lish newspaper. This slaughter of the accents, it must be obvi- ous, greatly aids the rapid naturalization of a newcomer. It loses much of its foreignness at once, and is thus easier to absorb. Depot would have been a long time working its way into Amer- ican had it remained depot, but immediately it became plain depot it got in. The process is constantly going on. I often encounter naivete without its accents, and even deshabille, hof- brdu, senor and resume. Canon was changed to canyon years ago, and the cases of expose, divorcee, schmierkase, employe and matinee are familiar. At least one American dignitary of learning, Brander Matthews, has openly defended and even advocated this clipping of accents. In speaking of naif and naivete, which he welcomes because "we have no exact equiva- lent for either word," he says: "But they will need to shed their accents and to adapt themselves somehow to the traditions of our orthography."[1] He goes on: "After we have decided that the foreign word we find knocking at the doors of English [he really means American, as the context shows] is likely to be useful, we must fit it for naturalization by insisting that it shall shed its accents, if it has any; that it shall change its spelling, if this is necessary ; that it shall modify its pronuncia- tion, if this is not easy for us to compass ; and that it shall con- form to all our speech-habits, especially in the formation of the plural."[2]
In this formation of the plural, as elsewhere, English regards the precedents and American makes new ones. All the English authorities that I have had access to advocate retaining the for- eign plurals of most of the foreign words in daily use, e. g., sanatoria, appendices, virtuosi, formulae and libretti. But Amer- ican usage favors plurals of native cut, and the Journal of the American Medical Association goes so far as to approve curricu- lums and septums. Banditti, in place of bandits, would seem an affectation in America, and so would soprani for sopranos
- ↑ Why Not Speak Your Own Language? in Delineator, Nov., 1917, p. 12.
- ↑ I once noted an extreme form of this naturalization in a leading Southern newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. In an announcement of the death of an American artist it reported that he had studied at the Bozart in Paris. In New York I have also encountered chaufer.
