Название: Лексикология английского языка - Антрушина Г. В.

Жанр: Иностранные языки

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CHAPTER 14

Do Americans Speak English

or American?

In one of his stories Oscar Wilde said that the English "have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."

Bernard Shaw, on the contrary, seemed to hold a different opinion on the point, but he expressed it in such an ambiguous way that, if one gives it some thought, the idea is rather the same as that of Wilde. Shaw said that America and England are two great nations separated by the same language.

Of course, both these statements were meant as jokes, but the insistence on a certain difference of the language used in the United States of America to the language spoken in. England is emphasized quite seriously.

Viewed linguistically, the problem maybe put in this way: do the English and the Americans speak the same language or two different languages? Do the United States of America possess their own language?

The hypothesis of theso-called "American language" has had several champions and supporters, especially in the United States (H. L. Mencken. The American Language. N.-Y., 1957).

Yet, there are also other points of view. There are scholars who regard American English as one of the dialects of the English language. This theory can hardly be accepted because a dialect is usually opposed to the literary variety of the language whereas American English possesses a literary variety of its own. Other scholars label American English "a regional variety" of the English language.

Before accepting this point of view, though, it is necessary to find out whether or not American English, in its modern stage of development, possesses those characteristics which would support its status as an independent language.

A language is supposed to possess a vocabulary and a grammar system of its own. Let us try and see if American English can boast such.

Vocabulary of American English

It is quite true that the vocabulary used by American speakers, has distinctive features of its own. More than that: there are whole groups of words which belong to American vocabulary exclusively and constitute its specific feature. These words are called Americanisms.

The first group of such words may be described as historical Americanisms.

At the beginning of the 17th c. the first English migrants began arriving in America in search of new and better living conditions. It was then that English was first spoken on American soil, and it is but natural that it was spoken in its 17th c. form. For instance, the noun fall was still used by the first migrants in its old meaning "autumn", the verb to guess in the old meaning "to think", the adjective sick in the meaning "ill, unwell". In American usage these words still retain their old meanings whereas in British English their meanings have changed.

These and similar words, though the Americans and the English use them in different meanings, are nevertheless found both in American and in British vocabularies.

The second group of Americanisms includes words which one is not likely to discover in British vocabulary. They are specifically American, and we shall therefore call them proper Americanisms. The oldest 01 these were formed by the first migrants to the American continent and reflected, to a great extent, their attempts to cope with their new environment.

It should be remembered that America was called "The New World" not only because the migrants severed all connections with their old life. America was for them a truly new world in which everything was strikingly and bewilderingly different from what it had been in the Old Country (as they called England): the landscape, climate, trees and plants, birds and animals.

Therefore, from the very first, they were ;faced with a serious lack of words in their vocabulary with which to describe all these new and strange things. Gradually such words were formed. Here are some of them.

Backwoods ("wooded, uninhabited districts"), cold snap ("a sudden frost"), blue-grass ("a sort of grass peculiar to North America"), blue-jack ("a small American oak"), egg-plant ("a plant with edible fruit"), sweet potato ("a plant with sweet edible roots"), redbud ("an American tree having small budlike pink flowers, the state tree of Oklahoma"), red cedar ("an American coniferous tree with reddish fragrant wood"), cat-bird ("a small North-American bird whose call resembles the mewing of a cat"), cat-fish ("called so because of spines likened to a cat's claws"), bull-frog ("a huge frog producing sounds not unlike a bull's roar"), sun-fish ("a fish with a round flat golden body").

If we consider all these words from the point of view of the "building materials" of which they are made we shall see that these are all familiarly English, even though the words themselves cannot be found in the vocabulary of British English. Yet, both the word-building pattern of composition (see Ch. 6) and the constituents of these compounds are easily recognized as essentially English.

Later proper Americanisms are represented by names of objects which are called differently in the

United States and in England. E. g. the British chemist's is called drug store or druggist's in the United States, the American word for sweets (Br.) is candy, luggage (Br.) is called baggage (Amer.), underground (Br.) is called subway (Amer.), lift (Br.) is called elevator (Amer.), railway (Br.) is called railroad (Amer.), carriage (Br.) is called car (Amer.), car (Br.) is called automobile (Amer.).

If historical Americanisms have retained their 17th-c. meanings (e. g. fall, п., mad, adj., sick, adj.), there are also words which, though they can be found both in English and in American vocabulary, have developed meanings characteristic of American usage. The noun date is used both in British and American English in the meanings "the time of some event"; "the day of the week or month"; "the year". On the basis of these meanings, in American English only, another meaning developed: an appointment for a particular time (transference based on contiguity: the day and time of an appointment > appointment itself).