freedom of phonography, so warmly advocated by many earnest men, but happily abandoned even in Webster's last edition of his great Dictionary, must inevitably lead, few are more striking than the word fillipeen, bravely quoted in Bartlett's Americanisms. As the pleasant custom which the term designates, is not known ever to have been connected with the giving of fillips, this manner of writing seems to be inexcusable; it certainly recalls neither of the two favorite derivations of the puzzling word. Fortunately it concerns Americans very little, whether the term is derived from the Greek pilos and πоɩvý, or from the German Vielliebchen, since they use it only as they have received it from their English forefathers; but it ought surely to be protected against such utterly lawless spelling. The muley-saw, a saw which is not hung in the gate, is almost as bad; few would at first recognize in the English-looking word, with its squint at a mule, the German word Mühlen säge, from which it is in reality derived. But what shall we say of German phrases which seem gradually to force their way into English, like the hold on! used thus: "When the police-officer saw him quietly walk out of the door, as if to leave the court-house, he called out to him, hold on, my good friend, you are wanted!" (Cincinnati Inquirer, July 17, 1865), or the what for (was für) of the New Englander, who had lived so long in Missouri that he could rise in the House and say: “Mr. Speaker, I demand to know who dared present such a petition. What for a boldness is that, to come here and ask us, who have fought against treason for four years, to honor the very traitors whom we have crushed?" (St. Louis Democrat, Aug. 21, 1866.) They are simple barbarisms which the genius of our language may endure for a time, but which ought not to be encouraged and endorsed by careful writers, even in the pages of a newspaper.

There is much less harm in the introduction of German phrases drawn from nature or local peculiarities. Thus, while the French and English draw their terms of contempt or pity for youthful inexperience from unfledged birds with green or yellow bills, etc., the German fancifully notices that newly-born animals are apt to be licked dry promptly everywhere except behind the ears, and hence their colloquial phrase: "The youngster is not dry yet behind his ears." The expression having become familiar to

Ámerican ears in Pennsylvania first, has from thence spread to other States also. "Rustic maidens rejecting the attentions of youths, whom they consider too young to be of special value as lovers, are fond of saying: You are not dry yet behind the ears, you had better wait!" (Professor S. S. Haldeman.)

THE NEGRO.

"Dark sayings, darkly uttered."

THE negro formerly occupied too subordinate a position in the social scale to influence the speech of his masters. His ignorance, his carelessness, his inability, with peculiar organs of speech untrained for many generations, to repeat certain sounds at all, and his difficulty in perceiving others by the ear, account amply for the havoc he played with the king's English. These impediments have made themselves clearly felt, since zealous and intelligent teachers of both sexes have devoted themselves in numbers to the training of freedmen's children. They have encountered almost insuperable difficulties, even where mental capacities were apparently fully equal to those of the white race, and the zeal to learn was almost irrepressible. The most successful among the welleducated negroes, who have risen to honorable positions at the bar, or earned distinction in other professions, men of eloquence often, and always forcible speakers, retain nevertheless certain peculiarities of sound, of utterance, and accentuation, which would mark them, even if they bore no trace of their origin in their. appearance, at least as much as foreigners are marked who have mastered a foreign idiom perfectly. Did not even the elder Dumas in his speech as in his writings betray his descent unmistakably?

The habits of the negro in his pronunciation of English words must, however, not be judged, as is too frequently done, by socalled negro minstrelsy. As French and German characters in comedy have passed into a conventional mispronunciation, as no American ever spoke like the Yankee on the boards of minor theatres in London, so have these so-called minstrels done great

injustice to the negro, whom they claim to represent. Foreigners, especially, believe in the conventional negro, as Englishmen believe in the long-legged, tobacco-chewing, bowie-knife-carrying Yankee in Punch. The bulk of American play-goers, we fear, are as frequently misled.

The error arises often from utter ignorance of the vast difference that exists between certain classes and varieties of negroes. The Virginia slave, for generations accustomed to the nicer functions of a house-servant, in daily contact with gentlewomen, and accustomed to hear at table and during long journeys on horseback or in private carriages, the conversation of intelligent men, was far above the average of the British laborer, to say nothing of the French peasant. He spoke fair English, infinitely better, at all events, than the Yorkshire yokel, or even the thorough-bred Cockney. The slave on a sugar or cotton plantation in the Southwest, on the other hand, was but a step removed from the African savage; his speech, largely intermixed with African terms, was well-nigh unintelligible. But even in the so-called Border States there was an immense gulf between the house-servant and the ruder Field-hand. Some of the former possessed not only knowledge, but even refinement; bodyservants, as they were called, taken abroad by their masters, astonished European gentlemen by their politeness of manner and their inbred courtesy, and the Ex-President of Liberia, long a slave in Virginia, never once lacked the dignity and self-possession required by his high office, when presented at foreign courts, or on the far more trying occasions, when he returned to his native State and met his former masters. But the field-hand was, what Mr. Olmsted says of him: "on an average a very poor and very bad creature, much worse than I had supposed before I had seen him, and grown familiar with his stupendous ignorance, duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous circumstance to a civilized country." (Journey in the Back Country, p. 432.)

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that even the most intelligent of the race seem to have some difficulty both in their hearing and in their organs of speech, which prevents their perceiving the

more delicate modifications of sound, which abound and are of such paramount importance in English, and of reproducing them accurately. As the German, whose native dialect has from childhood up accustomed his ear to an utter disregard of the difference between d and t, and b and p, never ceases to confound them in English also, so the negro finds it often utterly impossible to hear certain sounds, and can consequently not imitate them.

One of the most striking evidences of this inability is found in the unique and very interesting manuscript, in Arabic characters, made by a Mandingo slave, who belonged to a Mr. Maxwell, of Savannah. His American name was London, and having become a zealous Christian, he transcribed the Gospel with rare precision, using even the vowel-points-harakat-of the Arabic grammar, proving thus his careful training at home in making copies from the Koran. But in spite of all this training, and with all his intelligence, he could only write the English words as their sounds affected his ear, and thus his vocalization was in this wise: (First Chapter of John) "Fas chapta ob Jon. Inde beginnen wasde wad; ande wad waswid Gad, ande wad was Gad." The manuscript caused a ludicrous mistake, such as had happened even to Mr. de Sacy, the great Orientalist, who states himself that having received an Arabic manuscript from Madrid, he examined it carefully, and failing to discover a single Arabic word in it, suggested that the book was probably written in the language of the Hovas of Madagascar. Subsequently he found that the MS. was in Spanish, and had been written, according to the ear, by a converted Moor. In like manner the MS. of the intelligent Mandingo slave was presented to Mr. W. B. Hodgson, of Savannah, who also looked for Arabic words corresponding to the Arabic letters, and abandoned the task of deciphering it in despair. A chance remark suggested the turning of the latter into Roman letters, and he discovered at once by the sound what the eye had failed to perceive.

Still, the very imperfect manner in which the writer had evidently only been able to catch the English sounds, accounts at once for the majority of peculiar forms and sounds, which are so often exhibited as Americanisms, due to the influence of the negroes in our midst, while they are in effect nothing more than unsuccessful efforts to speak correct English. It is a grave mis