The dialect authors, in the meantime, are doing the reading public a service in furnishing it with entertaining stories of an elevating character. Moreover, some of them at least, as for example, Page, Harris and others, are rendering literature and science an ulterior service, consciously or unconsciously, in preserving in their books types of a people and their speech which a wave of oblivion is rapidly sweeping away.
If one will examine the speech of the negro and the native-born illiterate white, it matters not whether the latter be from New England, or from the South, one will find that, excepting certain provincialisms peculiar to their respective homes, their language has much in common, and to the student of historic English, it exhibits indisputable evidence of its affinity with the English of the seventeenth century. This is obvious from such words as hand-kercher, ar (air), pint (point), pison (poison), gwine (going), arrant (errand), cratur (creature), arth (earth), all of which are common alike to the “Yankee dialect” and to the negro dialect. The student who is familiar with the development of the English tongue will at once recognize these as standard, according to the received pronunciation of the seventeenth century. But in the development of the language, these pronunciations subsequently fell into disuse and were discarded by standard English. They still survived, however, in the lower stratum of society among the poor and illiterate who, denied the privileges and advantages of an education and therefore ignorant of the most elementary principles of grammar, inherited this speech from their ancestors and handed it down, with but little change, from generation to generation to their children.
The language of the seventeenth century was brought to America by the early settlers and was taught the slaves, and the tongue which the illiterate negroes then learned to speak they have preserved, without any material change, down to the present generation. Since this is the case, we can not then be surprised to find upon examination that many of their dialectal pronunciations and locutions are to be traced back to classic authors of an earlier period, yea, to Shakespeare himself. In this sense it is doubtless true that many of the fossilized pronunciations of our illiterates are much nearer the language of, and would therefore be more intelligible to, Shakespeare and Milton than present standard English.
Every one who has ever heard the old negro preacher giving an “exhortation” at the close of his fervid “sarmon” knows very well that, though the old man’s heart was perhaps right and himself on the way to the kingdom, his conscience never for a moment troubled him about his loose grammar. Notwithstanding his sanctification and his ecstatic anticipation of the joys of the kingdom for which he was bound, he had no conscientious scruples about “axin’” his “ole marster” if the latter was at all tardy in offering him the desired help. Perhaps many of those who were so familiar with the lingo of the old preacher never reflected that his language, like his heart, was, after all, not very far wrong and entirely without precedent when he “axed” for something. He was but obeying the scriptural injunction, which, according to Tyndale’s version, reads: “Axe and it shall be geven you.” Nor do they know that he was following, all unwittingly, to be sure, the example set by the first English printer, Caxton, who, in the preface to his edition of Vergil’s Aeneid, used precisely the same expression. If then the old parson blundered, as, according to our modern standard, he did, he at all events blundered in good company.
In Chaucer, “the first finder of our faire language,” as his ardent disciple Occleve rapturously, though quaintly, called him, we find the same word. Here we find also forms long since fossilized, though still preserved in the speech of the untutored, such as kiver, driv, holp, writ, rid, etc. In “Much Ado About Nothing” Dogberry, albeit he dislocates the dictionary in speaking of that villain who, he prophesies, would be condemned to everlasting redemption, yet uses grammar which, for his day, was above reproach, when he exclaimed: “O that I had been writ down an ass!”
So we must acknowledge that no violence was done to the language, however our sense of propriety may be shocked, when a century or so ago a Londoner remarked to his friend who had come up from his home in the country to see the play of “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and who was copiously bespattered with mud, as a result of his ride: “You came up to town, I suppose, to see Orpheus and you rid I see.” It would be difficult to find in the literature of that period a more felicitous illustration of a perfectly legitimate play on words which the contemporary pronunciation permitted.
Shakespeare, who could not resist the temptation to make a pun whenever opportunity offered, furnishes additional evidence of his versatility and ingenuity in his apt recognition of the obsolete pronunciation of many words of his time, which he turned to good account. Hence so many of his witticisms. In “Henry IV,” for instance, Falstall says: “If reasons were a plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion,” thus playing upon the old pronunciation of raisins with which we are all familiar upon the lips of the unlettered. Thus he plays upon the antiquated pronunciation of Rome as room, when, in “Julius Caesar,” Cassius says of Caesar’s vaulting ambition which o’erleaped itself:
“Now is it Rome indeed and Roome enough,
When there is in it but one only man.”
One of the conundrums of that period, which, by the way, could only have belonged to that period, illustrates the antiquated pronunciation of chair as cheer, still current among the illiterate. “Why is a stout man always happy?” The answer was, “Because he is cheerful (chair full).”
It is needless to multiply random illustrations. We owe a lasting debt of gratitude to the philologists who have labored in this field and illuminated this subject which before was enveloped with almost Cimmerian darkness. These amenities of philology which have been mentioned above are but an incident of the arduous and laborious pursuits of those philologists. Let us consider for a while some of the results of their research which prove how the English language has changed.