Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/425

Rh have been made by James Geddes, Jr., A. F. Chamberlain and other competent philologists, and there has grown up an extensive literature by native, French-speaking Canadians. Dr. Elliott says that alarmed purists predicted so long ago as 1817 that the French of Canada would be completely obliterated by English, and this fear still shows itself in all discussions of the subject by French-Canadians. But the language continues as the daily speech of perhaps 1,500,000 persons, and still has an official status, and is often heard in the Dominion Parliament. "The effect of English on the French," says Elliott, "has been immeasurably greater than that of French on the English.…The French has made use of all the productive means—suffixes, prefixes—at its disposal to incorporate the English vocables in its word-supply,…and to adapt them by a skilful use of its inflectional apparatus to all the requirements of a rigid grammatical system." On one page of N. E. Dionne's lexicon I find the following loan-words from English: barkeeper, bargaine (used in place of marché), bar-room, bull's-eye, buckwheat, buggy, buck-board, bugle, bully, bum, business, bus. As will be observed, a large proportion of them are not really English at all, but American. Many other Americanisms have got into the language, e. g., gang (in the political sense), greenback, ice-cream, elevateur, knickerbockers, trolley-car, sweater, swell (as an adjective of all work), caucus, lofeur (= loafer, a loan-word originally German) and lager, another. "Comme tu es swell ce matin, vas-tu aux noces?"—this is now excellent Canadian French. So is gologne (= go 'long). Louvigny de Montigny, in "La Langue Française au Canada," complains bitterly that American words and phrases are relentlessly driving out French words and phrases, even when the latter are quite as clear and convenient. Thus, un patron, throughout French Canada, is now un boss, pétrole is l'huile de charbon