Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/380

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366
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

knows, is pronounced Arkansaw by the Arkansans.[1] The local pronunciation of Illinois is Illinoy. Iowa is sometimes Ioway.[2] Many American geographical names offer great difficulty to Englishmen. One of my English acquaintances tells me that he was taught at school to accent Massachusetts on the second syllable, to rhyme the second syllable of Ohio with tea, and to sound the second c in Connecticut. In Maryland the name of Calvert county is given a broad a, whereas the name of Calvert street, in Baltimore, has a flat a. This curious distinction is almost always kept up. A Scotchman, coming to America, would give the ch in such names as Loch Haven and Lochvale the guttural Scotch (and German) sound, but locally it is always pronounced as if it were k.

Finally, there is a curious difference between English and American usage in the use of the word river. The English invariably put it before the proper name, whereas wo almost as invariably put it after. The Thames River would seem quite as strange to an Englishman as the river Chicago would seem to us. This difference arose more than a century ago and was noticed by Pickering. But in his day the American usage was still somewhat uncertain, and such forms as the river Mississippi were yet in use. Today river almost always goes after the proper name.

4.
Street Names

"Such a locality as 'the corner of Avenue H and Twenty-third street,'" says W. W. Crane, "is about as distinctly American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like Mississippi and Saratoga."[3] Kipling, in his "American Notes,"[4] gives testimony to the strangeness with which the number-names, the phrase "the corner of," and the

  1. ↑ Vide Proceedings of the Legislature and of the Historical Society of the State of Arkansas, and the Eclectic Society, of Little Rock, Ark., Fixing the Pronunciation of the Name Arkansas; Little Rock, 1881.
  2. ↑ "Curiously enough, Americans always use the broad a in the first syllable of Albany, whereas Englishmen rhyme the syllable with pal.
  3. ↑ Our Street Names, Lippincott's Magazine, Aug., 1897, p. 264.
  4. ↑ Ch. i.
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