Items related to Lectures on the English Language (Volume 1)
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1860. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... LECTURE XXX. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA. The English language in America is necessarily much affected by the multitude of new objects, processes, and habits of life that qualify our material existence in this new world, which, with sometimes incongruous architecture, we are building up out of the raw stock that nature has given us; by the great influx of foreigners speaking different languages or dialects, who, in adopting our speech, cannot fail to communicate to it some of the peculiarities of their own; by climatic and other merely material causes which affect the action of the organs of articulation, and of course the form of spoken words; by the generally diffused habit of reading, which makes pronunciation and phrase more formal and also more uniform; and doubtless by other more obscure and yet undetected causes. Tims far, it can by no means be said that any distinct dialectic difference has established itself between England and the United States; and it is a trite observation, that, though very few Americans speak as well as the educated classes of Englishmen, yet not only is the average of English used here, both in speaking and writing, better than that of the great mass of the English people; but there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, English is more emphatically (me in America than in its native land; and if we have engrafted on our mother-speech some wide-spread corruptions, we have very nearly freed the language, in our use of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable peculiarities exceedingly common in England. So far as any tendency to divergence between the two countries exists, it manifest...
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- PublisherGeneral Books LLC
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 0217500374
- ISBN 13 9780217500371
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages214
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