Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/13

 pedagogues, following the drive managers of the war time, conducts an annual Better Speech Week. The documents it issues offer but one more proof of the depressing fact that schoolmasters, at least in America, learn nothing and forget nothing. Its whole campaign seems to be centered upon an effort to protect the grammar books against the living speech of the American people.

As this edition goes to press, Dr. George Philip Krapp's large work, "The History of the English Language in America," has not yet been issued. Dr. Krapp, however, has politely permitted me to read his manuscript. His book presents an immense mass of material, and in the department of phonology most of that material is new. The complaint that I made in my first edition, that no adequate study of the development of American pronunciation existed, may be maintained no longer. But my discussions of the subject in the chapters which follow would be modified only in detail by the publication of Dr. Krapp's work, and so I have let them stand. It was my hope that some other American scholar would undertake a study of the grammar of vulgar American, hut so far this has not been done. Nor is there, as yet, any adequate investigation of American surnames, or of American slang. Perhaps Dr. Krapp's example will start work in these directions. Certainly it is absurd for American philologists to disdain, as they have in the past, the study of the national language. Judging by the communications that I have received from many of them—some, alas, rather waspish!--I incline to believe that the successive editions of the present work have broken down some of their old aloofness. Maybe the inquiries that I have suggested are being made even now.

The present edition is electrotyped, and I do not propose to make any changes in it for several years. The time and labor that I have put into it have kept me from other tasks that now press for execution. But soon or late, as fresh material accumulates, I'll probably go back to it. Meanwhile, I shall be grateful for any corrections or additions that are sent to me at my home, 1524 Hollins street, Baltimore.