Richard W. Bailey

THE FOUNDATION OF ENGLISH IN THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE: NEW ORLEANS, 1800-1850

�� Few descriptions of travel present so dismal a scene as that describing Christmas morning 1827 when Frances Trollope and three of her children left the “bright blue waves” of the Caribbean and encountered the muddy water staining the sea at Belize, Louisiana. “I have never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi,” she wrote in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1839, 1). It took two days to beat upriver to New Orleans, and the visitors saw uprooted trees. Sometimes several of these, entangled together, collect among their boughs a quantity of floating rubbish, that gives the mass the appearance of a moving island, bearing a forest, with its roots mocking the heavens; while the dishonoured branches lash the tide in idle vengeance; this, as it approaches the vessel, and glides swiftly past, looks like the fragment of a world in ruins. [2] The landscape, she reported, displayed a “total want of beauty” (3). An economic exile from England, Trollope encountered the New World with much skepticism and prejudice, but she found New Orleans deeply engaging, a society in which the languages spoken were mostly French and Spanish. She had landed in the most Caribbean of North American cities, and she marveled at the nuances of caste, color, and language she saw and heard around her. 1 There were no American towns in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase—at least if “American” were measured by Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston. All the visitors reported just how exotic it was. Trollope celebrated “the grace and beauty of the elegant Quadroons; the occasional groups of wild and savage-looking Indians” (5). Another English visitor, Harriet Martineau, arriving in 1835, thought the same thing, and she was astonished at “a multitude of every shade of complexion” at worship in St. Louis Cathedral with “no separation.” But it was a far less cordial scene than it first appeared: “The division between the American and French factions is visible even in the drawing-room. The French complain that the Americans will not speak French; will not meet their

Reviews : The Cambridge History of the English Language: English in Britain and Overseas. Edited by Robert Burchfield. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xxiii + 656

The Cambridge History is a huge undertaking-six large volumes are anticipated-and a tribute to the idea that our field can still be encompassed in one broad sweep, even at a time when ever-narrowing fields and subfields promise continued fragmentation. As conceived by the general editor, Richard M. Hogg, the project aims to be an &dquo;intermediate work&dquo; between the one-volume histories of the

Colonial English on a Silver Platter

In this information-conscious age, it is hard to imagine something scholarly and informative vanishing into an Orwellian memory hole. That, however, seems to have been the fate of this excellent CD-ROM; it does not appear in the MLA bibliography, and only 170 (or so) copies have been sold, perhaps because the publisher is unable to mount much of an advertising campaign. The reason seems to lie in the promise to the National Endowment for the Humanities that the finished product would be sold for less than a hundred dollars a copy. The scope of the project brings together colonial newspapers—some 162 titles encompassing 50,719 issues—and selects from them “music, poetry (lyrics), dance, and theatre.” Thus if the “Dead March” was played at a funeral (as it commonly was) and the performance was reported in the newspaper, it will be included here. A major objective was to collect information about poems and songs, and 12,061 are indexed. When these poems were long (as they commonly were), only the first four lines are entered, with an indication of how many more lines ensue. (Many of these newspapers are available in microform, and hence the extracts can be investigated more thoroughly without too much additional effort.) Why should readers of American Speech be interested in this resource? Consider the following from the Connecticut Gazette (New London), 8 May 1767:

Our Marvelous Native Tongue@@@Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language

1. English Discerned 2. Emergent English 3. English Abroad 4. World English 5. English Transplanted 6. Postcolonial English 7. English Improved 8. Imaginary English 9. English Imperiled 10. Proper English.

The Future of Lexicography@@@Dictionaries of English: Prospects for the Record of Our Language

Caribbean English, R. Allsop the dictionary of regional American English, Fred Cassidy the extinction of Scotland in popular dictionaries, J.A.Aitken lexicographic sources in Old and Middle English, T.F. Hoard shortcomings in existing dictionaries, R.W.Bailey the users perspective, R.K.K.Hartmann.