American Language Supplement 1 Read online

  “Dissertations on the English Language” still makes excellent reading, and it is surprising that no literary archeologist has ever reprinted it. The book was begun while Webster was on one of his early tours of the States, trying to induce their legislatures to give him copyright on his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” which included his spelling-book.3 He says in his preface:

  While I was waiting for the regular sessions of the legislatures … I amused myself in writing remarks on the English language, without knowing to what purpose they would be applied. They were begun in Baltimore in the Summer of 1785; and at the persuasion of a friend, and the consent of the Rev. Dr. Allison,… they were read publicly to a small audience in the Presbyterian church. They were afterward read in about twenty of the large towns between Williamsburg in Virginia and Portsmouth in New Hampshire. These public readings were attended with various success; the audiences were generally small, but always respectable; and the readings were probably more useful to myself than to my hearers. I everywhere availed myself of the libraries and conversation of learned men, to correct my ideas and collect new materials.4

  Webster was convinced that “several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English necessary and unavoidable,” but, rather curiously, he thought that the greater changes would occur in English. Indeed, he believed that “the vicinity of the European nations, with the uninterrupted communication in peace and the changes of dominion in war, are gradually assimilating their respective languages.” This was a bad guess, nor has time yet borne out his prediction that English and American would eventually become mutually unintelligible, though he based it upon sound premisses:

  Numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and science, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown to Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another — like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock, or rays of light shot from the same center and diverging from each other in proportion as their distance from the point of separation.1

  Webster was no philologian, in the modern sense; indeed, scientific philology was barely getting on its legs in the days of his early activity.2 It was thus no wonder that he leaned overheavily, in his etymological speculations, upon Holy Writ, and argued gravely that the original language of mankind must have been what he called Chaldee, i.e., what is now known as Biblical Aramaic. But despite this naïveté he was shrewd enough to see the relationship between such apparently disparate languages as Greek, Latin, English, French and Russian before their descent from a common ancestry was generally understood, and in particular he had the acumen to recognize English as a Germanic language, despite its large admixture of Latin and French terms. He hints, in his “Dissertations,”3 that it was a study of Horne Tooke’s “The Diversions of Purley”4 that convinced him of this last. He was a diligent student of the other English writers on language in his day, and saw that the overwhelming majority of them were quacks.5 “They seem not to consider,” he said, “that grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar.” In his ponderous introduction to his American Dictionary6 he aired his knowledge of the principal foreign languages, such as it was, at length, and in his preface he described his method of study. “I spent ten years,” he said, “in the comparison of radical words, and in forming a synopsis of the principal words in twenty languages, arranged in classes under their primary elements or letters. The result has been to open what are to me new views of language, and to unfold what appear to be the genuine principles on which these languages are constructed.” Nor was all this show of learning mere blague. “In 1807,” says Warfel, “Webster had mastered twelve languages. Steadily, as grammars and dictionaries were made available, he penetrated the secrets of new languages or dialects. By 1813 he had learned twenty: Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, Samaritan, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Persian, Irish (Hiberno Celtic), Armoric, Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, and, of course, English. Later he added Portuguese, Welsh, Gothic and the early dialects of English and German.… He was not only America’s first eminent lexicographer, but also her first notable comparative philologist.”1

  11. [Webster dedicated his “Dissertations” to Franklin but Franklin delayed acknowledging the dedication until the last days of 1789, and then ventured upon no approbation of Webster’s linguistic Declaration of Independence.] According to Warfel, Webster first met Franklin in Philadelphia early in 1786, when he called upon the sage to ask for permission to deliver one of his lectures on language at the University of Pennsylvania, of whose board of trustees Franklin was then president. Franklin seems to have been but little impressed by Webster’s plan to set up a purely American standard of speech, but the two found a common ground in the matter of simplified spelling. Eighteen years before, in 1768, Franklin himself had published “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling,”2 and was still very much interested in the subject. On May 24, 1786, Webster sent him an outline of a scheme of his own, and Franklin replied: “Our ideas are so nearly similar that I make no doubt of our easily agreeing on the plan.” They had frequent palavers on the subject in 1787, but could never come to terms. They remained, however, on a friendly footing, and Franklin’s delay in acknowledging the dedication of the “Dissertations” was due only to his last and very painful illness. He wrote on December 26, 1789, and died on April 17, 1790.

  Despite his advocacy of a reform in spelling Franklin was by no means in favor of American independence in language; on the contrary, he was something of a purist, and accepted the dicta of the English authorities without cavil. Thus he was very cautious in his letter to Webster, and had praise only for “your zeal for preserving the purity of our language, both in its expressions and pronunciation, and in correcting the popular errors several of our States are continually falling into with respect to both.” Franklin then proceeded to list some of those “errors,” for example, to improve in the sense of to employ, to notify (a person), to advocate, opposed to and to progress. Of the first he said:

  When I left New England in the year ’23 this word had never been used among us, as far as I know, but in the sense of ameliorated or made better, except once in a very old book of Dr. Mather’s, entitled “Remarkable Providences.” As that eminent man wrote a very obscure hand I remember that when I read that word in his book, used instead of the word imployed, I conjectured that it was an error of the printer, who had mistaken a too short l in the writing for an r, and a y with too short a tail for a v; whereby imployed was converted into improved.1

  But when I returned to Boston, in 1773, I found this change had obtained favor, and was then become common, for I met with it often in perusing the newspapers, where it frequently made an appearance rather ridiculous. Such, for instance, as the advertisement of a country-house to be sold, which had been many years improved as a tavern;2 and, in the character of a deceased country gentleman, that he had been for more than 30 years improved as a justice-of-peace. The use of the word improved is peculiar to New England, and not to be met with among any other speakers of English, either on this or the other side of the water.

  To improve, in the sense that Franklin complained of, has now become obsolete, but it continued in respectable usage long enough to be admitted to Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828. It still survived, indeed, in the edition of 1852, edited nine years after his death by his son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich. He also gave his imprimatur to to notify, to advocate, opposed to, and to progress, and all of them are now in perfectly good usage. To notify (as in “The police were notified”) is not actually an Americanism, but it is much oftener encountered in this country than in England, and most Englishmen take it to be native her
e. The DAE’s first example of its use in America is dated 1697. To advocate is also English, and was used by Milton, but it dropped out in England in the Eighteenth Century, and in Webster’s day it was one of the “Americanisms” chiefly belabored by English purists. Opposed to and to progress have much the same history. Of the latter the NED says:

  Common in England c. 1590–1670, usually stressed like the substantive. In 18th c. obs. in England, but app. retained (or formed anew) in America, where it became very common, c. 1790, with stress progréss. Thence readopted in England after 1800 (Southey 1809); but often characterized as an Americanism, and much more used in America than in Great Britain in sense in which ordinary English usage says go on, proceed.

  After Franklin’s death in 1790 Webster published his letter in the American Mercury (New York), and used it as a text for fourteen articles on language.1 There was little sign in these articles of Franklin’s influence; they were radical rather than cautious. In one of them Webster actually argued for the use of them in such phrases as them horses. Such expressions, he said, “may be censured as vulgar, but I deny that they are ungrammatical.” He then went on to deny that they were even vulgar:

  As far as records extend we have positive proof that these phrases were originally correct. They are not vulgar corruptions; they are as old as the language we speak, and nine-tenths of the people still use them. In the name of common sense and reason, let me ask, what other warrant can be produced for any phrase in any language? Rules, as we call them, are all formed on established practise and on nothing else. If writers have not generally admitted these phrases into their works it is because they have embraced a false idea that they are not English. But many writers have admitted them and they are correct English.

  In his last article, printed August 30, 1790, Webster included the following exposition and defence of his general position:

  Much censure has been thrown upon the writer of these remarks by those who do not comprehend his design, for attempting to make innovations in our language. His vanity prompts him to undertake something new, is the constant remark of splenetic and ill-natured people. But any person who will read my publications with a tolerable share of candor and attention will be convinced that my principal aim has been to check innovations, and bring back the language to its purity and original simplicity. In doing this I am sometimes obliged to call in question authorities which have been received as genuine and the most respectable, and this has exposed me to the charge of arrogance. I have, however, the satisfaction to find the ground I have taken is defensible; and that the principles for which I contend, though violently opposed at first, have afterwards been believed and adopted.1

  At this time, in all probability, Webster was already at work upon his first dictionary, but it did not appear until 1806.2 The reception it got was certainly not altogether cordial; in fact, there were denunciations of it before it actually came out.3 Webster, always ready for a row, defended it both before and after publication. On June 4, 1800 he inserted a puff in the New Haven papers describing it as “a small dictionary for schools” and announcing that enlarged revisions, “one for the counting-house” and the other “for men of science,” would follow, but it was actually a very comprehensive work for its time and listed 5,000 more words than Johnson’s dictionary of 1755. His qualifications for the task of compiling it are thus rehearsed by Warfel:

  1. “He had literally taken all knowledge for his province, and he had achieved distinction as a contributor in many departments,” e.g., law, medicine, economics and theology.

  2. “In every essay he took time to define carefully each important term he used.… Fuzzy thinking, arising from fuzzy terminology, had led astray people and legislators alike. From the day he entered the newspaper scribbling contest in 1782 until his death he was writing definitions to help his countrymen think straight.”

  3. He “delighted in etymological investigations.”

  4. His “curiosity was fortified by the scholar’s greatest asset, patience.”1

  But the best proof of his qualifications lay in the work itself. It was full of the author’s crotchets and prejudices, and many of its proposed reforms in spelling were so radical and so grotesque that even their author later abandoned them, but despite all these deficiencies it showed wide learning and hard common sense, and so it opened the way for the large American Dictionary of 1828. In all the years since its first publication there has been no working dictionary of English, of any value whatsoever, that does not show something of its influence. There are plain tracks of it even in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of the brothers Fowler.2

  11. [In 1801 a savant using the nom de plume of Aristarcus delivered an attack on Webster in a series of articles contributed to the New England Palladium and reprinted in the Port Folio of Philadelphia.] There were three of these articles, and they were admirably summarized by Leon Howard in American Speech in 1930.3 The author, who has never been identified, objected to various real and imaginary Americanisms, among them, spry, lengthy, illy, sauce (in the sense of a vegetable), caucus, to wait on (in the sense of to wait for), and the use of grand and elegant as intensives of all work. Howard, in his commentary, shows that some of these were not Americanisms, but had been in use in England for many years. Spry is listed by the NED as “current in English dialects, but more familiar as an Americanism”; the DAE, however, does not give it at all. The NED’s first example is dated 1746, and is from an English dialect source; the first American example is dated 1789. The NED lists sauce, in the sense of a vegetable or salad, as “chiefly U.S.,” but its first quotation is from an English book of 1629, and it finds no use of the word in America until 1705. It says, following Bartlett,4 that long-sauce is used (or was used) in the United States to designate beets, carrots and parsnips, and short-sauce to designate potatoes, turnips, onions, pumpkins, etc. The DAE’s first example of long-sauce is dated 1809, and its first of short-sauce is dated 1815. Garden-sauce is traced to 1833. In the sense of stewed or preserved fruit, as in apple-sauce, sauce is undoubtedly an Americanism: the DAE’s first example is dated 1801. The word was then almost universally pronounced sass, as it is to this day by rustics. Cranberry-sauce is even older, for it is found in John Adams’s diary, April 8, 1767. To wait on is a hawking term, used of a hawk circling above the head of a falconer, waiting for a bird to be flushed, but it has been used in England in the sense of to wait for since the Seventeenth Century. In that sense it is now reduced to dialectical usage in this country,1 but in the sense of to court it still enjoys some vogue, especially in the South, and in that sense the DAE calls it an Americanism, tracing it to 1877. Grand and elegant, as mellifluous intensives, seem to be genuinely American, and many of the English travelers of the early days marked their prevalence. The DAE does not list grand, but the NED’s first example comes from John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States,” 1816. Elegant is traced by the DAE to 1764. The NED, whose first example is from Bartlett’s first edition of his Glossary, 1848, hints that it may owe something to the influence of the Irish iligant. But this surmise is probably only a hazard inspired by the date of Bartlett’s book, which came out before the close of the great Irish immigration to the United States. Caucus and lengthy are discussed elsewhere.

  Howard suggests that the motive behind Aristarcus’s onslaught upon Americanisms and upon Webster’s effort to set up independent standards of speech in the United States was largely political. “The organ which placed its stamp of approval upon the papers, in reprinting them prominently,” he says, “was notoriously Federalistic and pro-British; and although Webster was definitely an opponent of Jefferson democracy and strongly Federalistic in his sympathies, he had attacked Alexander Hamilton during the previous year.” Like most of the other Englishmen and Anglomaniacs who wrote against Americanisms in his time, Aristarcus objected to them on the idiotic ground that they were unnecessary. In his first article2
he stated his case as follows:

  A language, arrived at its zenith, like ours, and copious and expressive in the extreme, requires no introduction of new words. On the contrary, it is incumbent on literary men to guard against impurities, and chastise with critical lash all useless innovations. The decline of taste in a nation always commences when the language of its classical authors is no longer considered as authority. Colloquial barbarisms abound in all countries, but among no civilized peoples are they admitted with impunity into books, since the very admission would subject the writer to ridicule in the first instance and to oblivion in the second.

  Now, in what can a Columbian dictionary differ from an English one, but in these barbarisms? Who are the Columbian authors who do not write in the English language and spell in the English manner, except Noah Webster, Junior, Esq.? The embryo dictionary then1 must either be a dictionary of pure English words, and in that case superfluous, as we already possess the admirable lexicon of Johnson, or else must contain vulgar, provincial words, unauthorized by good writers, and in this case must surely be the just object of ridicule and censure. If the Connecticut lexicographer considers the retaining of the English language as a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its stead, but adopt at once the language of the aborigines.… If he will persist, in spite of common sense, to furnish us with a dictionary which we do not want, in return for his generosity I will furnish him with a title for it. Let, then, the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name, and be called “Noah’s Ark.”