and one finds in it very excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uraguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.[1] But in the United States the business has attracted little attention, and less talent. The only existing formal treatise upon the subject[2] was written by a Swede trained in Germany and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary of Americanisms[3] was written in England, and is the work of an expatriated lawyer. Not a single volume by a native philologist, familiar with the language by daily contact and professionally equipped for the business, is to be found in the meagre bibliography.
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect Society,[4] nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as Richard Grant White, Thomas S. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all this preliminary work has left the main field almost uncharted. Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American dialect than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its spelling and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for observing inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary philological principles. In the preface to the first edition of his American Dictionary, published in 1828—the first in which he added the qualifying adjective to the title—he argued eloquently for the right of Americans to shape their own speech without regard to Eng-
- ↑ A few such works are listed in the bibliography. More of them are mentioned in Americanismos, by Miguel de Toro y Gisbert; Paris, n. d.
- ↑ Maximilian Schele de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World; New York, 1872.
- ↑ Richard H. Thornton : An American Glossary. . . ., 2 volb. ; Phila. and London, 1912.
- ↑ Organized Feb. 19, 1889, with Dr. J J. Child, of Harvard, as its first president.
