Book People Archive

Re: The American Language

jim said:
>    Scrapers will immediately notice that
>    the scrapee's work is in need of a little proofreading:

yes, jim, and i noticed it even more immediately than you did;
take a look below at the title of ii-1, in the table of contents...

it's easy enough to write a routine that verifies your t.o.c. against
the actual titles as they actually appear in the actual text itself, but
it appears that bartleby.com hasn't incorporated such a check...

nor are all problems with this book as visible as a prominent typo.
the table of contents is missing a link to chapter 12 -- "the future
of the language" -- which you can find by going to these pages:
>    http://www.bartleby.com/185/54.html
>    http://www.bartleby.com/185/55.html

still, as far as most books go, this one would be relatively difficult
for distributed proofreaders, since they routinely strip away styling
and then re-mark it in the formatting stage.   since this book makes
heavy use of italics, that workflow would cause lots of extra work...

compared to all that, a simple run through an ordinary spell-check
-- which would catch both of the errors we noticed immediately --
would be like a walk in the park.

-bowerbird

---------------------------------------------------------

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

I. Introductory
   1. The Diverging Streams of English
   2. The Academic Attitude
   3. The View of Writing Men
   4. Foreign Observers
   5. The General Character of American English
   6. The Materials of the Inquiry

II. The Beginnings of American

   1. The First Differntiation
   2. Sources of Early Americanisms
   3. New Words of English Material
   4. Changed Meaning
   5. Archaic English Words
   6. Colonial Pronunciation

III. The Period of Growth
   1. Character of the New Nation
   2. The Language in the Making
   3. The Expanding Vocabulary
   4. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences
   5. Pronunciation Before the Civil War

IV. American and English Today
   1. The Two Vocabularies
   2. Differences in Usage
   3. Honorifics
   4. Euphemisms
   5. Expletives and Forbidden Words

V. International Exchanges
   1. Americanisms in England
   2. Briticisms in the United States

VI. Tendencies in American
   1. General Characters
   2. Lost Distinctions
   3. Processes of Word-Formation
   4. Foreign Influences Today

VII. The Standard American Pronunciation
   1. General Characters
   2. The Vowels

VIII. American Spelling
   1. The Two Orthographies
   2. The Influence of Webster
   3. The Advance of American Spelling
   4. British Spelling in the United States
   5. Simplified Spelling
   6. The Treatment of Loan-Words
   7. Minor Differences

IX. The Common Speech
   1. Grammarians and Their Ways
   2. Spoken American As It Is
   3. The Verb
   4. The Pronoun
   5. The Adverb
   6. The Noun
   7. The Adjective
   8. The Double Negative
   9. Other Syntactical Peculiarities
   10. Vulgar Pronunciation

X. Proper Names in America
   1. Surnames
   2. Given Names
   3. Geographical Names
   4. Street Names

XI. American Slang
   1. Its Origin and Nature
   2. War Slang