ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SPEAKING
SIR,—I am afraid Mr. Ratcliffe falls into two very common errors to which about 95 per cent. of the British lecturers who visit America succumb. Not only do they attempt to judge the whole of America by their fleeting impressions of bits of it, but they generalise upon what they have heard from the " nice people " who entertained them after their lectures.
I still say that the prevailing accent in America (except in the Southern States) is, so far as its peculiarities are of English origin, Yorkshire. Mr. Ratcliffe cannot refute this by relating that in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, he heard the vowel sounds of Boston and Cambridge, England. Nor can he offset the notorious dominance of the Yorkshire "r" by saying that he met people in New England and the Eastern States who softened the " r " as English people do in the Home Counties. The soft " r," of course, was taken to the northern American colonies in some degree by settlers from Kent, who went out to Massachusetts as early as 1630.
In order to be sure of elements in American speech common to the whole country north of the Mason and Dixon Line one must have lived, as I happen to have done, not in New England and the East merely, but in the Middle West, on the Prairies, in the Rockies, and on the Pacific Coast. Visiting is not enough. One must have been domiciled in those regions, as a labourer, as a blackcoat worker, as a householder, not simply as a student.
Apart from attending with a sensitive car to phonetics, in the course of a score or two of years, one could hardly have helped observing as well with the eye not a few homely customs. For instance, one would have seen, clear across the country, not only, apple-pie and cheese served together as in Yorkshire, but everywhere Yorkshire salted biscuits, called in America " saltines," and above all, the Yorkshire custom of serving a big cup of coffee (or tea) in the midst of luncheon or dinner instead of a demi-tasse after it.—Yours faithfully, WILLARD CONNELY. The Athenaeum, S.W. r.
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