The History of American English

The history of American English can be divided into the colonial (1607-1776), the national (1776-1898), and the international (1898-present) periods. During nearly four hundred years of use in North America, the English language changed in small ways in pronunciation and grammar but extensively in vocabulary and in the attitude of its speakers.

English settlements along the Atlantic Coast during the seventeenth century provided the foundation for English as a permanent language in the New World. But the English of the American colonies was bound to become distinct from that of the motherland. When people do not talk with one another, they begin to talk differently. The Atlantic Ocean served as an effective barrier to oral communication between the colonists and those who stayed in England, ensuring that their speech would evolve in different directions.

On the one hand, changes in the English of England were slow to reach America, and some never made the crossing, so American English became in certain respects old-fashioned and eventually archaic, from the standpoint of the British. But on the other hand, the colonists were forced to talk about new physical features, flora, and fauna. For example, an Americanism early noted (and objected to) by British travelers was the use of bluff for the steep, high bank of a river. British rivers usually do not have such banks but are nearly level with the surrounding land, so when the colonists encountered the new fluvial topography, they had no name for it. Consequently, they pressed into service a word that means "steep" in naval jargon.

Americans also came cheek-to-jowl with Amerindians of several linguistic stocks, as well as French and Dutch speakers. They had to talk in new ways to communicate with their new neighbors. Moreover, the settlers had come from various districts and social groups of England, so there was a homogenizing effect: those in a given colony came to talk more like one another and less like any particular community in England. All these influences combined to make American English a distinct variety of the language.

Despite such changes, the norm of usage in the colonies remained that of the motherland until the American Revolution. Thereafter American English was no longer a colonial variety of the English of London but had entered its national period. Political independence was soon followed by cultural independence, of which a notable Founding Father was Noah Webster. As a schoolmaster, Webster recognized that the new nation needed a sense of linguistic identity. Accordingly he set out to provide dictionaries and textbooks for recording and teaching American English with American models. The need Webster sought to fill was twofold: to help Americans realize they should no longer look to England for a standard of usage and to foster a reasonable degree of uniformity in American English. To those ends, Webster's dictionary, reader, grammar, and blue-backed speller were major forces for institutionalizing what he called Federal English.

The language preserved its unity through the challenge of the Civil War (1861-1865); it assimilated immigrant languages and dialects, such as Spanish, German, and Irish, and replaced aboriginal Amerindian languages. The extension of American English and the preservation of its relative uniformity as the country expanded westward were aided by the railroads spanning the continent, the invention of the telegraph and telephone, and the explosion of journalism and popular education, all of which broadened communication.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Manifest Destiny of American English had been achieved, along with that of the territorial expansion of the nation. Because the domestic frontier had been exhausted, the nation had to look abroad if it was to continue to expand, territorially and linguistically. The Spanish-American War in 1898, though lasting barely four months, was a turning point in the history of the language. Before that war, American English played no more than a walk-on role on the world stage; foreign influences usually had to come to it. Afterward, international activity sharply increased, and the prominence of American English around the globe became proportionately greater.

In the course of war or commerce American English spread to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, China, Panama and other countries in Latin America, the Virgin Islands, and nations throughout the world. To the consternation of some, American popular culture followed. Through music, films, recordings, television, computers, aeronautics, multinational companies, and the military, the second half of the twentieth century became the Age of America, for good or for ill. The linguistic consequences have been profound--both on the use of English internationally and on the language itself.

As American English has been institutionalized and used internationally, the nature of its relationship to British English has changed. From the national period until the present day, there have been two opposing attitudes: Americanizing and Briticizing. The Americanizing attitude recognizes American usage as independent of British, not inferior to it; at its most extreme it seeks to exaggerate the differences. The Briticizing attitude emphasizes the connections between American and British; at its most extreme it regards American as subordinate to British. Exemplifications of the Americanizing versus Briticizing are Noah Webster's dictionary versus Joseph Worcester's; Mark Twain versus Henry James; H. L. Mencken's The American Language versus George Philip Krapp's The English Language in America, and Robert Frost versus T. S. Eliot.

If Americans have been divided on their view of the relationship between American and British English, few Britishers have had any doubt, and their confidence is widely shared by continental Europeans. To them English means British English, and American is a dialect, if not an aberration. The international prestige of British English has been maintained by both the geographical proximity of continental Europe to the British Isles and the residual influence of the British Empire around the world. It is also supported by England's reputation as a source of high culture. America, in contrast, is seen as a source of technology, commercialism, and pop culture.

Today, however, there are two main branches of English in the world, both including several national varieties: British English in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere; and American English in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. Although British English is more widely distributed, American English is spoken by nearly three times as many persons. That numerical preponderance has as an inevitable consequence that American English is now the principal representative of the English language and the major determinant of its future.

American English, although remarkably uniform considering that over 230 million people speak it, is by no means monolithic. It varies by location, social level, ethnic group, and other factors. There are four primary regional dialects in the United States: Southern or Coastal Southern, South Midland or Southern Mountain, North Midland or Lower Northern, and Northern or Upper Northern. The boundaries between them, which are traceable to the earliest settlements, are clearest in the eastern part of the country, where settlement came first. They become less distinct and more overlapping in the West.

The dialect regions are distinguished mainly by differences of pronunciation and vocabulary and only to a small extent by grammar. Pronunciation differences include the sounding or nonsounding of r in words like mother and mirth; the quality of the "aw" vowel in words like lawn and caught; the use of an "s" or "z" sound in greasy; and many other such features. Vocabulary differences include choices among faucet, spigot (spicket), and tap; downtown and uptown for a main business district; soda, pop, Coke, tonic, and soft drink for a carbonated beverage; and many other variations, including more restricted ones, such as schlepp for "mosey" or "lug" in the New York area or arroyo in the Southwest.

Ethnic dialects have phonological and grammatical characteristics, but they are most easily recognized by vocabulary. Many ethnic communities have contributed to the general American word stock: Louisiana creole gumbo and lagniappe, New York Dutch cookie and boss, Yiddish schnook and chutzpa, Mexican-Spanish lasso and ranch, Irish shebang and blarney, African-American jazz and goober, and many others.

Black English, one of the most prominent ethnic dialects, is the subject of great controversy concerning its history and present use. There are two opinions about its origin. One holds that slaves came from many tribes in Africa; they had no common language and therefore learned English from whites. In this view, Black English is a historical evolution of forms of nonstandard English that can be traced to the British Isles. The other holds that sailors and natives along the African coast used an English-based pidgin (or reduced language used for communication among persons speaking no other common tongue). Slaves brought to America knew this pidgin or soon learned it, and on the plantations it developed into a creole (a full language of mixed origins). In this view, Black English is a remnant of an independent language that has been gradually assimilating to general English, so that it now appears to be only a dialect. There is evidence for both opinions; it is impossible to say which is nearer to the historical reality.

The other controversy over Black English concerns its use and social status today. Some view it as a "home dialect" whose speakers need also to learn standard English to live effectively in the dominant society. Others regard that position as linguistic imperialism. They believe that the dominant society should respect minority cultures, including dialects, instead of expecting minorities to do the adapting. In practical terms, those who hold the second view would use Black English as a medium of instruction in the schools and would provide pedagogical materials written in it. Among the strong opponents of the second view are older-generation, middle-class African-Americans, who believe this would limit opportunities for social and economic advancement among blacks.

Hispanic English, another major ethnic dialect in the United States, exists in several subvarieties, notably Puerto Rican English in New York City, Cuban English in south Florida, and Chicano English in the Southwest. The main issue about Hispanic English (and other immigrant languages with sizable numbers of speakers) is that of bilingualism. It is parallel to the issue of the use and status of Black English. Specifically, the question is, should those who do not speak English be provided with schools, public services, legal proceedings, and so on in their native languages or should they be expected to learn English quickly and be linguistically disadvantaged until they do? In a larger sense, the question is whether non-English ethnic cultures should be preserved and fostered in Anglophone America or assimilated as quickly and completely as possible.

Both Black English and bilingualism are highly emotional issues with political overtones. The English First movement, which arose in opposition to other languages' achieving official status within American life, seeks the constitutional establishment of English as the only official language. Although seen by its opponents as xenophobic, the movement is a contemporary version of Noah Webster's Federal English--that is, an effort to provide a distinctive standard language for all citizens of the United States.

The very existence of a standard language has been called into question, but several things are clear. First, there is a standard written form of the language, extensively described in dictionaries and grammar books and used for most printed matter and public discourse. Second, this written standard is by no means monolithic but has a good deal of variation in it. Third, most arguments about what is or is not "good" English are concerned not with differentiating standard from nonstandard use but with variations within the standard. Fourth, standard English is chiefly a matter of grammar, spelling, and word choice; being primarily a matter of written English, it has little to do with pronunciation. Fifth, there is no standard pronunciation in the United States comparable to the Received Standard (or bbc English) of the United Kingdom.

Some particular pronunciations have low prestige ("ax" for ask or "liberry" for library), but pronunciation has not been institutionalized--there is no standard American accent. Recent presidents have spoken the easily identifiable regional accents of Massachusetts, Texas, and Georgia. What is called "General American" is a myth. Persons who deal with those from other regions may modify their pronunciation to eliminate phonetic features that are most readily identified as local dialect, but the result is not a unified, consistent accent. Rather, it is a pronunciation that has been "smoothed out" by avoiding easily recognized regionalisms.

Today English is an international language, widely used as a second and foreign language as well as a primary one. Although British English is more prestigious, American English is increasingly used. But in fact, the differences between them, especially in their written forms, are not great. In the foreseeable future, the unity of English--internationally and nationally in the United States--seems assured.

Painting

Painting

Painting, meant literally, is the practice of applying color to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, or other. However, when used in an artistic sense, the term "painting" means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner.

Painting is used as a mode of representing, documenting and expressing all the varied intents and subjects that are as numerous as there are practitioners of the craft. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature. A large portion of the history of painting is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of The Sistine Chapel to depictions of the human body itself as a spiritual subject.


Overview

What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity. Every point in space has different intensity. That painting is one of the basic skills needed by an artist to make masterpieces and works of art. The means of representing this intensity in painting is therefore the shade, nuance, i.e. the span between white and black with all visible gray shades - the difference in intensity. Line is considered as reduced surface, the difference in surface intensity (i.e., intensity of reflected light) is marked by thickness of line. In practice, only by use of shades painter can articulate shapes - if the two meeting surfaces are of very different intensity, the line will be thick, if the surfaces are close in intensity, the line will be pale. Color and texture are separate qualities, and they can not be used to articulate form, but can be mixed (for instance with gray) without restriction. By using just color (of the same intensity) one can only represent symbolic shapes, and not 3D space or construction of an object. It is important to distinguish between using this basic painting means and ideological means, like geometrical figures, various points of view and organization (perspective), symbols, etc. For instance, "white wall" is an idea, and for a painter, a white wall has different intensity at each point; a painter will perceive all various shades and reflections from nearby objects on a particular wall, but ideally, a white wall is still white in pitch darkness. In technical drawing, thickness of line is also ideal, this kind of drawing gives ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters.

Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are of music. Color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover the use of language is only a generalisation for a color equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalised register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C# in music, although the Pantone system is widely used in the commercial printing and graphic design industry for this purpose.

For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic and derived (complementary or mixed) colors (like, red, blue, green, brown, etc.). Painters deal practically with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phtalocyan, Paris blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, etc. Psychological, symbolical meanings of color are not strictly speaking means of painting. Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear - tones in music (like "C") are analogous to "shades" in painting, and coloration in painting is the same as the specific color of certain instrument - these do not form a melody, but can add different contexts to it.

Rhythm is important in painting as well as in music. Rhythm is basically a pause incorporated into a body (sequence). This pause allows creative force to intervene and add new creations - form, melody, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art and it directly affects the esthetical value of that work. This is because the esthetical value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom (of movement) of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the esthetical value.

Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer. (There is a growing community of artists who use computers to literally paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Photoshop, Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required.)

In 1829, the first photograph was produced. From the mid to late 19th century, photographic processes improved and, as it became more widespread, painting lost much of its historic purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world. There began a series of art movements into the 20th century where the Renaissance view of the world was steadily eroded, through Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism. Eastern and African painting, however, continued a long history of stylization and did not undergo an equivalent transformation at the same time.

Modern and Contemporary Art has moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation in favour of concept; this has led some to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.


History of painting


The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, etc.

In Western cultures oil painting and watercolor painting are the best known media, with rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historical predominated the choice of media with equally rich and complex traditions.

Aesthetics and theory of painting

Aesthetics tries to be the "science of beauty" and it was an important issue for 18th and 19th century philoshopers like Kant or Hegel. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle also theorized about art and painting in particular; Plato disregarded painters (as well as sculptors) in his philosophical system, sustaining that a painting is a copy of reality (a shadow of the world of ideas so it cannot depict the truth) and is nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting. Leonardo Da Vinci, on the contrary, said that "Pittura est cousa mentale" (painting is an intellectual thing). Kant identified Beauty with the Sublime, not referring particularly to painting, but this concept was taken by painters like Turner or Caspar David Friedrich. Hegel recognized the failure of attaining a universal concept of beauty and in his aesthetic essay wrote that Painting is one of the three "romantic" arts, along with Poetry and Music for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose. Painters like Kandinsky or Paul Klee also wrote theory of painting. Kandinsky in its essay sustains that painting has a spiritual value also he attaches primary colors to essential feelings or concepts, something that writers like Goethe had already tried to do.

Iconography has also something to say about painting. The creator of this discipline, Erwin Panofsky, tries to analyse visual symbols in their cultural, religious, social and philosophical depth to attain a better comprehension of mankind's symbolic activity.

Beauty, however, a concept of which Painting is essentially linked, cannot be defined as an objective matter, purpose or idea. Much aesthetics and theory of art is connected with painting. In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously asserted: "Remember that a painting – before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other – is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Thus, many twentieth century developments in painting, such as Cubism, were reflections on the business of painting rather than on the external world, nature, which had previously been its core subject.

Julian Bell (1908-37), a painter himself, examines in his book What is Painting? the historical development of the notion that paintings can express feelings and ideas:

"Let us be brutal: expression is a joke. Your painting expresses – for you; but it does not communicate to me. You had something in mind, something you wanted to ‘bring out’; but looking at what you have done, I have no certainty that I know what it was...."