American Language (128 page)

The Latin-Americans have taken over the vocabulary of American sport along with the games. “If you read
El Universal
, the
soi-disant
great daily of Mexico,” says the explorer just quoted, “you will be apprised that at a
match de box
a gentleman named, as like as not, Battling Martinez, has received from one Kid Sanchez
un K.O
. as the result of an
upper cut
(pro.
ooper coot
) or a
left hook
(’00k).… Next morning you can play
tenis
and keep score in English terms provided you have learned to give them the correct Spanish accent; and if you watch a game of
beisbol
or
futbol
or
basket
you virtuously call a foul a
foul
. In the afternoon you may shoot a few rounds of
golfo
” “Of a Monday morning,” says another observer,
⁹⁰
“when all the Latin-American journals are heavy with week-end sporting news, one’s eye is apt to be arrested by
el score
at
los links
of
el country club
. Some local cup-collector may be featured at some length.
Su pivot
, one learns, leaves nothing to be desired; he is
un swinger rapído
, too, and always makes
un espléndido drive
. With such a reputation, one can hardly feel surprised to read that he won yesterday’s match
por walkover.
”

The number of Spanish-speaking persons in the United States at the moment (1936) is hard to estimate. There were 1,422,533 Mexicans in 1930, of whom 805,535 had been born in this country and 616,998 in Mexico, but many of the latter have since returned home. At the same time the enumerators unearthed 58,302 natives of Spain, 52,774 of Puerto Rico, 47,699 of the Philippines and 2,834 of the Canal Zone. The natives of Cuba and Central and South America do not seem to have been listed. The Puerto Ricans were nearly all concentrated in New York, which had 45,973 of them, and the Filipinos in California. The Cubans live mainly in New York and Florida. There are Spanish daily newspapers in Tampa (2), New York (2), El Paso (2), Los Angeles, Laredo, Tex., and San Antonio.

So far as I have been able to discover, there is no discussion in print of the Portuguese spoken in the United States. I am informed, however, by Mr. João R. Rocha, editor of
O Independente
of New Bedford, Mass., the oldest Portuguese weekly in the country, and Mr. Peter L. C. Silveira, editor of the
Jornal Portugues
of Oakland, Calif., that it has been markedly modified by American influence. The grammatical changes are few, but there is a heavy borrowing of English words and not a few Portuguese words have been changed in meaning. Thus, the word
frizado
, which means curled up in Standard Portuguese, has come to mean frozen in America, and the word
cigarro
, which means a cigarette in Standard Portuguese, means a cigar here. Again, the Portuguese immigrants have abandoned
remé-dios
, the Standard Portuguese word for medicines, in favor of
medicinas
and have changed the meaning of
colégio
from a private grammar or secondary school to what we call a college.
⁹¹
In the case of
high-school,
they have produced a translated form,
escola alta
. From the phrase
to park a car
they have derived a verb,
parcar,
and use it in place of the Standard Portuguese
arrumar
or
estacionar
. Virtually all of the other verbs that they have borrowed have been given the Portuguese verbal termination
-ar, e.g., drivar
(to drive),
feeda
(to feed),
treatar
(to treat),
ablievar
(to believe),
tirear
(to ride),
pinchar
(to pitch),
savar
(to save),
crackar
(to crack),
pumpear
(to pump). A number of nouns are also given Portuguese terminations, e.g.,
feeda
(feed),
mecha
(match),
rancho
(ranch, thus showing a return to the original Spanish form),
raça
(race),
pana
(pan),
córa
(quarter of a dollar), and
passe-presidente
(past-president). But loan-nouns are often used unchanged, as in “Vou falar com a meu
lawyer
por causa do
case
que tenho na
court
” (I am going to talk with my lawyer about the case I have in court). In the case of nouns that are identical in Portuguese and English,
e.g., conductor
and
inspector
, the Portuguese pronunciation is abandoned for the English. In the use of loan-words English idioms are often borrowed,
e.g., não e das suas business
(none of your business),
fazar um speech
(to make a speech),
isso faz o spoil
(that spoils it),
está
alright
(it’s all right),
é fine
(it’s fine). The Portuguese spoken in Brazil is also full of loans from English,
e.g., aristú
(Irish stew),
buldogue
(bulldog),
sulipa
(slipper, and also sleeper, a railroad tie),
arceboque
(a boxcar for horses),
liderança
(leader),
araruta
(arrowroot). The Brazilians of the nether classes use
godeme
(God-damn) to signify a blow; they confused the exclamations of the fighting English sailors on the docks with their actual wallops. They use
bonde
to signify a street-car, for when the first line was established at Rio de Janeiro it was financed by the sale of bonds, and the operating company came to be known as the
companhia dos bonds
. In Portugal a street-car is called an
americano
.
⁹²

The Census of 1930 revealed 167,891 persons of Portuguese blood in the United States — 69,974 foreign-born and the rest born here of Portuguese or mixed parentage. Of this number, 110,197 gave Portuguese as their mother-tongue. There are thirteen Portuguese publications in the country, including a daily, the
Diario de Noricias
, at New Bedford, Mass., where the largest Portuguese colony is located.

The Rumanians constitute one of the smaller ethnic stocks in the United States. In 1930 the number of persons so classified by the Census Bureau was 293,453, of whom 146,393 had been born in Rumania, 125,479 had been born here of Rumanian parents, and 21,581 had been born here of mixed parentage. But of the 146,393 of Rumanian birth, but 53,452 reported that Rumanian was their mother-tongue. The rest spoke Yiddish (49,508), German (28,640), Hungarian (8,830) or some other language (5,963). The Rumanians proper have three periodicals in this country, of which one, the
America, Roumanian
⁹³
News
of Cleveland, formerly a daily, now appears three times a week. Its former editor, Mr. George Stancu-lescu, informs me that American-Rumanian shows the characters of all the other immigrant languages. It has borrowed a large number of common nouns, especially those representing objects and concepts
unknown in Rumania,
e.g., baseball-score, strike-breaker, lockout, picketing, golf-links, surprise-party, football-match, shower-party
. Sometimes they are taken in unchanged, but more often they are brought into harmony with Rumanian analogues,
e.g., conventie
(convention),
vilbără
(wheelbarrow),
grocerie
(grocery),
butcherie
(butcher-shop),
bort
(boarding-house),
saloner
(saloon-keeper),
platformă
(platform in the political sense),
poipuri
(pipes),
matchuri
(matches). The loan-verbs are inflected in the Rumanian manner,
e.g., Te fixuluesc
(I’ll fix you),
Am betuit
(I have made a bet),
Se resăluesc
(They are wrestling),
se matchue
(things matching one another),
L’au kidnăpuit
(They have kidnaped him),
Vrea să mă foolooe
(He wants to fool me),
Nu mă bădărui
(Don’t bother me).

There is a strong tendency to abandon Rumanian idioms for translated English idioms. Says Mr. Stanculescu:

The Rumanian in the United States, especially if he be of small education, finds English very difficult, for there are usages in English which have no parallel in Rumanian. The latter, for example, makes no distinction between
may
and
can
or
will
and
shall. There is
and
there are
at the beginnings of sentences offer another difficulty, for there are no equivalents in Rumanian. There is also confusion in gender, for Rumanian has grammatical gender, and no
it
is in its
vocabulary. As in many other languages, an action begun in the past but continued in the present is expressed by a verb in the present tense. Thus, the Rumanian immigrant commonly says “
I am in America ten years
instead of I
have been
in America ten years. He finds the sounds of
th, sh, ch, ph
and
gh
very strange, and often mispronounces them. Thus one hears
tis
for
this, tot
for
that, wort
for
worth, troot
for
truth, sharp
for
sharp, short
for
short, Kicago
for
Chicago, pkarmachy
for
pharmacy
and
enugkh
for
enough
.

The Right Rev. J. B. Dudek, chancellor of the Catholic diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, who was born in this country of Czech parents, has written an exhaustive study of the changes undergone by the Czech language in the United States, but unfortunately only parts of it have been published.
⁹⁴
Through the courtesy of Monsignor Dudek, however, I have had access to his complete manuscript, and present herewith a brief summary of his observations.

The first American loan-words, he says, were taken into American Czech by journalists and lecturers “whose chief claim to intellectual superiority seemed to rest, like that of some American Negroes, upon a propensity to employ a terminology unintelligible to the ordinary person.” But the masses of immigrant Czechs soon took to imitating these pretenders, and in a little while the common vocabulary was largely English. “A volume half the size of Webster’s International,” says Monsignor Dudek, “would be required to list the words taken over in this popular manner.” Most of them, of course, are nouns or verbs. All of the former are fully inflected “according to the declension, determined by the terminal letter or syllable, into which they would fall if written phonetically in Czech characters.” Monsignor Dudek continues: