of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically.[1] In Norway there is a widespread movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national language based upon the speech of the peasants.[2] In Spain the Real Academia Española de la Lengua is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografia and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals, taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.[3] But in the United States the business has attracted little attention and less talent. The only existing comprehensive treatise upon the subject,[4] if the present work be excepted, was written by a Swede trained in Germany and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary of Americanisms[5] was written in England, and is the work of an English-born lawyer.
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later
- ↑ Cf. Scandinavian Studies and Notes, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug., 1917, p. 258.
- ↑ This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the Storthing passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the landsmaal in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the landsmaal was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the landsmaal has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. Vide The Language Question, London Times, Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914.
- ↑ A number of such works are listed in the Bibliography and in Part II, Section 3 of the Appendix. The late Ricardo Palma, director of the Biblioteca Nacional at Lima, was an ardent student of American-Spanish, and tried to induce the Academia to adopt a long list of terms used in the Spanish of South America.
- ↑ Maximilian Scheie de Vere: Americanisms: The English of the New World: New York, 1872.
- ↑ Richard H. Thornton: An American Glossary…2 vols.; Phila. and London, 1912. Mr. Thornton returned to the United States after his dictionary was published.
