Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/147

Colonial Conditions 559 in the great commercial city of London. But the varieties that characterize spoken English today were probably even greater — less subdued to a literary medium — in the seventeenth , century when the language was transplanted to America. And American authors have seldom written with an eye to the London book market. It is not, therefore, surprising that the English in America, cut off from the British at home by an estranging sea and feeling for them an affectionate regard in about the same degree as it was accorded, should not have followed precisely the same lines of change. Some of the re- sulting differences it will help matters to glance at. The early colonists in America brought their English with them. They were for the most part plain people and their language must have had all the characteristics of the several dialects which they spoke at home. How far their original dialectical peculiarities are reflected in later American speech it might be hard to determine; probably so far as the later educated speech goes, not much. But the old New England plural housen, clever = good, mad = angry, I be, you be, they be, shet (shut), becase (because), sich {such), wrastle, mought {might), ax {ask), ketch {catch), '^ guess = suppose, and many others more certainly came over in the Mayflower than much else reputed a part of that seemingly miraculous cargo. Some of these forms are not often heard today, though guess has become a sort of shibboleth. ^ If they were once more common, it should be remembered that the situation in America was not wholly unlike that of England after the Norman Conquest; with the relaxation of literary standards, dialect forms, no longer re- pressed, gained recognition they could not have had in con- flict with a strong literary tradition. But it is not chiefly here that we are to look for the causes of such differences as gradually separated American and British speech. New conditions of life, to be sure', called for new words : wigwam, tomahawk, squaw, papoose, prairie, canyon, ' Ketch, Spenser's form of the word, is, to many educated people, the only natural pronunciation, and catch a purely literary affectation. There is a certain pleasant irony in the fact that in the strictly analogous word keg it is the pronun- ciation kag that is regarded as a vulgarism. ' The real objection to such expressions as guess and right away, as to quite so and / mean to say, lies not in themselves but in their monotonous employment as catch-words.