American Language Supplement 2 Read Online Free Page B

Pennsylvania ultimately acquired this type of English.” Moreover, it also found lodgment in Western New England, which received a considerable admixture of Scotch-Irish during the same period, and the speechways of this region soon “became established in New York State and in the Western Reserve of Ohio,” and thence moved into the whole of the opening West. Unquestionably this influence of Scotch-Irish example was powerful all along the frontier, and even nearer the coast it must have had some effect, for many of the early schoolmasters were Scotsmen or Irishmen. Though some eminent phonologists dissent, and I am mindful of Dr. Louise Pound’s tart but just remark that “it is the amateur in phonetic matters who speaks with strongest conviction and feels surest of his message,” 1 I find it impossible to put away the suspicion that later tides of pedagogy considerably reinforced the movement away from the southeastern English speechways of the Atlantic seaboard and toward those of the Scotch lowlands and the English North. The original Scottish schoolmasters, to be sure, did not long outlast the Eighteenth Century, nor did the Irishmen who followed them. By the time the great movement into the West was well under wayboth were beginning to be displaced by native young men, 1 and before the Civil War these native young men were giving way in their turn to females. Not many of the latter, in their primeval form, had any education beyond that of the common schools they taught in; the great majority, indeed, were simply milkmaids armed with hickory sticks. They could thus muster up no authority of their own, but had to depend perforce upon that of the books in their hands – and the book that was there invariably, before and above all others, was the aforesaid blue Speller of Noah Webster, When it got any support at all, it was usually from his unfolding series of dictionaries.
    Webster was a New Englander, but he was not a Bostonian, and his central purpose, as he wrote to John Pickering, was “to deliver … my countrymen from the errors that fashion and ignorance” were seeking to introduce from England 2 – and succeeding more or less in the Boston and New York areas. He advocated, above all, clarity and consistency in utterance, 3 and was against all the vowel changes, sacrifice of consonants and other perversions that were imitated from contemporary England usage in the Anglomaniacal circles of the East. In particular, he was opposed to the artificial
Bühnenaussprache
that Sheridan had introduced, and that Walker was soon to reinforce, for his opinion of actors was almost as low as his opinion of political and theological rhetoricians. 4 He thus gavepowerful, if not always conscious support to the Northern British influences – always in favor of relatively precise utterance – that were operating upon American speech west of the Hudson, and he was supported in turn by the natural tendency of hard-driven pioneers to say what they had to say in very plain language, without airs and fopperies. 1 The schoolma’am, without doubt, found it difficult to induce her pupils to speak with any elegance, just as her heirs (as we shall see anon) are finding it difficult today, but she at least taught them to articulate clearly and to pronounce words according to more or less logical patterns, 2 and in this benign endeavor her efforts were vastly facilitated by the popularity of the spelling-class and the spelling-bee, which broke up words into their component parts, and gave every part its full value. 3
    It is easy, of course, to over-estimate such influences, and every pedagogue is well aware that the speech actually acquired by the young is determined not only by what they are taught in school but also by what they hear outside. But I think it is unwise to argue, as some linguists have done, that the schoolma’am is a mere bystander in the process of speech change. 4 She needs a favorable environment to work her will