Made In America (4 page)

Sometimes the early explorers took Indians back to Europe with them. Such had been the fate of the heroic Squanto, whose life story reads like an implausible picaresque novel. He had been picked up by a seafarer named George Weymouth in 1605 and carried off – whether voluntarily or not is unknown – to England. There he had spent nine years working at various jobs before returning to the New World as interpreter for John Smith on his voyage of 1613. As reward for his help, Smith gave Squanto his liberty. But no sooner had Squanto been reunited with his tribe than he and nineteen of his fellows were kidnapped by another Englishman, who carried them off to Málaga, and sold them as slaves. Squanto worked as a house servant in Spain before somehow managing to escape to England, where he worked for a time for a merchant in the City of London before finally, in 1619, returning to the New World on yet another exploratory expedition of the New England coast.
¹⁸
Altogether he had been away for nearly fifteen years, and he returned to find that only a short while before his tribe had been wiped out by a plague – almost certainly smallpox introduced by visiting sailors.

Thus Squanto had certain grounds to be disgruntled. Not only had Europeans inadvertently exterminated his tribe, but twice had carried him off and once sold him into slavery. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, Squanto was of a forgiving nature. Having spent the greater part of his adult life among the English, he may well have felt more comfortable among Britons than among his own people. In any case, he
settled with them and for the next year, until he died of a sudden fever, served as their faithful teacher, interpreter, ambassador and friend. Thanks to him, the future of English in the New World was assured.

The question of what kind of English it was, and would become, lies at the heart of what follows.

So begins the
Mayflower Compact,
written in 1620 shortly before the Mayflower Pilgrims stepped ashore. The passage, I need hardly point out, contains some differences from modern English. We no longer use S interchangeably with s, or
ye
for
the
^*5
A few spellings –
Britaine, togeather, Northerne
– clearly vary from modern practice, but generally only slightly and not enough to confuse us, whereas only a generation before we would find far greater irregularities (for example,
gelousie, conseil, audacite, wiche, loware
for
jealousy, council,
audacity, which
and
lower).
We would not nowadays refer to a ‘dread sovereign’, and if we did we would not mean by it one to be held in awe. But allowing for these few anachronisms, the passage is clear, recognizable, wholly accessible English. Were we, however, somehow to be transported to the Plymouth colony of 1620 and allowed to eavesdrop on the conversations of those who drew up and signed the
Mayflower Compact,
we would almost certainly be astonished at how different – how frequently incomprehensible – much of their spoken language would be to us. Though it would be clearly identifiable as English, it would be a variety of English unlike any we had heard before. Among the differences that would most immediately strike us:

• Kn-,
  which was always sounded in Middle English, was at the time of the Pilgrims going through a transitional phase in which it was commonly pronounced
  tn.
  Where the Pilgrims’ parents or grandparents would have pronounced
  knee
  as ‘kuh-nee,’ they themselves would have been more likely to say ‘t’nee.’
  
• The interior
  gh
  in words like
  night
  and
  light
  had been silent for about a generation, but on or near the end of words – in
  laugh, nought, enough, plough
  – it was still sometimes pronounced, sometimes left silent and sometimes given an f sound.
  
• There was no sound equivalent to the
  ah
  in the modern
  father
  and
  calm.
  Father would have rhymed with the present-day
  gather
  and
  calm
  with
  ram.
  
• Was
  was pronounced not ‘woz’ but ‘wass’, and remained so, in some circles at least, long enough for Byron to rhyme it with
  pass.
  Conversely,
  kiss
  was often rhymed with
  is.
  
• War
  rhymed with
  car
  or
  care.
  It didn’t gain its modem pronunciation until sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century.
  ¹
  
• Home
  was commonly spelled ‘whome’ and pronounced, by at least some speakers, as it was spelled, with a distinct
  wh-
  sound.
  
• The various
  o
  and
  u
  sounds were, to put it mildly, confused and unsettled. Many people rhymed
  cut
  with
  put, plough
  with
  screw, book
  with
  moon, blood
  with
  load.
  Dryden, as late as the second half of the seventeenth century, made no distinction between
  flood, mood
  and
  good,
  though quite how he intended them to be pronounced is anybody’s guess. The vicissitudes of the wandering
  oo
  sound are evident both in its multiplicity of modern pronunciations (for example,
  flood, wood, mood)
  and the number of such words in which the pronunciation is not fixed even now, notably
  roof, soot
  and
  hoof.
  
• Oi
  was sounded with a long
  i,
  so that
  coin’d
  sounded like
  kind
  and
  voice
  like
  vice.
  The modern
  oi
  sound was sometimes heard, but was considered a mark of vulgarity until about the time of the American Revolution.
  
• Words that now have a short
  e
  were often pronounced and sometimes spelled with a short
  i.
  Shakespeare commonly wrote ‘bin’ for
  been,
  and as late as the tail-end of the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin was defending a short
  i
  pronunciation for
  get, yet, steady, chest, kettle
  and the second syllable of
  instead
  ²
  – though by this time he was fighting a losing battle.
  
• Speech was in general much broader, with stresses and a greater rounding of
  rs.
  A word like
  never
  would have been pronounced more like
  ’nev-arrr’
  .
  ³
  Interior vowels and consonants were more frequently suppressed, so that
  nimbly
  became ‘nimly’,
  fault
  and
  salt
  became ‘faut’ and ‘saut’,
  somewhat
  was ‘summat’. Other letter combinations were pronounced in ways strikingly at variance with their modern forms. In his
  Special Help
  to
  Orthographie or the True-writing of English
  (1643), a popular book of the day, Richard Hodges listed the following pairs of words as
  being ‘so neer alike in sound ... that they are sometimes taken one for another’:
  ream
  and
  realm, shoot
  and
  suit, room
  and
  Rome, were
  and
  wear, poles
  and
  Paul’s, flea
  and
  flay, eat
  and
  ate, copies
  and
  coppice, person
  and
  parson, Easter
  and
  Hester, Pierce
  and
  parse, least
  and
  lest.
  The spellings – and misspellings – of names in the earliest records of towns like Plymouth and Dedham give us some idea of how much more fluid early colonial pronunciation was. These show a man named Parson sometimes referred to as
  Passon
  and sometimes as
  Passen;
  a Barsham as
  Barsum
  or
  Bassum;
  a Garfield as
  Garfill;
  a Parkhurst as
  Parkis;
  a Holmes as
  Holums;
  a Pickering as
  Pickram;
  a St John as
  Senchion;
  a Seymour as
  Seamer;
  and many others.
  ⁴
  
• Differences in idiom abounded, notably with the use of definite and indefinite articles. As Baugh and Cable note, Shakespeare commonly discarded articles where we would think them necessary – ‘creeping like snail’, ‘with as big heart as thou’ and so on – but at the same time he employed them where we would not, so that where we say ‘at length’ and ‘at last’, he wrote ‘at the length’ and ‘at the last’. The preposition
  of
  was also much more freely employed. Shakespeare used it in many places where we would require another: ‘it was well done of [by] you’, ‘I brought him up of [from] a puppy’, ‘I have no mind of [for] feasting’, ‘That did but show thee of [as] a fool’, and so on.
  ⁵
  One relic of this practice survives in American English in the way we tell time. Where Americans commonly say that it is ‘ten of three’ or ‘twenty of four’, the British only say ‘ten to’ or ‘twenty to’.
  
• Er
  and
  ear
  combinations were frequently, if not invariably, pronounced ‘ar’, so that
  convert
  became ‘convart’,
  heard
  was ‘hard’ (though also ‘heerd’), and
  serve
  was ‘sarve’.
  Merchant
  was pronounced and often spelled ‘marchant’. The British preserve the practice in several words today – as with
  clerk
  and
  derby,
  for instance – but in America the
  custom was long ago abandoned but for a few well-established exceptions like
  heart, hearth
  and
  sergeant,
  or else the spelling was amended, as with making
  sherds
  into
  shards
  or
  Hertford,
  Connecticut, into
  Hartford.
  
• Generally, words containing
  ea
  combinations –
  tea, meat, deal
  and so on – were pronounced with a long
  a
  sound (and of course many still are:
  great, break, steak,
  for instance), so that, for example,
  meal
  and
  mail
  were homonyms. The modern
  ee
  pronunciation was just emerging, so that Shakespeare could, as his whim took him, rhyme
  please
  with either
  grace
  or
  knees.
  Among more conservative users the old style persisted well into the eighteenth century, as in the well-known lines by the poet William Cowper:
  

Different as this English was from modern English, it was nearly as different again from the English spoken only a generation or two before in the mid-1500s. In countless ways, the language of the Pilgrims was strikingly more advanced, less visibly rooted in the conventions and inflections of Middle English, than that of their grandparents or even parents.

The old practice of making plurals by adding
-n
was rapidly giving way to the newer convention of adding – s, so that by 1620 most people were saying
knees
instead of
kneen, houses
instead of
housen, fleas
instead
offlean.
The transition was by no means complete at the time of the Pilgrims – we can find
eyen
for
eyes
and
shoon
for
shoes
in Shakespeare – and indeed survives yet in a few words, notably
children, brethren
and
oxen,
but the process was well under way.

A similar transformation was happening with the terminal
-th
on verbs like
maketh, leadeth
and
runneth,
which also were
increasingly being given an
-s
ending in the modern way. Shakespeare used
-s
terminations almost exclusively except for
hath
and
doth.
^*6
Only the most conservative works, such as the King James Bible of 1611, which contains no
-s
forms, stayed faithful to the old pattern. Interestingly, it appears that by the early seventeenth century even when the word was spelled with a
-th
termination it was pronounced as if spelled with an
-s.
In other words, people wrote ‘hath’ but said ‘has’, saw ‘doth’ but thought ‘does’, read ‘goeth’ as ‘goes’. The practice is well illustrated in Hodges’
Special Help to Orthographie,
which lists as homophones such seemingly odd bedfellows as
weights
and
waiteth, cox
and
cocketh, rights
and
righteth, rose
and
roweth.

At the same time, endings in
-ed
were beginning to be blurred. Before the Elizabethan age, an
-ed
ending was accorded its full phonetic value, a practice we preserve in a few words like
beloved
and
blessed.
But by the time of the Pilgrims the modern habit of eliding the ending (except after
t
and
d)
was taking over. For nearly two hundred years, the truncated pronunciation was indicated in writing with an apostrophe –
drown’d, frown’d, weav’d
and so on. Not until the end of the eighteenth century would the elided pronunciation become so general as to render this spelling distinction unnecessary.

The median
t
in
Christmas, soften
and
hasten
and other such words was beginning to disappear (though it has been re-introduced by many people in
often).
Just coming into vogue, too, was the
sh
sound of
ocean, creation, passion
and
sugar.
Previously such words had been pronounced as sibilants, as many Britons still say ‘tissyou’ and ‘iss-you’ for
tissue
and
issue
.
The early colonists were among the first to use the new word
good-bye,
contracted from
God be with you
and still at that time often spelled ‘Godbwye’, and were among the first to employ the more democratic forms
ye
and
you
in preference to the traditional
thee, thy
and
thou,
though many drifted uncertainly between the forms, as Shakespeare himself did, even sometimes in adjoining sentences, as in
1 Henry IV:
’I love thee infinitely. But hark you, Kate.’
^*7