4.

The Adoption of Foreign Words in American English

4.1 Introduction

Contact with speakers of other languages residing in various parts of North America has led to the adoption of foreign words in American English. Some of these are regionally restricted, others have nationwide currency, still others are used—or at least understood—wherever English is spoken.

The circumstances under which words were adopted from the several languages—Indian, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, African—and the time of their acceptance vary greatly.

4.2 Amerindian Words

Algonkian words referring to the American fauna and flora and to the Indian way of life were adopted as soon as English colonists set foot on the Atlantic Seaboard, among them moose, raccoon, hickory, persimmon, hominy, pow wow, squaw, wigwam. For other examples see Mencken-McDavid 1963: 110-20. Stripped of their inflections and adapted to the English phonological and prosodie systems, they were carried westward to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. In the Plains and the Southwest terms were adopted from other Indian tribes, as tepee “tent” from Sioux and coyote “prarie wolf” from Nahuatl (via Mexican Spanish).

Amerindian names of rivers, mountains, cities, states, etc., abound all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This seems to be so natural that reference to it sounds trivial. Yet this observation has its relevance in area linguistics. As the most conservative elements of the vocabulary, place names often provide important—if not the only—information on the areal extent of a submerged speech community.

4.3 Dutch Words

For the Dutch contributions to the English vocabulary, the Linguistic Atlas survey of the Eastern States has established a set of isoglosses that are focused on the Hudson Valley, several of which are shown in Figure 20.

Other Dutch words have achieved more than regional—even national—currency, among them boss, cookie, waffle, Santa Claus, and Yankee. At the other extreme, such “homely” terms as rollechies “roulades” and winkle-hawk “right-angle tear in a garment” barely survive within the narrow confines of the Dutch settlement area on the lower Hudson River [Hawkins 1942].

FIGURE 20: Hudson Valley Words

From H. Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern States.

The geographic extent of the Dutch settlements is clearly reflected in place names. From south to north we encounter, among others, Sandy Hook (N. J.), Staaten Island, Brooklyn, Yonkers, Peekskill, Staatsburg, Rhine beck, Cat skill, Greenbush, Rensselaer (Co.), (Ballston) Spa, Amsterdam. It is within this area that the largest number of Dutch words survive in English.

The history of this section of New York State is so well known that it can be suggested in a few words. The Dutch settlements, established in the 1630’s, were taken over by the English in 1664. Though dominated by the English, many Dutch families continued to speak their language well into the nineteenth century. Throughout the Colonial period, both English and Dutch were official languages, and continued so for some time after the Revolution. During two centuries of decreasing bilingualism Dutch words were taken into the English of this area. In the westward movement some of them were carried to the Great Lakes Basin and beyond. Others were diffused more or less widely because the things they denote were themselves adopted by speakers of English, as the terms for foods prepared in a special way: cruller, cookie, coleslaw, pot cheese, waffle; stoop for a distinctive feature of the Dutch house; scow and sleigh for vehicles used by the Dutch; boss and Santa Claus for social customs peculiar to the Dutch. This is an excellent example to show that the diffusion of words is entailed by the spreading of the things they denote. Things and words go together.

4.4 Pennsylvania German Words

Pennsylvania German (PG) words have entered the English spoken in the Great Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, the fertile farm land of which York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, and Bethlehem are the urban centers. The location of some representative isoglossic lines established by the Atlas survey is shown in Figure 21. Their configuration effectively conveys the fact that Germanisms are most numerous in eastern Pennsylvania—the area that has been bilingual from Colonial times to the present—and that their number diminished in a westerly and southwesterly direction, where German is no longer spoken.

To the present bilingual area are confined, besides toot, the following farm words: bee! a call to chickens; laugh “whinny” (PG laxa); shilshite “whiffletree” (PG šil- šait; cp. SG scheit “billet, bar”).

Other Germanisms are still current as far west as the Alleghenies and/or in the Shenandoah Valley and the northern Appalachians, where German farmers from eastern Pennsylvania settled in larger numbers. Thus hommie! a call to sheep; vootsie! a call to pigs; saw buck ~ woodbuck “sawhorse”; over-den ~ over-head “hay loft” (cp. PG den = SG tenne “barn floor”); thick-milk “curdled milk” (transi, of PG /dikə-milix /); fat-cake s “doughnuts” (transi, of PG /fed-kuxə /); fossnocks “a kind of doughnut” (adaptation of PG /fasnaxs-kuxə / “Shrovetide cakes”). Only a few of these “homely” Germanisms show a wider diffusion, as ponhaws “Philadelphia scrapple” and especially smear case ~ cheese “cottage cheese.”

The perseverance of Germanisms in the English of the bilingual section of eastern Pennsylvania and their gradual recession in the western part of the state and in the Appalachians can be traced in considerable detail, because we have good information both on their present dissemination and on the underlying sociocultural factors. The settlement history of this ethnic group, its way of life, and its cultural activities (among them the creation of a folk literature in their dialect from ca. 1850 onward) are well known, and their dialect of German—essentially that of the Palatinate (Rheinpfalz) with some Alemannic admixtures—has been adequately described. The whole process of the interaction of languages in intimate contact—the adoption of words from the receding language on the part of the dominant language and their fading out is part of it—can be directly observed in this case. A good beginning has been made, but much more can be done. See, among others, the studies of C. E. Reed and L. W. Seifert [1949, 1954] and of Kurath [1945], which rely upon data secured by systematic sampling in the field with the aid of a set questionnaire.

FIGURE 21: Pennsylvania German Words

From H. Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern States.

The field records of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and the South Atlantic States provide considerable evidence for phonological influence of Pennsylvania German upon the English current in the bilingual area of eastern Pennsylvania, which awaits investigation and interpretation. Some of the problems can be easily foreseen:

(1) Since PG has only voiceless fricatives, to what extent are /v, z /replaced by /f, s / in their English?

(2) Does the lack of the contrast / d ≠ ¿ / in PG lead to some confusion between / d / and /1 / in their English?

(3) How do those whose first language is PG handle English / θ / and / ð /, which have no counterparts in PG? Do they substitute their voiceless / s / and /d /, at least occasionally?

A striking phonic effect of the PG substratum upon the English spoken in parts of eastern Pennsylvania appears in the free mid vowels /e / and / o / exemplified in day, bracelet, and ago, coat [Kurath-McDavid 1961: Maps 18–21]. Differing sharply from the upgliding / εI / and [ɔu ~ ou] current in Philadelphia and vicinity, the Great Valley has the long close monophthongs [e^•] and [o^•] of PG.

4.5 French Words

Long before English settlers moved into the basin of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, French explorers, fur traders, and Jesuit fathers had established trading post, forts, and missions at strategic points in these vast areas. Such place names as Lake Champlain, Detroit, Sault Ste. Marie, and St. Paul, La Crosse, St. Louis, New Orleans bear witness to this historic fact. When English settlements were planted there in the early decades of the nineteenth century, these French “names on the land,” and many others, were adopted by the newcomers.

Within these areas, French words for features of the landscape—butte, chute, prairie, and levee, bayou (< Choctaw)—and for ways of the voyageurs—batteau, cache, chowder, portage—were taken into English in the eighteenth century, most of them through contacts between the far-ranging French and English fur traders. The extensive replacement of a variety of eastern terms for the mock serenade by shivaree (presumably via /srivari / from French charivari) along the Great Lakes and in the Valley of the Mississippi must clearly be attributed to this background [Davis-McDavid 1949].

Little is known about the extent of French influence upon the English spoken in the province of Ontario and of English influence upon the French of Quebec in officially bilingual Canada. On the North American continent there is no other linguistic and sociocultural situation like this. It offers an unsurpassed opportunity for the observation of linguistic cross-influences in a rather well known social context.

Thanks to M. Babington and E. B. Atwood [1961], we have some information about the contributions of French to the English of largely bilingual southern Louisiana. The authors find the usual types of “homely” words, such as calls to domestic animals, affectionate terms for members of the family, and names of favorite dishes. Also some words referring to the environment have been adopted, among them armoire “wardrobe,” pirogue “river boat” (< Sp. piragua < Carib), bagasse “waste from sugar cane” (< Sp. bagazo), pooldoo “coot or mudhen” (Fr. poule d’eau).

It is of interest to note that some of these words came into French from Spanish, the language of the rulers of Louisiana from 1762 to 1803. Among them, lagniappe “a bonus given to the customer” (< Sp. la napa < Quechuan), is worth noting as an expression for a practice that has spread beyond the French-speaking area into coastal Texas [Babington-Atwood 1961: Map 11].

4.6 Spanish Words

Spanish county names along the Gulf of Mexico—Zapata, Presidio, Refrigio, Mata Gorda, Lavaca, San Jacinto—suggest the centers of Spanish settlements in Texas, so do the names of rivers flowing into the Gulf—Rio Grande, Colorado, Trinity—and the names of such cities as El Paso, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Gonzales. Outnumbered two to one by English settlers in the eastern half of the state when Texas was admitted to the Union (1845), speakers of Spanish were the sole occupants of the sparsely settled area along the Rio Grande until after the Civil War. It is here that Mexican Spanish words, with some of which the English settlers of central Texas had become familiar by 1850, became established in English.

Most of the Spanish terms adopted fall into two semantic domains: (1) words for features of the landscape not hitherto encountered by English speaking settlers in their westward movement; (2) the terminology for a way of herding cattle in open grassland, unfamiliar to speakers of English. In his Regional Vocabulary of Texas [1962] E. B. Atwood has provided extensive localized data for such terms in a series of maps. He also calculated the relative frequency of these Spanish terms in Texas as a whole.

Of the topographical terms, some are current in all of western Texas and familiar to most Americans, as canyon “deep stream bed,” mesa “high flat land,” arroyo “dry creek.” Others are largely restricted to the southwestern part of the state, as llano “plain,” acequia “irrigation ditch,” chaparral “brush-covered land.”

English settlers adopted the Mexican way of herding cattle in its entirety, and with it the Spanish terminology. The northward expansion of the “Cattle Kingdom” through the High Plains—with its cattle drives as far north as Wyoming—is a familiar story. The popular “Westerns” of the movie industry have made some of the Spanish terms known throughout the land, and even abroad.

Several terms within this semantic field—vaguero “cowboy” and toro “bull”—are confined to the southwestern triangle of Texas, the original center of the cattle industry, which has remained bilingual to this day. Some are more or less restricted to the grassland of the high plains, as hacienda “ranching establishment,” reata “rope for lassoing cattle,” remuda “group of saddle horses.” Still others have spread also eastward and into Oklahoma, among them corral “horse pen,” bronco — bronc “unbroken horse,” cinch “saddle girth.” See Atwood 1962: Maps 2-29. The northward spreading of some of these Spanish terms is treated by H. B. Allen [1958: 5-7].

The phonological and prosodie adaptation of the Spanish words offered little difficulty.

(1) the palatal /n / is replaced by the sequence /nj / in canyon; apical / r / and / rr / are rendered by constricted / r /, as in reata and corral; the velar fricative /x / is replaced by / h / in hackamore and frijoles. The initial consonants of llano and hacienda in American English are due to spelling.

(2) The Spanish stress pattern is retained, as in mesa, remuda, corral, and hackamore (< jaquima) “rope halter of a horse.” Lariat for la reata “lasso” is an exception.

(3) Final unstressed vowels tend to be dropped when a word achieves wide currency, as in ranch, cinch, lariat, bronco — bronc.