Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/190

 in that fashion, unless, perhaps, it was a music-hall comedian trying (and failing) to be funny. I have lived in England for twenty-one years and I know the country, north and south, east and west, country and town, far better than Mr. Williams can ever hope to know it. I have lived among working-people in London, in provincial towns and in villages, and I have never heard any Englishman speak in that style. I have been in the army, as a private soldier and as an officer, and I tell Mr. Williams that if he imagines he heard a soldier saying hexercises and heverywhere, then he simply has not got the faculty of hearing. The dropped h is common, but the sounding of it where it ought not to be sounded has almost ceased. I have never heard it sounded in a city, and only on one occasion have I heard it sounded in the country, where an old-fashioned fisherman, with whom I used to go sailing, would sometimes say haccident when he meant accident. This man's younger brother never misplaced the h at all in this way, though he often elided it where it ought to have been sounded. The h is more likely to be dropped than sounded because of the natural laziness of most people over language. As many errors of pronunciation are due to slovenliness and indolence as are due to illiteracy, and it is far easier to omit the h from a word than to sound it. A considerable effort is necessary in order to sound the h in words where there is no such letter, and this fact, apart altogether from the results of compulsory education, makes it unlikely that Mr. Williams heard anyone in England saying Hi for I and Hamerica for America.

Mr. Ervine is of the opinion that popular novels perpetuate misconception of the common speech of England in America, and of that of the United States in England. "I imagine that most Americans," he says, "form their impressions about English dialect from reading Dickens, and do not check these impressions with the facts of contemporary life.…A popular novel will fix a dialect in the careless mind, and people will continue to believe that men and women speak in that particular fashion long after they have ceased to do so. Until I went to America, I believed that all negroes spoke like the characters in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Mr. John Drinkwater clearly thought so, too, when he wrote 'Abraham Lincoln.' I expected to hear a negro saying something like 'Yaas, massa, dat am so!' when he meant, 'Yes, sir, that is so!' I daresay there are many negroes in America who do speak in that way; in fact, Mr. T. S. Stribling's notable story, 'Birthright,' makes this plain. But all negroes do not do so, and perhaps the most correct English I