American Language (70 page)

The
r
is sounded in Bermuda before consonants and in the terminal position by all classes, save in a few words,
e.g., shirker, stern, perfectly, first
and
further
. “It appears to be present in sufficient quantity,” says Dr. Ayres, “to require belief that the English immigrants brought it with them, as they brought it likewise to the American Continent.” In the West Indies, including the Bahamas, an exaggerated form of Southern English prevails among the blacks, with a very broad
a
dominant. Their white overlords speak Southern English too, but in a more restrained manner, and with touches, now and then, of Lowland Scotch.

In Hawaii there has arisen a dialect of American that is confined to the islands, and is full of interesting peculiarities. Its basis seems to be Beach-la-Mar, the common trade speech of the Western Pacific, in which, for many years past, there have been a number of terms of American origin,
e.g., alligator, boss, pickaninny, schooner
and
tomahawk
,
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but since English began to be taught in the Hawaiian schools in 1853, and especially since the American annexation of the islands in 1898, this crude jargon has moved in the direction of Standard American, and today it is very far from its humble beginnings. The original Beach-la-Mar, considerably changed by Chinese influence, still survives,
¹⁴⁷
but it is spoken only by “the immigrant generation of Orientals and Latins, and some elderly native Hawaiians.”
¹⁴⁸
The other non-American inhabitants, whether Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Portuguese, Porto Ricans, Filipinos or native Hawaiians, speak the dialect aforesaid, in varieties ranging from something rising but little above Beach-la-Mar to something hard to distinguish from the speech of native Americans.
¹⁴⁹
It is used, in one
form or other, by probably two-thirds of the people of the islands. It resembles vulgar American in its disregard of grammatical niceties, but its vocabulary differs considerably from the speech of the mainland. Many familiar words and phrases, e.g.,
to pitchfork, small potatoes
and
to go the whole hog
, are omitted because the objects to which they refer are unfamiliar in Hawaii; other common expressions have been changed in meaning,
e.g., bogus
has come to mean boastful or a boaster,
meat
signifies only beef, and by a confusion between
laboratory
and
lavatory, lab
has come to mean the latter. There are, of course, many loan-words from Hawaiian and the non-English immigrant languages,
e.g., aloha
(farewell),
haole
(a white of Germanic blood),
kuleana
(a small land-holding) and
wikiwiki
(quickly) from the Hawaiian;
jabon
(the shaddock),
hekka
(a popular stew), and
mama-san
(an old Japanese woman) from the Japanese;
stay
(from
esta
, meaning
is
) from the Portuguese;
kaukau
(food) from the Chinese; and
bagoong
(a shrimpy sauce) from one of the Filipino languages. In addition, there are a number of survivals from Beach-la-Mar, still in wide use,
e.g.
, the use of
been
as “the common device to express past time of action,” the use of
one
as the indefinite article, and the use of
humbug
in the sense of bother. The different races speaking the dialect have borrowed or invented various more or less opprobrious names for one another,
e.g., dog-eater
for Hawaiian,
baccaliaos
(codfish) for a Portuguese,
yabo
(from the Japanese) for a Korean. A recent Japanese immigrant is a
Japan jack
, and his brother from China is a
China jack
. The reduplication of words for intensification has been taken over from Hawaiian,
e.g., talk-talk
and
fight-fight
. In a number of cases words of similar sound have been confused, with resulting change in the meaning of one or both. Thus
slide
is commonly pronounced
sly, to sly
is to slide, and as an adjective
sly
means slippery. Similarly,
to bob
has been related (not illogically) to
barber
, and transformed
into
to barb
. The parts of speech are often interchanged,
e.g., taxi
signifies the driver as well as his vehicle, a stupid person is a
dumb, hungry
is used in place of
hunger
, and
politeness
serves as adjective instead of
polite
. Within the confines of any given part of speech there is a disregard of small shades of difference in meaning. Thus, “there was
much
people, but they had
few
money.”

The tendency to reduce all the tenses of the verb to a sort of historical present, so marked in vulgar American, goes the full way in the Hawaiian dialect. The auxiliaries
been
and
stay
, taken over from Beach-la-Mar and borrowed from Portuguese respectively, serve in lieu of tense inflections, at least in the easier sorts of discourse. Thus, “I
been
eat” means “I have eaten,” and “Us
stay
sweating” means “We are sweating” or “We were sweating,” according to the context. The final
s
is commonly omitted from the third person singular in the present tense, there is a hopeless confusion between the preterite and perfect participle, and
to
is often dropped before the infinitive, as in “I like go.” In the use of the pronoun all the confusions between case-forms that occur in vulgar American are encountered, and in addition two forms are sometimes joined, as in “
Me I
will go.” There is also some confusion in number, as in “Take
these
flowers and put
it
in a vase.” The noun, in the genitive, seldom shows the final ’
s
. The common form is “They stayed at
Hirata
,” not “at
Hirata’s.
” The noun also loses
s
in the plural. The article is frequently omitted altogether, and
one
is often used in place of
a
. Sometimes
a
is used in the plural. Among the prepositions there is chaos. Sometimes a preposition is omitted, as in “The horse stepped [
on
] him”; sometimes it is put where it doesn’t belong, as in “I attend
to
school”; and sometimes the wrong one is used, as in “We walked
till
Haina.” The adverbs also suffer severely. Both adverbs and adjectives are placed before the subject when emphasis is desired, and after the interrogatives
what
and
where
the verb also precedes the subject. Conjunctions are often omitted between two members of a series, and when a sentence closes with a preposition the preposition is sometimes forgotten. The articulation of those who speak this dialect is reasonably clear, but they have a habit of prolonging stressed vowels, and of clipping unstressed vowels and all consonants. “Sometimes it is difficult for an ear trained to Mainland American speech to catch words because of the comparative rapidity of utterance. There is little drawling, even where there
is hesitation; the speed and pitch of utterance remind us more of the British norm than of the American.”
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But British influence upon the dialect, of course, is actually infinitesimal. It is a form of American English, and in the course of time it will probably come closer and closer to everyday vulgar American. Since 1896 all the public schools of the islands have been conducted in American English, and every other language currently in use, including Hawaiian, shows signs of dying out.

Those Filipinos who have acquired American English in the public schools of the archipelago do it less violence than the Hawaiians, but nevertheless they make changes in it. It is most unusual for one of them to speak it well. For one thing, they learn it mainly, not by hearing it, but out of books, and under the tutelage of teachers who have learned it in the same way.
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For another thing, it is full of sounds that are strange to their lips, and are not easily mastered,
e.g.
, those of
th, sh, f, v, j
and
z
. Thus they commonly convert
there
into
dare, thin
into
tin, she
into
see, flea
into
plea, verb
into
herb, jelly
into
chelly, zig-zag
into
sig-sog, is
into
iss
, and
has
into
hass
. They are unable to pronounce combinations of
s
with
t, p, l
or
k
without prefixing
e
, so that
student
becomes
estudent, space
becomes
espace, sleep
becomes
esleep
, and
skate
becomes
eskate
. The word
Filipino
, as they utter it, sounds much like
Pilipino
. The combination of
m
or
n
with
d
is also difficult for them, as is the combination of
l
and
d
, so they commonly omit the
d
in such words as
blamed, chained
and
failed
. The
r
is always heavily trilled. The vowels are easier for them, save the flat
a
of
am
, but they often confuse one with another, and in writing they give all the vowels Spanish values, so that
chick
becomes
cheek
and
shed
becomes
shade
.
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According to Dr. H. Otley Beyer, professor of ethnology in the University of the Philippines, the Filipinos speak no less than 87 languages and dialects, but nearly all of them belong to the Tagala branch of the
Malayo-Polynesian family, and show the same general characters. For example, they all put the accent on the penultimate syllable in many common words. Inasmuch as Spanish does the same the natives are inclined to carry that accent into English, and in consequence they often say
probábly, charácter
and
distribúting
. Even when they do not push the accent all the way, they move it a step, thus producing such forms as
dyséntery
and
vegétable
. They also carry many Tagala idioms into English. Thus, the answer to a negative question is an affirmative,
e.g.
, “Have you no bananas?” “Yes.” The affirmative is also used in answering a question embodying alternatives, and applies to the one mentioned last,
e.g.
, the reply to “Do you prefer meat or fish” is “Yes,” meaning “I prefer fish.” This Filipino English will probably not long survive the American withdrawal from the islands. It is “essentially a bookish language, a language of learning, somewhat in the sense that Latin was the language of learning in the Middle Ages,” and not many natives have ever got sufficient command of it to speak it voluntarily and naturally.
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Article XIII, Section 3 of the Philippine Constitution provides that it is to be supplanted as soon as possible, along with Spanish, by “a common national language based on one of the existing native languages.”

The American spoken by Americans in the Philippines shows a large admixture of Spanish and Tagala words and phrases, just as the American spoken in Hawaii is shot through with terms borrowed from Hawaiian. But in both cases it is pronounced according to the General American pattern, and there are no changes in its grammar and syntax. Here is a specimen from Manila:

In this brief dialogue there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (
hola, amigo, porque, ese, señorita, lavandera, cuanto
and
paseo
), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (
spera
for
espera
and
no
kerry
for
no quiero
), two loan-words from the Tagala (
komusta
and
kayo
),
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two from the Pidgin English of the China coast (
chow
and
chit
), one Philippine-American localism (
conant
), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (
hablaing
). The following is from an article on Hawaiian English in the Christian Science
Monitor:
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