Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/148

 56o The English Language in America and all the others that have become a part of the general stock of English. Stores in the Western world (the usage is not con- fined to the United States) really were stores and not shops. Our most common corn was maize, and it naturally became corn par excellence. Fall {autumn) and rare {underdone) axe "Americanisms" only in the sense that they have retained a vitality here which even in England they have not wholly lost. Political life, sport, changed economic conditions, have all furnished the language with new words, or old words in new senses. The most striking differences, however, have come about, not through the retention of dialect words or the intro- duction of new words for new ideas, but because American English, in its comparative isolation, has not followed step by step the many changes that have occurred in British EngUsh since the seventeenth century. American EngUsh is in some respects archaic. It has never developed, for example, the swooping diphthongs that, since the end of the eighteenth century at least, have characterized the'British pronunciation of e, i, 0, u, ' to represent which the British phoneticians write say, be, boat, and do [sei], [bij], [bout], [duw]. The American diphthongs, so far as they exist, are much less noticeable. The characteristic American unrounding of [o] to [a], got, not [gat], [nat], occurs in some of the British dialects and was an elegant affectation in the days of Charles II. The palatal g and c still sometimes heard in the Virginia pronunciation of garden and card (written "gyarden, " "cyard") were held by many in eighteenth-century England to be the height of refinement. The old distinction between hoarse (vowel of no) and horse (vowel of law) is still preserved by many Americans, especially outside the Middle States. Elizabethan gotten and the old preterite ate are heard oftener in America than in Britain. Americans, indeed, look on a pronunciation "et" as vulgar. They have either never lost or have, for the most part, suc- cessfully recovered the ancient distinction between the voice- less initial in which and the voiced in witch, where the South Briton pronounces them both witch. Finally, the so-called broad or Italian a, which began to be fashionable in England near the close of the eighteenth century, never established itself outside of New England and, to some ' In phonetic notation vowels should be given their Continental sounds.