of the Western states to those of the Eastern states. Now there is no
contempt intended in the word dude. It simply means 'a person who pays his
way on a far ranch or camp'.
2) Cases where different words are used for the same denotatum, such as
can, candy, mailbox, movies, suspenders, truck in the USA and tin, sweets,
pillar-box (or letter-box), pictures or flicks, braces and lorry in
England.
3) Cases where the semantic structure of a partially equivalent word is
different. The word pavement, for example, means in the first place
'covering of the street or the floor and the like made of asphalt, stones
or some other material'. The derived meaning is in England 'the footway at
the side of the road'. The Americans use the noun sidewalk for this, while
pavement with them means 'the roadway'.
4) Cases where otherwise equivalent words are different in distribution.
The verb ride in Standard English is mostly combined with such nouns as a
horse, a bicycle, more seldom they say to ride on a bus. In American
English combinations like a ride on the train to ride in a boat are .quite
usual.
5) It sometimes happens that the same word is used in American English
with some difference in emotional and stylistic colouring. Nasty, for
example, is a much milder expression of disapproval in England than in the
States, where it was even considered obscene in the 19th century.
Politician in England means 'someone in polities', and is derogatory in the
USA. Professor Shweitzer, pays special attention to phenomena differing in
social norms of usage. E.g. balance in its lexico-semantic variant 'the
remainder of anything' is substandard in British English and quite literary
in America.
6) Last but not least, there may be a marked difference in frequency
characteristics. Thus, time-table which occurs in American English very
rarely, yielded its place to schedule.
This question of different frequency distribution is also of paramount
importance if we wish to investigate the morphological peculiarities of the
American variant. Practically speaking the same patterns and means of word-
formation are used in coining neologisms in both variants. Only the
frequency observed in both cases may be different. Some of the suffixes
more frequently used in American English are: -ее (draftee n 'a young man
about to be enlisted'), -ette - tambourmajorette 'one of the girl drummers
in front of a procession'), -dom and -ster, as in roadster 'motor-car for
long journeys by road' or gangsterdom.
American slang uses alongside the traditional ones also a few specific
models, such as verb stem-1- -er+adverb stem +--er: e.g. opener-upper 'the
first item on the programme' and winder-upper 'the last item',
respectively. It also possesses some specific affixes and semi-affixes not
used in literary Colloquial: -o, -eroo, -aroo, -sie/sy, as in coppo
'policeman', fatso 'a fat man', bossaroo 'boss', chapsie 'fellow'.
The trend to shorten words and to use initial abbreviations is even
more pronounced than in the British variant. New coinages are incessantly
introduced in advertisements, in the press, in everyday conversation; soon
they fade out and are replaced by the newest creations. Ring Lardner, very
popular in the 30's, makes one of his characters, a hospital nurse,
repeatedly use two enigmatic abbreviations: G.F. and P. F.; at last the
patient asks her to clear the mystery.
"What about Roy Stewart?" asked the man in bed.
"Oh, he's the fella I was telling you about," said Miss Lyons.
"He's my G. F B. F"
"Maybe I'm a D.F. not to know, but would yoa tell me what a B.F.
and G.F. are?"
"Well, you are dumb, aren't you?" said Miss Lyons. "A G.F., that's
a girl friend, and a B.F. is a boy friend. I thought everybody knew
that"
The phrases boy friend and girl friend, now widely used everywhere,
originated in the USA. So it is an Americanism in the wider meaning of the
term, i.e. an Americanism "by right of birth", whereas in the above
definition it was defined Americanism synchronically as lexical units
peculiar to the English language as spoken in the USA. Particularly common
in American English are verbs with the hanging postpositive. They say that
in Hollywood you never meet a man: you meet up with him, you do not study a
subject but study up on it. In British English similar constructions serve
to add a new meaning.
With words possessing several structural variants it may happen that
some are more frequent in one country and the others in another. Thus, amid
and toward, for example, are more often used in the States and amidst and
towards in Great Britain.
A well-known humourist G. Mikes goes as far as to say: "It was decided
almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in
the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been
carried out." In his book "How to Scrape Skies" he gives numerous examples
to illustrate this proposition: "You must be extremely careful concerning
the names of certain articles. If you ask for suspenders in a man's shop,
you receive a pair of braces, if you ask for a pair of pants, you receive a
pair of trousers and should you ask for a pair of braces, you receive a
queer look. It has to be mentioned that although a lift is called an
elevator in the United States, when hitch-hiking, you do not ask for an
elevator, you ask for a lift.
There is some confusion about the word flat. A flat in America is
called an apartment; what they call a flat is a puncture in your tyre (or
as they spell it, tire). Consequently the notice: flats fixed does not
indicate an estate agent where they are going to fix you up with a flat,
but a garage where they are equipped to mend a puncture." Disputing the
common statement that there is no such thing as the American nation, he
says: "They do indeed exist. They have produced the American constitution,
the American way of life, the comic strips in their newspapers: .they have
their national game, baseball —which is cricket played with a strong
American accent — and they have a national language, entirely their own."
This is of course an exaggeration, but a very significant one. It
confirms the fact that there is a difference between the two variants to be
reckoned with. Although not sufficiently great to warrant American English
the status of an independent language, it is considerable enough to make a
mixture of variants sound unnatural, so that students of English should be
warned against this danger.
Local Dialects in the USA
The English language in the USA is characterized by relative
uniformity throughout the country. One can travel three thousand miles
without encountering any but the slightest dialect differences.
Nevertheless, regional variations in speech undoubtedly exist and they have
been observed and recorded by a number of investigators. The following
three major belts of dialects have so far been identified, each with its
own characteristic features: Northern, Midland and Southern, Midland being
in turn divided into North Midland and South Midland.
The differences in pronunciation between American dialects are most
apparent, but they seldom interfere with understanding. Distinctions in
grammar are scarce. The differences in vocabulary are rather numerous, but
they are easy to pick up.
Cf., e.g., Eastern New England sour-milk cheese, Inland Northern Dutch
cheese, New York City pot cheese for Standard American/cottage cheese
(творог).
The American linguist F. Emerson maintains that American English had
not had time to break up into widely diverse dialects and he believes that
in the course of time the American dialects might finally become nearly as
distinct as the dialects in Britain. He is certainly greatly mistaken. In
modern times dialect divergence cannot increase. On the contrary, in the
United States, as elsewhere, the national language is tending to wipe out
the dialect distinctions and to become still more uniform.
Comparison of the dialect differences in the British Isles and in the USA
reveals that not only are they less numerous and far less marked in the
USA, but that the very nature of the local distinctions is different. What
is usually known as American dialects is closer in nature to regional
variants of the literary language. The problem of discriminating between
literary and dialect speech patterns in the USA is much more complicated
than in Britain. Many American linguists point out that American English
differs from British English in having no one locality whose speech
patterns have come to be recognized as the model for the rest of the
country.
CANADIAN, AUSTRALIAN AND INDIAN VARIANTS
It should of course be noted that the American English is not the only
existing variant. There are several other variants where difference from
the British standard is normalized. Besides the Irish and Scottish variants
that have been mentioned in the preceding paragraph, there are Australian
English, Canadian English, Indian English. Each of these has developed a
literature of its own, and is characterized by peculiarities in phonetics,
spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Canadian English is influenced both by
British and American English but it also has some specific features of its
own. Specifically Canadian words are called Canadianisms. They are not very
frequent outside Canada, except shack 'a hut' and to fathom out 'to
explain'.
The vocabulary of all the variants is characterized by a high
percentage of borrowings from the language of the people who inhabited the
land before the English colonizers came. Many of them denote some specific
realia of the new country: local animals, plants or weather conditions, new
social relations, new trades and conditions of labour. The local words for
new not ions penetrate into the English language and later on may become
international, if they are of sufficient interest and importance for people
speaking other languages. The term international w о г d s is used to
denote words borrowed from one language into several others simultaneously
or at short intervals one after another. International words coming through
the English of India are for instance: bungalow n, jute n, khaki adj, mango
n, nabob n, pyjamas, sahib, sari.
Similar examples, though perhaps fewer in number, such as boomerang,
dingo, kangaroo are all adopted into the English language through its
Australian variant. They denote the new phenomena found by English
immigrants on the new continent. A high percentage of words borrowed from
the native inhabitants of Australia will be noticed in the sonorous
Australian place names.
Otherwise an ample use was made of English lexical material. An
intense development of cattle breeding in new conditions necessitated the
creation of an adequate terminology. It is natural therefore that nouns
like stock, bullock or land find a new life on Australian soil: stockman
'herdsman', stockyard, stock-keeper 'the owner of the cattle'; bullock v
means 'to work hard', bullocky dray is a dray driven by bullocks; an
inlander is a stock-keeper driving his stock from one pasture to another,
overland v is 'to drive cattle over long distances'; to punch a cow 'to
conduct a team of oxen'; a puncher 'the man who conducts a team of oxen';
tucker-bag 'the bag with provision'.
The differences described in the present chapter do not undermine our
understanding of the English vocabulary as a balanced system. It has been
noticed by a number of linguists that the British attitude to this
phenomenon is somewhat peculiar. When anyone other than an Englishman uses
English, the natives of Great Britain, often half-consciously, perhaps,
feel that they have a special right to criticize his usage because it is
"their" language. It is, however, unreasonable with respect to people in
the Vfiited States, Canada, Australia and some other areas for whom English
is their mother-tongue. Those who think that the Americans must look to the
British for a standard are wrong and, vice versa, it is not for the
American to pretend that English in Great Britain is inferior to the
English he speaks. At present there is no single "correct" English and the
American, Canadian and Australian English have developed standards of their
own.
Conclusion
I. English is the national language of England proper, the USA,
Australia and some provinces of Canada. It was also at different times
imposed on the inhabitants of the former and present British colonies and.
protectorates as well as other Britain- and US-dominated territories, where
the population has always stuck to its own mother tongue.
II. British English, American English and Australian English are
variants of the same language, because they serve all spheres of verbal
communication. Their structural pecularities, especially morphology, syntax
and word-formation, as well as their word-stock and phonetic system are
essentially the same. American and Australian standards are slight
modifications of the norms accepted in the British Isles. The status of
Canadian English 'has not yet been established.
III. The main lexical differences between the variants are caused by
the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the
semantic structures of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of
some words on different territories.
IV. The British local dialects can be traced back to Old English
dialects. Numerous and distinct, they are characterized by phonemic and
structural peculiarities. The local dialects are being gradually replaced
by regional variants of the literary language, i. e. by a literary standard
with a proportion of local dialect features.
V. The so-called local dialects in the British Isles and in the USA are
used only by the rural population and only for the purposes of oral
communication. In both variants local distinctions are more marked in
pronunciation, less conspicuous in vocabulary and insignificant in grammar.
VI. Local variations in the USA are relatively small. What is called by
tradition American dialects is closer in nature to regional variants of the
national literary language.
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