Question

write are the differences between british and american english according to Simeon Potter "Our Language "

Answer 1

The language taken by John Smith to Virginia in 1607 and by the Plymouth Fathers to Massachusetts in 1620 was the English of Spenser and Shakespeare. During the following century and a half most of the colonists that settled in New England were British, but the Dutch founded New Amsterdam and held it until it was seized by the British in 1664 and re-named after the King’s brother, the Duke of York. When, on 17 September 1787, the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard ratified the Federal Constitution, they comprised four million English-speaking people, most of whom still lived east of the Appalachian Mountains. From the linguistic point of view this was the first and decisive stage in the history of United States English, which, by general consent but less accurately, we call American English for short.

During the period from 1787 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 new states were created west of the Appalachians and the Alleghenies, and fresh immigrants came in large numbers from Ireland and Germany. The potato famine of 1845 drove one and a half million Irishmen to seek homes in the New World and the European revolution of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Middle West.

The third period, from the end of the Civil War to the present day, was marked ethnographically by the arrival of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century one million Scandinavians, or one firth of (156-157) the population of Norway and Sweden, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled, for the most part, in Minnesota and in the Upper Mississippi valley. They were soon followed by millions of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Yugoslavs, and Italians, whose numbers were subsequently augmented by displaced persons in flight from those political persecutions which afflicted Europe in the earlier half of the twentieth century. As the great North American Republic took shape with the attachment of French and Spanish populations, with the addition of native Amerindian tribesmen in the Middle West, and with the absorption of Chinese and Japanese who landed on the Pacific Coast, so the cosmopolitan character of the United States became more and more accentuated. Further, negroes from Africa have come to number over twelve millions. At no time, however, has the speech of Washington and Jefferson, of Jackson and Lincoln, stood in jeopardy. Never has there existed any real danger that English might not prove capable of completely assimilating these immigrant tongues or that the children of the French in Louisiana, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the Scandinavians in Minnesota, or the Slavs and Italians in Michigan might not be able to understand, speak, read, and write English in the third and fourth generations.

The literary language, indeed, has seldom diverged perceptibly from that of the old country. Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne did their best in their day to write impeccable Standard English. Henry James (1843-1916), Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1949), and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) were born in the United States but they spent their mature lives in England and all three became naturalized British subjects. Edmund Wilson, Douglas Bush, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and other eminent American critics, write not unlike their British colleagues, James Sutherland, Basil Willey, Lionel Charles Knights, William Empson, and David Daiches. English literature is now worldwide: no sea or ocean bounds can be set to (158-159) its glorious domain. Henceforth English letters will include all excellent and memorable writing in the English language, irrespective of political and geographical boundaries.

Answer 2

Answer:

During the period from 1787 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 new states were created west of the Appalachians and the Alleghenies, and fresh immigrants came in large numbers from Ireland and Germany. The potato famine of 1845 drove one and a half million Irishmen to seek homes in the New World and the European revolution of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Middle West.

The literary language, indeed, has seldom diverged perceptibly from that of the old country. Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne did their best in their day to write impeccable Standard English. Henry James (1843-1916), Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1949), and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) were born in the United States but they spent their mature lives in England and all three became naturalized British subjects. Edmund Wilson, Douglas Bush, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and other eminent American critics, write not unlike their British colleagues, James Sutherland, Basil Willey, Lionel Charles Knights, William Empson, and David Daiches. English literature is now worldwide: no sea or ocean bounds can be set to (158-159) its glorious domain. Henceforth English letters will include all excellent and memorable writing in the English language, irrespective of political and geographical boundaries.

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