Anglo-Saxon word nine centuries ago. The etymol- ogists miss the history of this word, and of the word ''slop," by not know ing that, both as noun and verb, ''slop' refers to any liquid or semi-liquid food for cattle, and this over so wide a re- zion of America as to make its an tiQuity certain.
 Take another expression that seems strictly American. "She is in perfect gale one says of a little girl or young woman in a state of effervescent
 nirth. It is easy and natural to sup 1 pose this to be modern. and to derive it from seafarer's figure of speech But the Danes who settled in England spoke tongue very much like the Icelandic, and there is in this speech the word ''gall'-with long vowel meaning a fit of gayety," so that Anglo-Danish ladies in the court of Knut probably got into a perfect gale as our American wom- en and girls do now. In New England they have the verb to train for to romp. For this I can find no re- mote ancestry; it may have come from