Raven I. McDavid

Midland and Canadian Words in Upstate New York

T HE STUDENT of dialect geography is interested not only in indicating the major dialect divisions within a speech community, but in interpreting apparent exceptions to the major patterns. Moreover, when two major dialect types have been found separated by a rather sharp boundary, it is important to examine just what speech forms have crossed that boundary, and to discover or suggest the reasons. This paper is concerned with the extent to which the folk vocabulary of Upstate New York1 reflects linguistic influences from outside the Northern speech area of the Atlantic seaboard states; specifically, it is concerned with the occurrences of words of Midland or Canadian origin.2 Kuraths analysis of the vocabulary of the Atlantic seaboard3 sets up eighteen dialect areas between southern New Brunswick and the Savannah River, grouped into the three regional divisions of Northern, Midland, and Southern. Admittedly on incomplete data,4 Kurath included all Upstate New York in the Northern area, and specifically indicated it as derivative from northwestern New England.5 Since the indicated boundary between the North and the Midland runs somewhat south of the New York-Pennsylvania line almost due west from the forks of the Susque-

Aphaeresis in New England

ARECENT ARTICLE appearing in this journall discusses the occurrence and form of APHAERESIS in ordinary American-English conversation. Although Kypriotakis claims appear to be substantially correct,2 they are unsupported by systematic data. This paper reports evidence of aphaeresis in New England, as documented in the Linguistic Atlas of New England.3 The authors take this opportunity to demonstrate the potential of the Atlas, and other resources of its kind, to provide facts of usage amenable to sociolinguistic theory. It is unfortunate that sociolinguists have typically failed to consult these valuable linguistic materials.4 The case argued in a sociolinguistic article could only be strengthened by an examination of all pertinent materials.

Dimensions of Usage and Dictionary Labeling

The practice of labeling words or senses in English dictionaries is far from a new one. Among seventeenth-century dictionaries Edward Phillips in the various editions of the New World of Words used symbols like a dagger or a check to indicate words whose use he thought should be restricted in some way. Those which he marked included hybrid words, hard words--unassimilated Latin terms--and terms of art-what we would call technical terms. In his revision of Phillips and in his own dictionary John Kersey also used symbols. He marked an almost entirely new set of words, but again included hard words as well as obsolete words and technical terms. Kersey also condemned low words--what we might call popular terms, including cant, argot, and sometimes dialect terms. Nathaniel Bailey in his dictionaries marked words also; his groups again fall into hard words, obsolete terms, and low words--cant and dialect. The same categories are found among the words Benjamin , Martin marked in his dictionary of 1749. N. E. Osselton in Branded Words in English Dictionaries Before Johnson (1958) concludes that before Johnson the corpus of &dquo;branded words&dquo; was about two thousand. In his Plan of an English Dictionary of 1747, Samuel Johnson announced his intention of marking several classes of words by symbols, including poetic words, obsolete words, &dquo;words used in burlesque and familiar compositions&dquo;, and &dquo;barbarous or impure words and expressions&dquo; so that these might be &dquo;carefully eradicated wherever they are found.&dquo; In the Dictionary itself Johnson includes frequent subjective, prescriptive labels: &dquo;a barbarous contraction&dquo;, &dquo;a colloquial abuse of the word&dquo;, &dquo;this sense is somewhat low&dquo;, &dquo;an unauthorized word&dquo;, &dquo;a word

False Scents and Cold Trails: the Pre-Publication Criticism of the Merriam Third

new meanings but on the words and meanings that had been attested in earlier editions. A competent staff conscientiously worked to make the new dictionary the best possible record of mid-century usage. Nevertheless, well before September 28, 1961--the official date of publication--the dictionary had won the hostility of a large and vocal proportion of newspaper editors, professional book-reviewers, and the miscellaneous pundits-at-large that are often described as the (New York) Literary Establishment. Later, there were vigorous misrepresentations of the dictionary in such places as the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the Saturday Review, the American Scholar and Horizon. --

Atlas of English Sounds. Eduard Kolb, with the help of Beat Glauser, Willy Elmer, and Peter Stamm. Bern: A. Francke Verlag, 1979, pp. 12 + 323 + [2]

of the SED records from the Northern Section--carbons in the possession of the late Eugen Dieth, who had assisted Orton in planning the Survey, especially in designing the Questionnaire (Dieth and Orton 1952). 1 A Word Geography of En land (Orton-N. Wright 1974) appeared just before Orton’s death. The Linguistic Atlas of En land (Orton, Sanderson and Widdowson 1978) was completed by Orton’s associates, according to his plans (see review by R. McDavid, American Speech 55). The AES is the largest and most impressive of these studies. The maps are of the largest scale and are most elegantly prepared; about half are in two colors, many in three. The paper is heavy; the typography is clean and legible. That such a handsome work could be edited and published is due to the generosity of national and local foundations, backed by the soundest currency in the world.

Historical, Regional, and Social Variation:

What James H. Sledd has called the &dquo;agonizing deappraisal&dquo; of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary since its appearance in 1961, has shown that many Americans, in keeping with the national trend to simplistic interpretations, would make a sharp dichotomy between &dquo;good language&dquo; and &dquo;bad language, &dquo; or between what is &dquo;correct&dquo; and what is &dquo;incorrect. &dquo; In this

English Dialectology: An Introduction. By Lawrence M. Davis. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1983. xii + 151

It is hard to review objectively a book by a former student and colleague, a personal friend, and an auxiliary member of one’s family. Fulsome praise would be rightly suspect; finicky criticism would seem to be asserting one’s role as Grosspapa. But steering a middle course between this Scylla and that Charybdis, I must conclude that, though it is far from unchallengeable, English Dialectology is a very useful work, particularly for its target audience, the introductory course, with much information difficult to find elsewhere. One must, in reviewing, recognize the difficulties the author faced: distance from the materials he discusses and from those which might have supplied important modifications of his statements; administrative burdens (he is just being paroled from a deanship); and unanticipated travels to the Golan Heights, Lebanon, and places Israeli security forbids mentioning. The flaws first. Principally, Davis’s discussion of statistics,

Some Notes on Maryland and Baltimore

The data on the pronunciation of Maryland and Baltimore are derived from the 1216 field records made between 1933 and 1974 for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (Kurath et al. 1980-). That project extends the investigation of the Eastern Seaboard begun for the Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath et al. 1939-43) into 518 communities between the St. Lawrence River valley and northeastern Florida.1 As in New England, the informants represent three distinct cultural levels: 603 are Type I, or users of folk speech; 473 are Type II, or users of common or popular speech; and 140 are Type III, or users of cultured or cultivated speech.2 The responses of each informant were taken down in a finely graded phonetic notation (Kurath et al. 1939, ch. 4). Only ten field records represent transcriptions other than those of Guy S. Lowman, Jr., who made 836 field records in 1933-41, or McDavid, who made 310 field records himself in 1941, 1945-56, and 1964 and transcribed from tapes sixty interviews made by others in 1965 -74. No two fieldworkers hear or transcribe exactly alike, nor do they conduct interviews in the same way.3 Accordingly, the following brief review of the practices of Lowman and McDavid may throw some light on the interpretation of the evidence. Lowman, a student of Daniel Jones, participated in the training sessions for the New England fieldworkers held in conjunction with the 1931 Linguistic Institute. He did the largest share of records in New England and was in the field almost continuously from the beginning of operations for the New England atlas until his death in 1941. McDavid received his training in field methods from Bernard Bloch, who did the second largest share of the New England records and who worked for ten more years with Kurath in editing the records. Both Lowman and McDavid made careful notes on their transcription practices. They routinely indicated their relative certainty about particular transcriptions in individual records, especially near dialect bound-

The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland: Scots Section. Ed. with an introduction by J. Y. Mather and H. H. Speitel. Vol. I, pp. 429; Vol. II, pp. 292. Guildford: Biddles; New Haven: Archon Books, 1975, 1977

The two first volumes of the Scots section of the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (LAS) are part of a steady flow of basic works in the linguistic geography of English, coming after a drought of nearly two decades. After the third volume of Kurath et al. 1939-43 (LANE), there were only derivative and interpretive studies. But with 1962 began a series of comprehensive works reflecting various innovations in method: Atwood 1962, Orton, et al. 1962-71 (SED), 2 Gordon Wood 1971, Harold B. Allen 1973-6 (LAUM), Albert H. Marckwardt, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., et al. 1976-8 (LANCS),3 Hans Kurath, Raven I. McDavid, Jr. and Raymond K. O’Cain 1978(LAMSAS). In addition, the following projects are in various stages, looking toward publication in the near future: Frederic

A dictionary of modern American and British English on a contrastive basis , Givi Zviadadze. Enlarged and revised ed. Pp. 519. Tbilisi State University Publishers, Georgia, USSR, 1973

Comparisons of British and American English are an old story. Beginning with John Witherspoon’s essays (1781), which launched the word Americanism, they have been the subject of many warm if not always enlightening discussions; since 1919, when Mencken first charted his soundings of the two streams of English, they have been a respectable subject for scholarly investigations. Craigle-Hulbert 1938-44, Mathews 1951, Avis 1967 have presented the North American side of the lexicon; Allen Walker Read’s impending dictionary of Briticisms should do the same for the British Isles. Dialects on both