词汇大师(Wordmaster)--English in Early America

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: July 3, 2003

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is away. This week on WORDMASTER -- English in early America. It's a timely topic, as Americans get ready to celebrate the Fourth of July. On that day in seventeen-seventy-six the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain.

Jill Lepore is a history professor at Harvard University and author of the book, "A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States."

LEPORE: "One of the chief dangers that political theorists in the eighteenth century perceived about founding an American republic -- that is, unifying¹ these states -- was that Americans didn't really have that much in common with one another. Many Americans did not speak English as their first language, for instance.

There were a lot of native French speakers, a huge number of native German speakers, all of the Africans, all of the Native American peoples that lived in the colonies. None of those people spoke² English as a first language. Some African Americans did speak English as a first language."

AA: "The Africans you referred to would be the slaves who were brought here."

LEPORE: "Right, right. So there were a number of projects after the Revolution that were attempting to homogenize pronunciation. And Noah Webster was the chief architect of the plan that was most successful, which was to basically give every American the same spelling book."

AA: "Let's talk a little more about Noah Webster. Who was he? What was his job?"

LEPORE: "Webster was a New England farmer's son. He was born in 1758. He went to Yale [University.] He'd kind of just missed out on fighting in the Revolutionary War and was a little bit bitter about that. It was a heroic act of his generation. He, when he graduated, tried to become a schoolmaster. He had some law school training, he did a bunch of things.

"Working as a schoolmaster and traveling a little bit -- really, as an itinerant³ schoolmaster, because he wasn't very successful -- he became quite appalled⁴ at the great differences in speech, in pronunciation, that he observed among Americans. He hadn't traveled very much out of New England until that point in his life. And he decided⁵ that what he ought to do, the service that he could do to his nation would be to homogenize American pronunciation."

AA: "Without the Internet, without telephones, without all the instant messaging, how did he go about doing something like that?"

LEPORE: "Well, he traveled a lot, he gave lecture tours -- in which he was heckled, because one of the things that he perceived was that New England pronunciation was the right pronunciation. And so when he traveled in the South, for instance, he considered it uncouth⁶. He considered the pronunciation of Southerners to be wrong. So he had a difficult charge. But what -- the reason that he was so successful was he had a great niche⁷ to enter into, because American schoolchildren needed to read.

"I mean, it was sort of even more of an urgent necessity in a democracy than it was when Americans were subjects of the English monarchy⁸. And the only schoolbooks they had were English schoolbooks, where all the little stories and reading exercises were about how wonderful the king was. So sort of like, you know, Iraqis burning all their Saddam textbooks.

I mean, Americans just didn't want these schoolbooks anymore, so they threw them all out. And they had nothing to use to teach their schoolchildren to read. So Webster wrote in 1783 'The American Spelling Book' and had it printed all across the colonies. And it became the spelling book by which generations of Americans learned to read.

"All of the American distinctive⁹ spellings, like that we spell honor without the U or mimic¹⁰ without the K, these are all Websterisms. Webster introduced these to simplify spelling, but he also wanted his books to look different from English books. He thought that one way Americans would feel themselves to be American was if they picked up a newspaper and they could tell immediately that it was an American newspaper, because mimic wouldn't have a K, that this would just be a badge of our national identity."

AA: "Now we've been talking about English as it was spoken in the early United States. There were some people, though, who wanted German to be the official language, did they not?"

LEPORE: "There was, you know, kind of -- people, some had seriously suggested German as the national language. But there was also a discussion of whether French should be the national language, because France had come to our aid during the Revolutionary War and that it was more appropriate to be loyal to the French language than to the English language.

People wanted to rid themselves of the English language. You know, people would say, well maybe Hebrew should be the American language, because we are a 'chosen people.' None of these proposals were very serious. But they were all indications of just how much up for grabs, to some degree, the idea of a national language was and how uncomfortable people really were with the idea of English being the American language."

AA: Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore is the author of "A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States." And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected] and we're on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "Yankee Doodle Boy"/James Cagney 1942

1 unifying   

使联合( unify的现在分词 )； 使相同； 使一致； 统一

参考例句：

• In addition, there were certain religious bonds of a unifying kind. 此外，他们还有某种具有一种统一性质的宗教上的结合。
• There is a unifying theme, and that is the theme of information flow within biological systems. 我们可以用一个总的命题，把生物学系统内的信息流来作为这一研究主题。

2 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

3 itinerant   

adj.巡回的；流动的

参考例句：

• He is starting itinerant performance all over the world.他正在世界各地巡回演出。
• There is a general debate nowadays about the problem of itinerant workers.目前，针对流动工人的问题展开了普遍的争论。

4 appalled   

v.使惊骇，使充满恐惧( appall的过去式和过去分词)adj.惊骇的；丧胆的

参考例句：

• The brutality of the crime has appalled the public. 罪行之残暴使公众大为震惊。
• They were appalled by the reports of the nuclear war. 他们被核战争的报道吓坏了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

5 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

6 uncouth   

adj.无教养的，粗鲁的

参考例句：

• She may embarrass you with her uncouth behavior.她的粗野行为可能会让你尴尬。
• His nephew is an uncouth young man.他的侄子是一个粗野的年轻人。

7 niche   

n.壁龛；合适的职务(环境、位置等)

参考例句：

• Madeleine placed it carefully in the rocky niche. 玛德琳小心翼翼地把它放在岩石壁龛里。
• The really talented among women would always make their own niche.妇女中真正有才能的人总是各得其所。

8 monarchy   

n.君主，最高统治者；君主政体，君主国

参考例句：

• The monarchy in England plays an important role in British culture.英格兰的君主政体在英国文化中起重要作用。
• The power of the monarchy in Britain today is more symbolical than real.今日英国君主的权力多为象徵性的，无甚实际意义。

9 distinctive   

adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的

参考例句：

• She has a very distinctive way of walking.她走路的样子与别人很不相同。
• This bird has several distinctive features.这个鸟具有几种突出的特征。

10 mimic   

v.模仿，戏弄；n.模仿他人言行的人

参考例句：

• A parrot can mimic a person's voice.鹦鹉能学人的声音。
• He used to mimic speech peculiarities of another.他过去总是模仿别人讲话的特点。