Free American Language Supplement 2 by H.L. Mencken

loan-words have been preserved only by changes in spelling, as in
ouch
(
autsch
) and
bower
(
bauer
). In yet other cases they have succumbed to folk-etymology,
e.g
., the Dutch
koolsla
, pronounced
cole-slaw
, which has become
cold-slaw;
or suffered changes in their vowels,
e.g
., the Spanish
peon
(whose derivative,
peonage
, rhymes the first syllable with
see
),
loafer
(from the German
laufer
), and
smearcase
(from
schmierkáse
).
Hofbráu
has become
huffbrow, rathskeller
has become
ratskiller, wanderlust
has acquired a last syllable rhyming with
rust
, the
sch
of
schweizer
has become a simple
s
, and the German
u
of
bummer
has become the English
u
in
rum
. The late Brander Matthews believed in the inevitability of such changes, and refused to denounce them. “The principle which ought to govern,” he once said,
    can be stated simply. English should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful, and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. No doubt this is today a counsel of perfection; but it indicates the goal which should be strived for. It is what English was capable of accomplishing prior to the middle of the Seventeenth Century. 2 It is what English may be able to accomplish … if we once awaken to the danger of contaminating our speech with unassimilated words, and to the disgrace which our stupidity or laziness must bring upon us, of addressing the world in a puddingstone and piebald language. 3
    Here, I suspect, Matthews’s facile talk of a moral obligation was rather more pedagogical than wise: there is no actual offense toGod, I am advised by my chaplain, in trying to pronounce French words like a Frenchman. A more plausible objection to it was stated by Larsen and Walker in “Pronunciation: A Practical Guide to American Standards,” 1 to wit:
    Setting up a foreign standard of pronunciation for isolated words and phrases in an English context … would throw them out of harmony with the passage as a whole. Especially in the case of French the foreign language is so entirely different from English in intonation, in accent, and in tenseness of utterance that a perfect rendering of isolated French words … would involve an awkward shift of the whole vocal machinery. Borrowed words and phrases are adequately pronounced with a certain amount of compromise between the foreign sounds and the corresponding native sounds. 2
    They follow this with lists of French, German and Italian words in which an ingenious attempt is made to approximate the pronunciations of the original languages without setting the 100% American tasks beyond the power of his tongue, and on the whole they succeed admirably, though they encounter the usual difficulties with the German
ch
, 3 the French
l, u
and nasal
n
, and the Italian
c
. When a foreign word in wide use presents difficulties the plain people sometimes dispose of it by inventing a shortened form, as in
bra
(pronounced
brah
) for
brassière
. 4 Not infrequently a loan which has had polite treatment in the higher levels is dealt with barbarously when it becomes known lower down. This happened, for example, to
coupé
. It was commonly pronounced in an approximation of the French manner so long as it designated a four-wheeled, one-horse carriage, 5 in use only among the relatively rich, but when it was applied,
c
. 1923, to a new model of Ford car it quickly became
coop
. 6 In the same way
chauffeur
became
sho-f’r, liqueur
became
lik-kewer
, 1
chassis
became
shassis
or
tshassis
, and
chic
came close to
chick. Hors-d’oeuvre
has always been a stumbling block to Anglo-Saxons, and when, in Prohibition days, it began to be given to the embalmed fish, taxidermized eggs, salted