Page:The American Language.djvu/255

Rh brethern, childern, interduce, apern, calvary, govrenment, modren and wosterd (for worsted). Ow is changed to er, as in feller, swatter, yeller, better, umbreller and holler; ice is changed to ers in jaunders. Words are given new syllables, as in ettum, mischievious and municipial.

In the complete sentence, assimilation makes this disorganization much more obvious. Mearns, in a brief article gives many examples of the extent to which it is carried. He hears "wah zee say?" for "what does he say?" "ware zee?" for "where is he?" "ast 'er in" for "ask her in," "itt'm owd" for "hit them out," "sry" for "that is right," and "c'meer" for "come here." He believes that t is gradually succumbing to d, and cites "ass bedder" (for "that's better"), "wen juh ged din?" (for "when did you get in?"), and "siddup" (for "sit up"). One hears countless other such decayed forms on the street every day. Have to is almost invariably made hafta, with the neutral vowel where I have put the second a. Let's, already noticed, is le’ ’s. The neutral vowel replaces the oo of good in g'by. "What did you say" reduces itself to "wuz ay?" Maybe is mebby, perhaps is p'raps, so long is s'long, excuse me is skus me; the common salutation, "How are you?" is so dismembered that it finally emerges as a word almost indistinguishable from high. Here there is room for inquiry, and that inquiry deserves the best effort of American phonologists, for the language is undergoing rapid changes under their very eyes, or, perhaps more accurately, under their very ears, and a study of those changes should yield a great deal of interesting matter. How did the word stint, on American lips, first convert itself into stent and then into stunt? By what process was baulk changed into buck? Both stunt and buck are among the commonest words in the everyday American vocabulary, and yet no one, so far, has investigated them scientifically.

A by-way that is yet to be so much as entered is that of naturalized loan-words in the common speech. A very characteristic word of that sort is sashay. Its relationship to the French chassé seems to be plain, and yet it has acquired meanings in