cording to P. W. Joyce,[1] of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more importance than these few contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part borrowings from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish conservatism in speech,[2] came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees, so to speak, had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea, and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips, struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still clung, in their common speech, to such forms as h'ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join,[3] sass for sauce, heighth for height and rench for rinse and lep for leap, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread through the country undoubtedly gave them a certain support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists. And the same support was given to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch, ag'in for against and onery for ordinary.
- ↑ English As We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London and Dublin, 1910, pp. 179–180.
- ↑ "Our people," says Dr. Joyce, "are very conservative in retaining old customs and forms of speech. Many words accordingly that are discarded as old–fashioned or dead and gone in England, are still flourishing alive and well, in Ireland. [They represent]…the classical English of Shakespeare's time," pp. 6–7.
- ↑ Pope rhymed join with mine, divine and line; Dryden rhymed toil with smile. William Kenrick, in 1773, seems to have been the first English lexicographer to denounce this pronunciation. Tay survived in England until the second half of the eighteenth century. Then it fell into disrepute, and certain purists, among them Lord Chesterfield, attempted to change the ea–sound to ee in all words, including even great. Cf. the remarks under boil in A Desk–Book of Twenty–Five Thousand Words Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly; New York, 1917. Also, The Standard of Pronunciation in English, by T. S. Lounsbury; New York, 1904, pp. 98–103.
