American Language (127 page)

Dr. Livingston says that the Italians in the United States resent
dago
and
wop
, but have become reconciled to
guinea
, which they spell
ghini
and use frequently in good-humored abuse, as in
grannis-simo ghini, a
sort of euphemism for
fool
. He reports that a number of Americanisms have been taken back to Italy by returning immigrants,
e.g., schidu
(skiddoo) and
bomma
(bum), “which have become Neapolitan ejaculations.”
Briccoliere
(bricklayer) “circulates in Sicily.”
⁷⁹

The Census of 1930 showed that there were 1,790,424 persons of Italian birth in the United States at that time, 2,306,015 who had been
born here of Italian parentage, and 450,438 who had been born here of partly Italian parentage, or, 4,546,877 in all. Save for the Germans, they constituted the largest racial
bloc
in the country, and they exceeded the Germans in the number of individuals actually born in their country of origin. Of them, 1,808,289 reported that Italian was their mother-tongue. The Italian periodicals published in the United States number 113, of which eight are daily newspapers.

The changes undergone by Spanish in the New World have been studied at length by Spanish-American philologians, and their numerous monographs on Cubanisms, Mexicanisms, Argentinisms, Chileanisms, Honduranisms and so on put to shame the neglect of the American vulgate by their American colleagues. Even the Spanish spoken in the Southwestern United States has been investigated scientifically, chiefly by Dr. Aurelio M. Espinosa, of Leland Stanford University. Dr. Espinosa’s papers on the subject have been printed in both English and Spanish. In English he published a series of “Studies in New Mexican Spanish” in the
Revue de Dialectologie Romane
from 1909 to 1914,
⁸⁰
and in Spanish he has brought out an elaborate study of New Mexican phonology in the Biblioteca de Dialectología Hispanoamericana edited by the Instituto de Filología of the University of Buenos Aires,
⁸¹
and a number of smaller studies.
⁸²

The New Mexican speech area investigated by Dr. Espinosa runs from El Paso in the south to beyond Pueblo, Colo., in the north, and
from near the Texas border in the east to beyond the Arizona border in the west. At the time he made his inquiry it had about 250,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants —175,000 in New Mexico, 50,000 in Colorado, and 25,000 in Arizona. Within this area the dialect spoken is generally uniform. In Southern Arizona, Southern California and the upper part of the Mexican State of Sonora there is another speech area, using a dialect somewhat closer to Standard Castilian than that of New Mexico. It has been studied by Dr. Anita C. Post, who took her doctorate at Stanford under Dr. Espinosa.
⁸³
Both dialects show a great many resemblances to American-English. There is the same tendency toward the decay of grammatical niceties, the same hospitality to loan-words, the same leaning toward a picturesque vividness, and the same survival of words and phrases that have become archaic in the standard language. “It is a source of delight to the student of Spanish philology,” says Dr. Espinosa in “Studies in New Mexican Spanish,” “to hear daily from the mouths of New Mexicans such words as
agora, ansi, naidien, trujo, escrebir, adrede
” — all archaic Castilian forms, and corresponding exactly to the
fox-fire, homespun, andiron, ragamuffin, jail
(for autumn),
flapjack
and
cesspool
that are preserved in American. They are survivors, in the main, of the Castilian Spanish of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, though some of them come from other Spanish dialects. Castilian itself has changed very much since that time, as Standard English has changed; it is probable, indeed, that a Castilian of the year 1525, coming back to life today, would understand a New Mexican far more readily than he would understand a Spaniard, just as an Englishman of 1630 would understand a Kentucky mountaineer more readily than he would understand a Londoner.

New Mexico has been in the possession of the United States since 1846, and so it is natural to find its Spanish corrupted by American influences, especially in the vocabulary. Of the 1400 words that Dr. Espinosa chooses for remark, 300 are English, 75 are Nahuatl, 10 come from the Indian languages of the Southwest, and 15 are of doubtful or unknown origin; the rest are pure Spanish, chiefly archaic. As in the case of the Pennsylvania Germans, the French Canadians and the Scandinavians of the Northwest, the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico have borrowed the American names of all
objects of peculiarly American character,
e.g., besbol
(baseball),
grimbaque
(greenback),
játqueque
(hot-cake),
sosa
(soda),
quiande
(candy),
fayaman
(fireman),
otemil
(oatmeal),
piquenic
(picnic),
lonchi
(lunch). Most of them have been modified to bring them into accord with Spanish speech-habits. For example, all explosive endings are toned down by suffixes,
e.g., lonchi
for
lunch
. So with many
r
-endings,
e.g., blofero
for
bluffer
. And sibilants at the beginning of words are shaded by prefixes,
e.g., esteque
for
steak
and
espechi
for
speech
. Not only words have been taken in, but also many phrases, though most of the latter are converted into simple words,
e.g., olraite
(all right),
jaitun
(hightoned),
jamachi
(how much),
sarape
(shut up),
enejau
(anyhow). This Southwestern Spanish, like Pennsylvania-German, Yankee-Dutch and Vestur-islanska, seems doomed to vanish soon or late. “For a generation at least,” says Dr. Post, “the child of Spanish-American parentage has really been learning Spanish at school, rather than at home. The present generation is not saying
truje, vide, muncho
, as their grandparents did. The Spanish of the future may be more nearly correct, if it does not die out completely.”

English, of course, has also influenced the Spanish of the Antilles and of the Canal Zone. “Porto Ricans are conscious of the fact,” says Salvador Rovira,
⁸⁴
“that their Spanish has been debased with English idiom, and that it is rapidly becoming mongrel.” In the large Puerto Rican colony in New York a large number of American loan-words are in everyday use,
e.g., champu
(shampoo),
dresin
(dressing),
chopas
(chops),
cornfleques
(cornflakes),
ribsteque
(rib-steak),
chainaría
(shoe-shining stand),
corna
(corner of a street),
cuora
(quarter of a dollar),
fanfurria
(frankfurter),
bildin
(building),
cuilto
(quilt),
ticha
(teacher),
estor
(store),
marqueta
(market),
caucho
(couch),
lanlor
(landlord),
lanlora
(landlady),
boso
(boss),
meibi
(maybe).
⁸⁵
From Panama comes news of
nacao
(knockout),
estrei
(straight),
managual
(man o’ war),
guachiman
(watchman).
⁸⁶
The people of each and every one of the Latin-American countries pride themselves on the purity of their Spanish, but the truth is, of course, that all of them speak dialects more or less marked, and use large numbers of words unknown to Standard Castilian.
⁸⁷
The late
Dr. A. Z. López-Penha, the Colombian poet and critic, once made up for me (1922) a list of American loans in common use in the Latin-American seaports: it included
cocktail, dinner-dance, foxtrot, sweater, kimono, high-ball, sundae, bombo
(boom),
plataforma
(platform, political),
mitin
(meeting),
alarmista, big-stick
and various forms of
bluff
(usually
blofero
, but
blofista
in Cuba). The American
auto
has been naturalized, and so has
ice-cream
, but in the form of
milk-cream
, pronounced
milclee
by the lower orders. The boss of a train is the
conductor del tren
; a commuter is a
commutador; switch
is used both in its American railroad sense and to indicate the electrical device;
slip, dock
and
wharf
(guáfay) are in daily use; so is
socket
(electrical), though it is pronounced
sokáytay
; so are
poker
and many of the terms appertaining to the game. The South Americans often use
just
in the American way, as in
justamente a
(or
en
)
tiempo
(just in time). They are very fond of
good-bye, dam-fool
and
go to hell
. They have translated the verb phrase,
to water stocks
, into
aguar las acciones
. In Cuba the
watermelon (patilla
or
sandía
, in Spanish) is the
mélon-de-agua
. Just as French-Canadian has borrowed Americanisms that are loan-words from other immigrant tongues,
e.g., bum
and
loafer
from the German, so some of the South American dialects have borrowed
rapidas
(rapids) and
kimono
, the first brought into American from the French and the second from the Japanese. The Spanish borrowings from American are naturally most numerous just south of the Rio Grande, just as the American borrowings from Spanish are most numerous along its north bank. Says a recent explorer:
⁸⁸