No More Learning

M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness: '_Je definis un
patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue
toute jeune st qui n'a pas fait fortune. _' The first part of his
definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the
Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, and neither, it seems
to me, will quite fit a _patois/_, which is not properly a dialect, but
rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of
pronunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by
side with the finished and universally accepted language. Norman French,
for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI. , could hardly be
called _patois_, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a
_lingo_ rather than a dialect. It has retained a few words now fallen
into disuse in the mother country, like to _tarry_, to _progress_,
_fleshy_, _fall_, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some,
as in _freshet_; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the
broad Norman pronunciation of _e_ (which Moliere puts into the mouth of
his rustics) in such words as _sarvant_, _parfect_, _vartoo_, and the
like. It maintains something of the French sound of _a_ also in words
like _ch[)a]mber_, _d[)a]nger_ (though the latter had certainly begun to
take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt
_dainger_). But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in
it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English
provincial dialects. There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb
to _sleeve_. To _sleeve_ silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of
silk with the point of a needle till it becomes _floss_. (A. S. _slefan_,
to _cleave_=divide. ) This, I think, explains the '_sleeveless_ errand'
in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously
darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that
cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, and therefore bootless?
I am not speaking now of Americanisms properly so called, that is, of
words or phrases which have grown into use here either through
necessity, invention, or accident, such as a _carry_, a _one-horse
affair_, a _prairie_, to _vamose_. Even these are fewer than is
sometimes taken for granted. But I think some fair defence may be made
against the charge of vulgarity. Properly speaking, vulgarity is in the
thought, and not in the word or the way of pronouncing it. Modern
French, the most polite of languages, is barbarously vulgar if compared
with the Latin out of which it has been corrupted, or even with Italian.
There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between
_ministerium_ and _metier_, or _sapiens_ and _sachant_, than between
_druv_ and _drove_ or _agin_ and _against_, which last is plainly an
arrant superlative. Our rustic _coverlid_ is nearer its French original
than the diminutive cover_let_, into which it has been ignorantly
corrupted in politer speech. I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen
at different times three diverse pronunciations of a single
word,--_cowcumber_, _coocumber_, and _cucumber_. Of these the first,
which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of _concombre_. Lord
Ossory assures us that Voltaire saw the best society in England, and
Voltaire tells his countrymen that _handkerchief_ was pronounced
_hankercher_. I find it so spelt in Hakluyt and elsewhere. This enormity
the Yankee still persists in, and as there is always a reason for such
deviations from the sound as represented by the spelling, may we not
suspect two sources of derivation, and find an ancestor for _kercher_
in _couverture_ rather than in _couvrechef_? And what greater phonetic
vagary (which Dryden, by the way, called _fegary_) in our _lingua
rustica_ than this _ker_ for _couvre_? I copy from the fly-leaves of my
books, where I have noted them from time to time, a few examples of
pronunciation and phrase which will show that the Yankee often has
antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side. My list
might be largely increased by referring to glossaries, but to them eyery
one can go for himself, and I have gathered enough for my purpose.

I will take first those cases in which something like the French sound
has been preserved in certain single letters and diphthongs.