A History of English Language

A history of the english language 340
243. Archaic Features in American English.
A second quality often attributed to American English is archaism, the preservation of old
features of the language that have gone out of use in the standard speech of England.
American pronunciation as compared with that of London is somewhat old-fashioned. It
has qualities that were characteristic of English speech in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The preservation of the r in General American and a flat a in fast, path, etc. (§
250.7) are two such that were abandoned in southern England at the end of the eighteenth
century. In many little ways standard American English is reminiscent of an older period
of the language. Most Americans pronounce either and neither with the vowel of teeth or
beneath, while in Britain an alternate pronunciation has developed since the American
colonies were established and the more usual pronunciation is now with an initial
diphthong [aI]. The American use of gotten in place of got as the past participle of get
always impresses the British of today as an old-fashioned feature not to be expected in
the speech of a people that prides itself on being up-to-date. It was the usual form in
Britain two centuries ago. American English has kept a number of old words or old uses
of words no longer used in Britain. Americans still use mad in the sense of angry, as
Shakespeare and his contemporaries did, and they have kept the general significance of
sick without restricting it to nausea. They still speak of rare meat, whereas the British
now say underdone. Platter is a common word in the United States but is seldom used
anymore in Britain except in poetry. Americans have kept the picturesque old word fall
as the natural word for the season. They learn autumn, the word used in Britain, in the
schoolroom, and from books. The American I guess, so often ridiculed in England, is as
old as Chaucer and was still current in English speech in the seventeenth century. If we
were to take the rural speech of New England or that of the Kentucky mountaineer, we
should find hundreds of words, meanings, and pronunciations now obsolete in the
standard speech of both England and this country. There can be no question about the fact
that many an older feature of the language of England can be illustrated from survivals in
the United States.
The phenomenon is not unknown in other parts of the world. The English spoken in
Ireland illustrates many pronunciations indicated by the rhymes in Pope, and modern
Icelandic is notably archaic as compared with the languages of the Scandinavian
countries of the mainland. Accordingly it has often been maintained that transplanting a
language results in a sort of arrested development. The process has been compared to the
transplanting of a tree. A certain time is required for the tree to take root, and growth is
temporarily retarded. In language this slower development is often regarded as a form of
conservatism, and it is assumed as a general principle that the lan-guage of a new country
is more conservative than the same language when it remains in the old habitat. In this
theory there is doubtless an element of truth. It would be difficult to find a student of the
Scandinavian languages who did not feel that the preservation of so many of the old
inflections in Icelandic, which have been lost in modern Swedish and Danish, speaks
strongly in support of it. And it is a well-recognized fact in cultural history that isolated
communities tend to preserve old customs and beliefs. To the extent, then, that new