45. OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD

The First American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most

exciting period in the history of the English language—a time when 12,000

words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking

place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was also a time of

considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104 pilgrims who

sailed from Plymouth in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use

the s form on verbs, saying has rather than hath, runs rather than runneth.

Similarly, thee and thou pronoun forms were dying out. Had the pilgrims come a

quarter of a century earlier, we might well have preserved those forms, as we

preserved other archaisms such as gotten.

The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to

describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved

inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or

explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and

caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees

("John Cheese"). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a

Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical

evidence is slight. Often the new immigrants borrowed Indian terms, though

these could take some swallowing since the Indian languages, particularly those

of the eastern part of the continent, were inordinately agglomerative. As Mary

,Helen Dohan notes in her excellent book on the rise of American English, Our

Own Words, an early translator of the Bible into Iroquoian had to devise the

word kummogkodonattootummooetiteaonganunnonash for the phrase "our

question." In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called

Chargoggagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to translate as

"You fish on that side, we'll fish on this side, and nobody will fish in the

middle." Not surprisingly, such words were usually shortened and modified. The

English-sounding hickory was whittled out of the Indian pawcohiccora.

Raugraoughcun was hacked into raccoon and isquonterquashes into squash.

Hoochinoo, the name of an Indian tribe noted for its homemade liquor, produced

hooch.

Some idea of the bewilderments of Indian orthography is indicated by the factthat Chippewa and Ojibway are different names for the same tribe as interpreted

by different people at different times. Sometimes words went through many

transformations before they sat comfortably on the English-speaking tongue.

Manhattan has been variously recorded as Manhates, Manthanes, Manhatones,

Manhatesen, Manhattae, and at least half a dozen others. Even the simple word

Iowa, according to Dohan, has been recorded with sixty-four spellings. Despite

the difficulties of rendering them into English, Indian names were borrowed for

the names of more than half our states and for countless thousands of rivers,

lakes, and towns. Yet we borrowed no more than three or four dozen Indian

words for everyday objects—among them canoe, raccoon, hammock, and

tobacco.

From the early Spanish settlers, by contrast, we took more than 500 words—

though many of these, it must be said, were Indian terms adopted by the

Spaniards. Among them: rodeo, bronco, buffalo, avocado, mustang, burro, fiesta,

coyote, mesquite, canyon, and buckaroo. Buckaroo was directly adapted from

the Spanish vaquero (a cowboy) and thus must originally have been pronounced

with the accent on the second syllable. Many borrowings are more accurately

described as Mexican than Spanish since they did not exist in Spain, among

them stampede, hoosegow, and cafeteria. Hoosegow and jug (for jail) were both

taken from the Mexican-Spanish juzgado, which, despite the spelling, was

pronounced more or less as "hoosegow." Sometimes it took a while for the

pronunciation to catch up with the spelling. Rancher, a term borrowed from the

Spanish rancho, was originally pronounced in the Mexican fashion, which made

it something much closer to "ranker."

From the French, too, we borrowed liberally, taking the names for Indian tribes,

territories, rivers, and other geographical features, sometimes preserving the

pronunciation (Sioux, Mackinac) and sometimes not (Illinois, Detroit, Des

Plaines, Beloit). We took other words from the French, but often knocked them

about in a way that made them look distinctively American, as when we turned

gaufre into gopher and chaudiere into chowder. Other New World words

borrowed from the French were prairie and dime.

Oftentimes words reach us by the most improbable and circuitous routes. The

word for the American currency, dollar, is a corruption of Joachimsthaler, named

for a sixteenth-century silver mine in Joachimsthal, Germany. The first recorded

use of the word in English was in 155 3, spelled daler, and for the next two centuries it was applied by the English to various continental currencies.

Its first use in America was not recorded until 1782, when Thomas Jefferson, in

Notes on a Money Unit for the United States, plumped for dollar as the name of

the national currency on the ground that "the [ Spanish] dollar is a known coin

and the most familiar of all to the mind of the people." That may be its first

recorded appearance, but clearly if it was known to the people the term had

already been in use for some time. At all events, Jefferson had his way: In 1785

the dollar was adopted as America's currency, though it was not until 1794 that

the first dollars rolled off the presses. That much we know, but what we don't

know is where the dollar sign ($) comes from. "The most plausible account,"

according to Mario Pei, "is that it represents the first and last letters of the

Spanish pesos, written one over the other." It is an attractive theory but for the

one obvious deficiency that the dollar sign doesn't look anything like a p

superimposed on an s.

Perhaps even more improbable is how America came to be named in the first

place. The name is taken from Americus Vespucius, a Latinized form of

Amerigo Vespucci. A semiobscure Italian navigator who lived from 1454 to

1512, Vespucci made four voyages to the New World though without ever once

seeing North America. A contemporary mapmaker wrongly thought Vespucci

discovered the whole of the continent and, in the most literal way, put his name

on the map. When he learned of his error, the mapmaker, one Martin

Waldseemuller, took the name off, but by then it had stuck. Vespucci himself

preferred the name Mundus Novus, "New World."

In addition to borrowing hundreds of words, the Mundus Novians (far better

word!) devised many hundreds of their own.