The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

What odds against the first word the Pilgrim Fathers met with in America, and from a “wild man,” being “welcome”? That having travelled three thousand miles and hit a spot on the continent they had not aimed for, they should be met in English? The man who came out of the woods had picked up some words from English fishermen along the coast. But he was not the miracle. He introduced them to Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto, and it was Squanto who saved the settlement. He is a most important man in this chapter of the adventure of English.

Squanto had been kidnapped by English sailors fifteen years before and taken to London, where he was trained to be a guide and interpreter and learned English. He managed to escape on a returning boat. By chance, or through God’s providence, the Pilgrims had hit America next to the tribal home of the Native American who was certainly the only fluent native-English speaker for hundreds of miles around and arguably the most fluent English speaker on the entire continent:

The Pilgrim Fathers were extremely fortunate to find a person who was both sympathetic and could communicate with them in an efficient manner. You couldn’t have had a more helpless group of people to start a new society. They brought all the wrong stuff, they didn’t really bring people who were expert in agriculture or fishing. They were coming with a lot of faith and not a great deal of preparation.

Native words for natural things included “moose,” “raccoon,” “skunk,” “opossum” and “terrapin”; for native foods “hominy” and “squash” for the variety of pumpkin grown there. “Squaw” came in, as did “wigwam,” “totem,” “papoose,” “moccasin” and “tomahawk.” William Penn remarked on the beauty of the native language. He wrote: “I know not a Language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness, in Accent and Emphasis, than theirs.” And many place names came from Native American words, as do numerous rivers, including the Susquehanna, the Potomac and the Miramichi.

Moreover, the English found the native languages very difficult. The word “skunk,” for instance, began as the uneasy “segankw”; “squash,” much more alarmingly, was “asquutasquash”; “raccoon” was one of many which originally had several native names: “rahaugcum,” “raugroughcum,” “arocoune,” “arathkone,” “aroughcum” and “rarowcun.” Perhaps the struggle to reproduce the native pronunciation was just too much and they settled for raccoon.

War brought other colonies under British rule. New Amsterdam was taken and became New York in 1664. New Sweden became New Delaware. Dutch terms remain in Breukelen (Brooklyn) and Haarlem, and in “waffle,” “coleslaw,” “landscape” (as it had done back in England), “caboose,” “sleigh,” “boss” (to become very important as a way in which slaves and servants could address their employers or owners without calling them “master”), “snoop” and “spook.”

There would be words from French New Orleans — “praline” and “gopher.” “Chowder” from the Breton, and “picayune,” a small coin, came to mean anything small. Borrowings from the Spanish were on a very big scale — Spanish is still the biggest feeder into American English: “barbecue,” “chocolate,” “stampede,” “tornado” and “plaza.”

On the whole the Spanish had sent armies and priests and taken gold. The French sent fur trappers and looked for trade. The English came to settle and that finally ensured that it was the language of Tyndale and Shakespeare which would be heard in the mid eighteenth century from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains.

The English “shop” became the American “store.” “Lumber” was rubbish in London; on the east coast it was and is “cut timber.” An English “biscuit” was an American “cracker.” An American “pond” could be as big as an English “lake”; an American “rock” could be as small as an English “pebble.” In America a piece of land became a “lot,” named after the method of drawing lots to determine which new owner received which new territory.

English upper-class visitors to America noted the absence of regional pronunciation with approval. In 1764 Lord Gordon wrote: “The propriety of language here surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any but the polite part of London.”

Even The Last of the Mohicans author, James Fenimore Cooper, joined in: “The people of the United States speak . . . incomparably better English than the people of the mother country.” This opinion was repeated over and again. The Americans did not just speak good English, they spoke it better than the English back in England.

It’s still in use and that chanting of syllables by millions of children in tens of thousands of schools over two centuries changed and set the sound of much of American English. Americans pronounce polysyllables with a far more even emphasis than the English.

Webster was not an admirer of the English aristocratic clipped vowel and his classroom drill could have been especially designed to oppose it. Where the English say “cemet’ry,” Americans have “cemetery,” English “laborat’ry,” American “laboratory.”

Incorrect

Like most reformers, Webster appealed to “logic.” “Colour” and “honour” had to get rid of that illogical “u,” and they did. “Waggon” could roll just as easily with one “g,” so one “g” went. “Traveller” lost an “l,” “plough” became “plow,” “theatre” and “center” were turned into “theater” and “center” and so it went on for scores of similar words. “Cheque” became “check,” “masque” became “mask,” “music,” “physic” and “logic” lost the final “k” that English gave them.

Benjamin Franklin, who by the age of seventeen had become a printer and is known as one of the fathers of the new nation, spent a good deal of his time concerned with American spelling. He read the essays of Thomas Addison in the English Spectator to improve his style. Though he was a great defender of American English, when David Hume, the philosopher, criticised his use of “colonise” and “unshakable,” he withdrew them. Yet he had a radical view of the language and wanted to get rid of letters he thought unnecessary — c, w, y and j — and add six others. He wanted to remove silent letters and reform the whole business. He sent his scheme to his friend May Stevenson in a letter beginning: “Diir Frind” but May replied that she could “si meni inkanviiniensis az vel az difikylties.” That stopped it.

By the 1820s, Americans felt that not only did they have the future of English in their hands, not only were they refining and embellishing it, they were also keeping it pure, still using words the former owners had dropped, words like “burly,” “greenhorn,” “deft,” “scant,” “talented,” and “likely.” And Americans still say “sick” to mean ill, not just nauseous. They say “fall” meaning autumn, just as the English once did. Americans pronounced the old flat “a” in “path” and “fast” — both abandoned in southern England in the late eighteenth century. They use the old “gotten,” not “got.” They say “eether,” we say “eye-ther” — America’s is the old form. They use “I guess” as Chaucer did.

In 1804, President Jefferson, on behalf of the United States, bought what was then called Louisiana from the French for three cents an acre. It cost them about fifteen million dollars. It more than doubled the size of the country. If ever proof were needed of the difference between the French and the English in North America — that the one came to trade, the other to settle — this was it.

It was after dark before we finished butchering the buffaloe, and on my return to camp I trod within a few inches of a rattle snake but . . . fortunately escaped his bite . . . late this evening we passed another creek . . . and a very bad rappid which reached quite across the river . . . a female Elk and its fawn swam down through the waves which ran very high, hence the name of Elk Rappides which (we) instantly gave this place . . . opposite to these rappids there is a high bluff and a little above on the lard (larboard) a small cottonwood bottom in which we found sufficient timber for our fire and encampment.

In England “creek” is a tidal inlet, in America it covers all manner of streams. An adjective is turned into a noun — “rapid” into “rapids.” “Bluff ” is an American coinage to describe broadfaced cliffs. “Rattle snake” and “cottonwood” are examples of the way two English words could combine forces in the face of new material. “Elk” is one of the words imported from England but applied to a different beast. “Buffalo,” oddly, had been an English word for two hundred years, imported from a Portuguese book about China. And American buffaloes are bison.

Webster in his dictionary had said that it contained not fifty words peculiar to America. In the untutored journals of the two frontiersmen, Clark and Lewis, we discover many hundreds of new words which can claim to be peculiarly American English. It is significant that these frontiersmen and those who followed their trail were much more open to Native American words. Partly because there was so much to describe and the native word was the handiest. But partly I guess because the men were far less engaged in the battle to beat London polite society at its own game or remodel English as a classical language to match Latin, and construct an imperial language to out-Rome Rome. And perhaps the men on the frontier had a finer democratic instinct when it came to culture. Five hundred Native American words are recorded in those journals for the first time. Not an overwhelming number, but many more than before. Some fell away, some have been mentioned, but words derived from native languages include: “hickory,” “hominy,” “maize,” “moccasin,” “moose,” “opossum,” “pecan,” “persimmon,” “squaw,” “toboggan,” “powwow” and “totem,” as well as more obscure words such as “kinnikinnic,” a mixture of leaves for smoking; “pemmican,” a preserved mixture of meat, fat and berries; and “tamarack,” a kind of larch. As previously mentioned, of the first thirteen states, only Massachusetts and Connecticut are from native words. As the country went west, more Native American words were used for the s...

On that expedition English went word-drunk and it was to stay intoxicated out west for decades to come. Lewis and Clark and their men became dab hands at naming: they used physical characteristics — “Crooked Falls” and “Diamond Island”; incidents — “Colt-Killed Creek”; names of members of the expedition — “Floyd’s River,” “Reuben’s Creek”; ladies back home were toasted in geography — “Fanny’s Island,” “Judith’s Creek.” And Jefferson himself, as was fitting, got a place — “Jefferson’s River.”

The word “immigrant” is an American invention.

The Pilgrim Fathers had come primarily from the south and east of England. Two hundred years later, new Americans from Britain were more likely to come from Scotland or from Ulster, where they felt driven out by a combination of natural disasters, high rents and religious intolerance. There were also among the Scots and Irish many who came, as others did, in search of a better life and with hope to make one. It has been claimed that half the population of Ulster left for America. They found the land on the eastern seaboard and the land nearest to it already occupied and staked out. They moved west. They were regarded as good fighters and encouraged to go to the frontier and face the greatest risks. The Ulstermen were unjustly regarded and written about as uncouth, and they pushed on from where they were not welcome to the wilder, emptier places they made their own. Their older accents can still be heard among the hillbillies of the Appalachians and in the music that evolved into country western.