American Language Supplement 2 (29 page)

With Dr. C. M. Wise of the Louisiana State University in charge, there is now in progress a survey of the State dialects upon a scientific basis, and in the course of a few years it should produce a valuable volume for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Wise was one of the scholars who took instruction in linguistic geography from Dr. Hans Kurath, editor of the Atlas, while Kurath was at Brown University. At the conclusion of this course the General Education Board, acting through the American Council of Learned Societies, established four scholarships in the South for scholars interested in studying its speech, and Wise was appointed for Louisiana. He decided to gather materials for a linguistic atlas of the State, and he and his graduate students have been engaged upon the project ever since. He read a paper describing their work before the Linguistic Society of America in July, 1942, and published a report upon it in
Studies in Linguistics
in 1945.
⁴
A provisional map that he has prepared shows that the area of French influence runs northward from the Gulf to the vicinity of Alexandria on the Red river. From there its boundary slopes south-westward to the mouth of the Sabine river, on the Texas-Louisiana border, and southeastward to Baton Rouge and then eastward along the north side of Lake Pontchartrain to the mouth of the Pearl river. In this area, says Wise, there are two phonological marks of the local speech. One is the change of
ar
, “final in a stressed syllable with or without a succeeding consonant or consonants, and not preceded
by the sound of
w
,” into a vowel resembling the
a
of
chalk
and
although
, so that
yard
becomes something on the order of
yawd
. The other is the diphthongization of the vowel in
bird, heard
, etc., already noted. In the six parishes east of the Mississippi, but north of the French area, the speech is that of Mississippi and the rest of the lowland South. In the region lying along the Arkansas and Texas borders it is that of the Ozarks, which is to say, of Appalachia. A number of Wise’s graduate students have completed intensive studies of the speech of communities in various parts of the State, and all the material amassed is being preserved in quadruplicate.

“Maine and New Hampshire,” says Hans Kurath, “are the most conservative parts of New England. Both are rural and remote from the great population centers, with large areas that are sparsely settled and have been losing population for several decades. As a result, [they] preserve many dialectal features lost in the southern part of the Eastern area, and they still use currently other features now rare in eastern Massachusetts or losing ground in the Boston area.”
¹
All this applies, as Kurath explains further on, only to the southeastern coast and the western uplands, both of which were settled by immigrants from Massachusetts. “Northern Maine,” he says, “belongs to the St. John river area of New Brunswick, which was settled by Loyalists from New York, New Jersey and western Connecticut,” and therefore shows the influence of what has now come to be called General American. The dialects of the State have got a great deal of attention from linguists in recent years, and the literature dealing with them is extensive. It begins with a study of that of the Penobscot valley, contributed to
Dialect Notes
in 1907 by Joseph William Carr and George Davis Chase, of the University of Maine,
²
and it runs down to the detailed reports provided by the maps in the Linguistic Atlas of New England.
³
Carr and Chase,
whose interest was chiefly in vocabulary, called attention to the influence of lumbering upon the speech of Maine, and also to the infiltration of terms from Canada. The investigators who followed
¹
also devoted themselves mainly to vocabulary, and in their lists were many picturesque locutions that have never been reported, so far as I know, from any other region,
e.g., tie-up
, a cow-barn;
to cousin
, to visit relatives;
gorming
, clumsy, stupid;
pizen-neat
, over-neat;
spleeny
, vaguely ailing;
hog-wrestle
, a country dance;
burn
, burned-over woodland;
matterated
, infected;
drozzle tail
, a slovenly woman;
muster-bread
, a kind of ginger-bread;
claw-off
, an excuse;
pod
, a large belly;
all of a biver
, excited;
all of a high
, very eager;
booze-fuddle
, whiskey;
dingclicker
, a good-looking woman;
dite
, a small amount;
to gibbet
, to punish;
nimshy
, a young girl;
stool
, a sill or threshold;
potato thump
, mashed potatoes;
skulch
, swill;
rent
, any house or apartment for rent;
snug
, stingy;
yip
, noisy talk;
whee-up
, a fit of anger; and
smutter
, a cloud of dust. Some of the survivals of English dialect in the dialect were tracked down and listed by Dr. Anne E. Perkins in 1922,
²
and its phonology was discussed by Ezra Kempton Maxfield in 1926
³
and by W. Cabell Greet in 1931.
⁴
Maxfield thus described two of the Maine vowels:

Maxfield said that the Maine
a
, as in
aunt
, is not
aw
or
ah
, but “something that sounds like
ar
,… [though] certainly not the gnarled sound that passes for
r
west of Albany and north of the Mason and Dixon line.… You would be laughed at if you asked the way to
Bath
(rhymed with
lath
). You must say
Barth
.” Greet hears a flat
a
in
aunt, dance, can’t, answer, grass
and
fast
, and says that it “is very flat.” He agrees with Maxfield that
o
is often a diphthong, but says that it “is not marked.” He goes on:

The first known study of an American dialect was Jonathan Boucher’s of that of Maryland, written before 1775 though not published until 1832.
²
It took the form of a pastoral entitled “Absence” and was accompanied by explanatory footnotes and a glossary. It antedated John Witherspoon’s treatise on American speech by six years.
³
Some of the words occurring in it are not traced further back, by the DAE, than Boucher’s text,
e.g., wring-jaw
, hard cider;
cushie
, a kind of pancake;
eggnog
, and
belly-bacon
. Not many of them, however, appear to have been peculiar to Maryland: they were simply specimens of the general speech of the colonies,
e.g., mad
for angry,
Fall
for Autumn,
bug
for any kind of insect,
persimmon-beer
,
roasting-ear, possum, canoe, hominy, pow-wow, squaw
and
yam
. But one of them,
johnny cake
, may have originated in Maryland,
¹
and so may some of the tobacco-growers’ terms listed but not defined,
e.g., twist-bud, thick-joint, bull-face
and
leather-coat
. Boucher defined
bandore
, which he noted was pronounced
banjor
, as “a rude musical instrument made of the shell of a large gourd or
pumpion
,
²
and strung somewhat in the manner of a violin.” “It is much used,” he added, “by Negroes.”
³
He defined
pickaninny
as “a male infant,” and said nothing of color. Some of his terms were borrowed, with credit, from books on the West Indies
⁴
but he indicated that they had come into Maryland use.
⁵

Since Boucher’s time there has been little study of the speech of the State, but an excellent investigation of that of at least one of the counties, Garrett, has been made by a native thereof, Miss Florence Warnick. This is reported in a pamphlet, “Dialect of Garrett County, Maryland,” printed privately in 1942.
⁶
Garrett county is the westernmost county of the State and is surrounded by Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Geographically, it is part of Appalachia, but its speech has been influenced by immigration from the German areas of Pennsylvania. Some of the German loans noted by Miss Warnick are
hutchy
, a colt (Ger. dial,
hutsch, hutschel
or
hutschli
);
ponhoss
, scrapple (Ger.
pfannhase
, panned hare);
satz
, home-made yeast;
snits
, sliced and dried apples or other fruit (Ger.
schnitz
, a slice);
what-fer
(Ger.
was für
), and the Pennsylvania German use of
all
, as in “The butter is
all
,”
i.e.
, exhausted. She suggests that another word,
blage
, gossip, may be from the French
blague
. Many of the terms she lists are obviously Appalachian,
e.g.
,
whistle-pig
for what is called a
ground-hog
elsewhere in Maryland, but there are also a few that Wentworth does not find anywhere else,
e.g., cabbage-leaves
, large ears;
to chew
, to scold;
to cut up molly
, to act extravagantly;
to dance in the hog-trough
, used of an older brother or sister left unmarried after the marriage of a junior;
hanover
, a rutabaga;
¹
to make him scratch where he don’t itch
, to put in a predicament;
pe-pippa
, a very little bit;
pooch-jawed
, fat-cheeked;
snoopy
, finicky about food; and
sollybuster
, any unusual thing. Miss Warnick notes that
ornery
is pronounced
onry
in Garrett county.

As I have noted in my introductory remarks on American dialects, there are at least five speech areas in Maryland. Some incidental mention of them is to be found in “Delmarva Speech,” by W. Cabell Greet,
²
but there was no scientific attempt to delimit them until the late Guy S. Lowman, Jr., one of the editors of the Linguistic Atlas of New England, began accumulating material for a similar atlas of the South Atlantic States. At the time of his death he had in hand records of the speech of 400 informants in scattered communities in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. About a third of these informants were elderly persons who had lived in their birthplaces or nearby all their lives, a second third was made up of middle-aged persons of fair education, and the remainder were college graduates. This somewhat meagre material was worked up in 1940–41 by Miss Elizabeth Jeannette Dearden, a candidate for the doctorate at Brown University under Hans Kurath.
³
Miss Dearden found that the line dividing Appalachian speech from that of the Piedmont, represented by the use of [paper]
poke
in the former and
sack
in the latter, crosses Maryland from north to south in Washington county, rather less than 100 miles west of Baltimore, and that the
lightwood
line runs west to east through Washington and Annapolis, and then through Caroline county on the Eastern Shore into Delaware. She said: