Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/234

 oo?" A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dialogue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly translated the first question as "Where is he?" and the second as "Where is who?" A recent viewer with alarm argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. "Like the French," he says, "we have a marked liaison—the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to c'meer (= come here).…Hoo-zat? (= who is that?) has as good a liaison as the French vous avez." This critic believes that American tends to abandon t for d, as in Sadd'y (== Saturday) and siddup (= sit up), and to get rid of h, as in ware-zee? (= where ts he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to Chapter IX. Even, however, in the standard speech there is a great slaughter of vowels. A correspondent of education, accustomed to observing accurately, sends me the following specimens of his own everyday conversation:

But here, of course, we come upon the tendency to depress all vowels to the level of a neutral e—a tendency quite as visible in English as in American, though there are differences in detail. The two languages, however, seem to develop along paths that tend to diverge more and more, and the divergences already in effect, though they may seem slight separately, are already of enough importance in the aggregate to put serious impediments between mutual comprehension. Let an Englishman and an Amer-