The Early Days of American English | Hacker News Reader

The Early Days of American English

laphamsquarterly.org

116 pointssamclemens60 comments

The attribution of "bushwhacker" as coming from the Dutch "forest keeper" surprised me, as the compound word bushwhack already makes sense as a description of the activity and a quick search indicates both bush and whack were already present in English prior.

The Oxford English Dictionary etymology of the word just indicates it is a compound formed from those two English words[0]. Online Etymology Dictionary does mention a possible connection to the Dutch however[1]. It would be interesting to know why etymologists make the connection to the Dutch.

[0]: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/bushwhacker_n

[1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/bushwhacker

Edit: it seems the English sense of the word bush as meaning "the wilderness" came to it from the Dutch bosch via the American colonies[2], maybe that's the connection.

[2]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/bush#etymonline_v_18128

In Dutch we have the word “boswachter”, which means something like forest keeper. In old Dutch it was probably spelled “boschwachter” or something similar.

South African English uses bush in this sense as well. I anssume it’s via the Afrikaans “bosveld”. In fact English speakers will often retain the “veld”, using the term bushveld. (Nobody says bushfield).

It has a specific meaning [0], but is also used generally to mean the wilderness.

I’m not sure if it has a meaning in Dutch other than as “forest field”.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushveld

I assumed it was an Australian amalgamation of bush and whack that can be imagined to mean exactly what it means, like a lot of words do, perhaps inspired by a loose overheard memory, perhaps not.

I can't really imagine an American saying it. I can imagine an Australian.

People say bushwhack in the US. It means not using an established trail when out in the woods/wilderness.

> For instance, corn meant wheat in England, but usually referred to oats in Ireland.

No combined reference to both oats and the English language is complete without Johnson's definition[1].

[1]: https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=o...

> Americans also said mad for angry, another English usage that died out in the old country.

> The expression I guess, meaning that one supposes or agrees, is often used to stereotype Americans in British books and movies, but it was current in England during the seventeenth century

My parents were refugees and survived in the country I grew up in by keeping close with the tightknit community of their fellow countrymen. They kept the language and the culture of their homeland alive, and taught it to their kids, so that they would never forget their roots.

The problem: the language of the homeland changed in those years, and what my siblings and I actually learned is outdated, funny-sounding, and almost unintelligible since bits of english are thrown in there too. A conversation with a native is hard. I guess its funny how language changes, and how it is preserved most by those who are no longer part of it's development.

Early colonial America coincided with the end of the Great Vowel Shift; my understanding is English at that time sounded somewhat more like Irish or New England (and Downeast Midatlantic?) accents today. That is, "English English" has changed more than other forms of English.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uQc5ZpAoU4c

But then again: https://daily.jstor.org/colonial-america-gain-linguistic-ind...

Author's understanding of English English differs from mine.

> A bluff in England denoted a high but rounded shoreline, while in America it was used to describe steep cliffs

Author uses the past tense; perhaps it did denote a shoreline, I don't know. Nowadays it refers to a "false hilltop" - what appears to be the crest of a hill while you are climbing towards it, but turns out to be elevated ground between the climber and the true peak.

> In England, lumber is old, discarded furniture and other items of the sort usually found in attics

Lumber: cut wood, wood that has been prepared in a sawmill.

Timber: Wood "on the hoof" - complete with bark.

Old discarded furniture might be considered lumber; but I've never heard the term used that way.

Source: I'm English.

These are historic definitions. You can see them in old dictionaries, e.g. the first definition of lumber is "disused furniture and the like" in the older editions of the OED. The 3rd definition is timber sawn into planks and called out as being North American usage. And the 2nd definition of "superfluous fat, Esp. In horses" seems extremely dead to me.

Regarding "lumber", the author used the present tense. So old dictionaries can't support that usage.

Regarding "bluff", the author used the past tense, and may be correct.

The internet aechive comes again to the rescue, if you want to read the article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230916175256/https://www.lapha...

I feel like there’s a second facet of this. Spoken English in old interviews and movies here in the States often featured an awkward, weird hybrid accent known as “mid-Atlantic“, and it really didn’t die completely out of movies until the 1990s. Until that time, it appears that Americans had some kind of inferiority complex about their regional accents.

Since then news readers in the USA have even adopted a much more genuinely American, specifically Southern California sound, that even began to seep into UK spoken English a bit. (Since about the early 2000s the BBC has started to let newsreaders with regional English accents into the club, which I really enjoy and encourage.)

> Until that time, it appears that Americans had some kind of inferiority complex about their regional accents.

The phenomenon of Mid-Atlantic English appears to have been a class marker rather than merely people being embarrassed about having a regional accent.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent :

It is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so". The accent was embraced in private independent preparatory schools, especially by members of the American Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film and stage acting

I think we’re saying the same thing but your explanation is much better. Thanks.

See e.g. the conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr, who spoke with a really classic example of this accent (and was alive much more recently than most people who spoke like this):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0d8mzdr4jE

It's such a weird mix of British and American locution. I've never heard anyone speak like this in real life, and they did I would look at them funny.

He had an interesting history. I guess English wasn't his first language. And he spent some time going to school in England in his early teens. I'd guess he came by that fascinating accent honestly. Not quite British, not quite American. And he spoke with a melody, very flowing from one word into the next. It does make him sound a bit aristocratic.

He pulled it off better than anyone though

If sounding as infinitely punchable for how he said it as well as what he said is better.

Buckley is one of Robin Williams’s impressions as Genie that I was too young to get. https://youtu.be/RBUSp7LglJg?t=36

Not to be confused with the actual mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia/Baltimore) accent which is basically the aggressive opposite of the transatlantic accent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_accent

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_English

Yeah, not exactly our greatest cultural contribution to the language.

Sorry, people of Philly ;)

I’m convinced the BBC actively hunts down the most aggressive form of each accent specifically to put them on air now.

I was going to add something about how I sometimes don’t even understand them, but thanks for getting the point across for me!

I find the number of accents kind of exhausting tbh. But the real reason I turn off BBC is because of the fact that it's sports news half the time ... or a feel good story about a barber in Kibera ... or meta-news (we're in the news room and this is how we put together our stories). I wish there was just a radio station with news. BBC has the people to do it but they just don't do it. I'd much rather have inside politics about Zambian carbon credits but that's the type of thing that's like <1% of the programming.

Still laughing my butt off at this perfect comment

Period piece movies tend to use modern slang and ways of speaking, which is just lazy on the part of the scriptwriters.

Mark Twain's books give a taste of how people actually talked then.

Yes. So do old court transcripts. It is amazing how modern some of the participants of the Salem witch trials sounded.

One that sticks out in my mind is the Coen brothers’ True Grit (with dialogue largely taken from the 1968 novel), which consciously avoids contractions—not entirely, but enough to result in a noticeable (though pleasing) aesthetic. Except that’s more of the opposite case—false archaism, rather than false modernity.

Saw the movie recently myself, and wondered if it's really representative of the vernacular of rough men on the frontier in the 19th century. By teachers in schoolhouses, sure, but by bounty hunters and criminals?

It was pointed out on HN recently that Tolkien achieved an "old english" effect in the dialog by avoiding using french-derived words.

"Deadwood" was interesting in that it used Shakespearean dialog in an old west setting. It was a bit hard to follow, but worth it.

Mid-Atlantic/Trans-Atlantic was a status marker, educated into the upper class similarly to Received Pronunciation in the UK.

> An English watershed is a line or ridge separating the waters that flow into different drainage areas, but in America it’s a slope down which the water flows, or the catchment area of a river.

The original English meaning of watershed is retained in American English in a metaphorical usage, such as "a watershed event", a turning point.

I guess I've been using Pond and Watershed incorrectly all these years, as I have definitely referred to something artificial as a pond and have used watershed to connote drainage. Even the definition of bluff they use feels to me like something we could use in American English. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> sick, which referred specifically to a digestive upset, became a general term for any illness

This claim strikes me as dubious. (But it wouldn’t be a pop-sci article on linguistics without at least one factual error, so maybe this is it.) Wiktionary has a 15th-century attestation of sick meaning “ailing” more generally, and this accords with Germanic cognates (cf. Swedish sjuk “ill”). I would therefore suspect that some English dialects brought to America preserved the original meaning before UK English narrowed it. This claim is sourced neither in the linked article nor in the book The United States of English that it hawks. Would be interested if anyone has more on this.

This online etymology dictionary (etymonline.com/word/sick) says that: The restricted meaning of English sick, "having an inclination to vomit, affected with nausea," is from 1610s.

Usage and etymology may differ, even if over the long term there is little semantic drift, as usage may reflect context and cultural changes.

Popular references like etymononline.com are nice and all, but I’m hoping for some scholarly literature if anyone here in the community has a good pointer.

Along those lines, I have always found this map fascinating: https://roaringbrookmaps.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/what-do-yo...

We have quite a mix here in Oregon.

The real surprise, given the distances in miles and time, is how similar American and British English are - compare with Afrikaans vs Dutch for example, or how much (at least according to Wikipedia) Cypriot Turkish and Greek have both diverged from their mainland forms.

How about how Americans say ICE cream (stress on the first word), while British say ice CREAM. There must be more examples like this.

Someone down voted me, so here's a list and explanation about the difference in stress:

https://englishwithkim.com/words-americans-brits-stress-diff....

Yankees my dad always joked was a concatenation of Jan and Kees.

I update diction in open source docs periodically, but avoid Americanizing the text (unless the project I’m working on has a policy of doing so). Sometimes, though, I don’t realize something’s an Americanism.

One US–UK difference I hit last week was the mandative subjunctive. A sentence went: “…to request that it adds such‐and‐such…”. My instinct was to use: “…to request that it add such‐and‐such…”, but a contributor told me introducing the mandative subjunctive here would feel archaic in British English, and the former wording is typical there.

Sure enough, I found some quotes from UK papers (cribbed from a Reddit post) that seem to demonstrate the practice. In the US I think I’d expect a newspaper or other formal writing to use the subjunctive in these cases, even though it’s often dropped in casual speech.

> Fidel Castro has demanded that the USA stops [stop] invading Cuban airspace (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013wwyx)

> MPs have demanded that the Government reconsiders [reconsider] its decision to allow Huawei to help build the UK’s 5G networks (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/02/12/mps-demand...)

> Last month it demanded that trading positions are [be] disclosed (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jul/03/regulators....)

> but avoid Americanizing the text

So you UKize it instead? Not sure one is better than the other, and would argue US English is more widespread.

Is Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand English closer to UK or America? I assume Canada is closer to the US while those down south are closer to the UK.

It's weird because the commonwealth countries all still insist on UK spelling, but have become much more American in their slang and actual speech.

Canadian vocabulary is pretty much the same as American, we say “gas”, not “petrol”, and use “I guess” instead of “I suppose”, but there are still some spelling holdouts, like “centre”, “theatre”, “colour” etc. But spelling of the “tire”, for example, is American, not British.

I leave it unchanged. The result is stylistic variation across sections of the codebase based on the nationality of the writer, but that’s fine—my focus is on fixing unclear or outright incorrect writing, not necessarily forcing every tense or mood to be consistent with my own regional dialect.

"Color, not colour", someone in America said.

This one's the other way around. It was spelled "color" in early English, French, and Latin. At some point the French officially added a "u" in order to make the spelling more phonetic, and the English aristocracy imitated that even though it makes no sense given English pronunciation.

Rather like the use of z over s, American English simply follows the ancient Greek over the French.

Could you cite that? Sounds interesting, if somewhat contrary to expectation since Chaucer manuscripts already show -our for some words later spelled with -or.

While the part about the English aristocracy is somewhat glib (at the point in time when the "u" was added, arguably the aristocracy were still French, or at least Norman), but the fact that it was "color" in old French and Latin is indisputable, and that for a while both spellings were acceptable in England even as "color" become enshrined in America.

Quoting https://www.etymonline.com/word/-or :

In U.S., via Noah Webster, -or is nearly universal (but not in glamour), while in Britain -our is used in most cases (but with many exceptions: author, error, tenor, senator, ancestor, horror etc.). The -our form predominated after c. 1300, but Mencken reports that the first three folios of Shakespeare's plays used both spellings indiscriminately and with equal frequency; only in the Fourth Folio of 1685 does -our become consistent.

A partial revival of -or on the Latin model took place from 16c. (governour began to lose its -u- 16c. and it was gone by 19c.), and also among phonetic spellers in both England and America (John Wesley wrote that -or was "a fashionable impropriety" in England in 1791).

[...]

Fowler notes the British drop the -u- when forming adjectives ending in -orous (humorous) and derivatives in -ation and -ize, in which cases the Latin origin is respected (such as vaporize). When the Americans began to consistently spell it one way, however, the British reflexively hardened their insistence on the other. "The American abolition of -our in such words as honour and favour has probably retarded rather than quickened English progress in the same direction." [Fowler]

The sibling comment is great, but I'd also like to add that it's important to keep in mind that English spelling was not particularly standardized until relatively recently. People spelled words and even their own names however it seemed best to them at that particular moment in time. Variants like "color" and "colour" existed alongside each other peacefully for centuries and even in a single writer's mind.

"Color" did not exit the British isles until quite late! For example, perusing through Google Books, you can find it in the 1829 edition of the London "Encyclopaedia", and in the 1844 edition of "The London Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Manufacture and Repertory of Patent Inventions."

Whenever I encounter an English person who laments the American spelling of color or honor, I remind them that they spell those words the French way.

> spelled

You have just outed yourself as American!

Not necessarily. “Spelled” as the passive participle is the Oxford spelling. (Oxford spelling uses “spelt” for the active past tense form only.)

I'm French. It's funny, because now that you mention it, the verbs "colorer" and "colorier", both related to colors, are still spelled this way, while the word for color itself is "couleur"... and I never really noticed.

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