The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary"

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On Fri., 11 Jun 2010 11:47:01 Barbara Need <bhneed at GMAIL.COM> wrote: 
>

>
> I don't remember the source (possibly Pyles and Algeo), but I do
> remember reading that English visitors to the American Colonies and
> the US early on were struck by the fairly uniform speech of Americans
> of all classes (probably white Americans, but I could be wrong). I
> have always thought it had to do with the limited number of regions
> that colonists came from in England. That is, fewer dialects came over
> than were present in Great Britain at the time.
>
> Barbara
>

My husband and I found some relevant research, most of it by Allen Walker Read and Paul K. Longmore, when we were writing Origins of the Specious. Here's a passage from our book (pp, 14-15), with source notes afterward: 

"In 1724, Hugh Jones, an Englishman teaching at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, observed that 'the Planters, and even the Native Negroes,' spoke English as well as anyone in the English-speaking world. Lord Adam Gordon, a Scottish nobleman visiting Philadelphia in the 1760s, said 'the propriety of Language here surprized me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection surpassing any, but the polite part of London.'

"These were not isolated opinions. William Eddis, a British customs official in Annapolis, Maryland, confessed that he was 'totally at a loss' to explain why the 'strange intermixture'  of people in the Colonies hadn't corrupted the language. 'The language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated,' he wrote in a 1770 letter. And Nicholas Cresswell, a young Englishman who was visiting the Colonies when the Revolution broke out, was startled at how well the Americans spoke English. 'Though the inhabitants of this Country are composed of different Nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do,' he wrote in his diary."

[See Read, Allen Walker, "British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century," American Speech, Supplement 86 (2002; originally published in 1933).  Also, Longmore, Paul K., " 'Good English Without Idiom or Tone': The Colonial Origins of American Speech," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Spring 2007). And for information about the British customs official William Eddis, see Bain, Robert, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds., Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).]

Pat O'Conner

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