¹ Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. by Sibree, J. (London, 1894), p. 90.Google Scholar

² In his La idea del descubrimiento de América (Mexico City, 1951) Edmundo O’Gorman lays the groundwork for an integral history of the Americas; see especially pp. 9–24, 361–367.

³ Larrea, Juan, Rendición de espíritu (2 vols.; Mexico City, 1943).Google Scholar

⁴ Jane, Lionel Cecil, Liberty and Despotism in Spanish America (Oxford, 1929).Google Scholar

⁵ Herskovits, Melville J., The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941).Google Scholar

⁶ Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas (New York, 1947).Google Scholar

⁷ Gordon, Wendell C., The Economy of Latin America (New York, 1950).Google ScholarPubMed

⁸ Hanson, Simon G., Economic Development in Latin America (Washington, 1951).Google Scholar

⁹ Beals, Ralph L., “Social Stratification in Latin America,” The American Journal of Sociology, LVIII, 4 (January, 1953), 327–339.Google Scholar

¹⁰ A good handbook of studies on American Spanish is Nichols, Madaline W., A Bibliographical Guide to Materials on American Spanish (Cambridge, 1941).Google Scholar

¹¹ Tomás Navarro Tomás, “El idioma español en el ‘cine’ parlante—español o hispanoamericano?” Revista de las Espanas, V, 48–49 (August-September, 1930), 418–427.

¹² Mintz, Sidney W. and Wolf, Eric R., “An Analysis of Ritual Co-parenthood (Compadrazgo),” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, VI, 4 (Winter, 1950), 341–368.Google Scholar The importance of studying Latin American institutional history both as transplantation and as independent formation is stressed by Richard Konetzke in “Las ordenanzas de gremios como documentos para la historia social de Hispano-américa durante la época colonial,” Estudios de historia social de España, ed. by the Instituto “Balmes” de Sociología (Madrid, 1949), I, 483 ff.

¹³ “Hence the phonetic manifestations of Vulgar Latin are concerned more with consonants than with vowels, and consonantal changes are usually induced by the expansion of neighboring vowel sounds.” Vossler, Karl, The Spirit of Language in Civilization (London, 1932), pp. 109–110.Google Scholar

¹⁴ It is suggestive that, just as certain consonantal groupings of Latin were smoothed out in medieval French (in such words as esprit, étude, épée), so in turn the spoken French of Canada planes down its own mother tongue. ( Daviault, Pierre, “La langue française au Canada,” Royal Commission Studies [Ottawa, 1951], pp. 31–32.Google Scholar) As will later be brought out, however, such linguistic trends cannot wholly be attributed to the effect of “wide open spaces.”

¹⁵ The analogy of the sea came easily to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento when he described transportation on the pampas: “Nuestras carretas viajeras son una especie de escuadra de pequeños bajeles, cuya gente tiene costumbres, idioma y vestido peculiares que la distinguen de los otros habitantes, como el marino se distingue de los hombres de tierra.” (Facundo [Buenos Aires, 1942], p. 32.)

¹⁶ Entwistle, William J., The Spanish Language together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque (London, 1936), p. 256.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Daviault, loc. cit., p. 29.

¹⁸ Edwards, Bryan, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (2nd ed.; 2 vols.; London, 1794), II, 9.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Cortés, Hernán, Cartas de relación de la conquista de Méjico (5th ed.; 2 vols.; Madrid, 1942), I, 37.Google Scholar

²⁰ An illustration will perhaps make this analogy more clear. During a country walk I once met a little girl and exchanged greetings as we passed. Later, on the return, I encountered her once more. “We meet again,” I said, and she simultaneously observed, “First you were going this way and I was going that way and now I’m going this way and you’re going that way.” One of us, that is, called up a cliché which related the incident to many others of his experience; the other could only describe the meeting discursively, since she could supply for it no context.

²¹ A Brazilian is inclined to say o artista que a voz dele me agrada rather than o artista cuja voz me agrada, o livro que te falei nele rather than o livro de que te falei. (Clóvis Monteiro, Português da Europa e português da América [Rio de Janeiro, 1931], pp. 93–95.) It is of interest that this construction is a peninsular archaism.

²² Medo a pobreza becomes medo da pobreza; trabalhar a preceito becomes trabalhar com preceito; estou a correr becomes estou correndo. (Renato Mendonça, O português do Brasil [Rio de Janeiro, 1936], pp. 257–261.)

²³ Ibid., p.266

²⁴ Entwistle, op. cit., p. 262; Mayor, Avelino Herrero, Presente y futuro de la lengua española en América (Buenos Aires, 1944), pp. 156–157.Google Scholar For the evasion of the niceties of future conjugations in American English sees Mencken, H. L., The American Language, Supplement 1 (New York, 1945), pp. 402–404.Google Scholar

²⁵ Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, La lengua de Cristóbal Colón (3rd ed.; Madrid, 1947), pp. 113–115.Google Scholar

²⁶ Both citations given in Alonso, Amado, El problema de la lengua en America (Madrid, 1935), pp. 130–136.Google Scholar

²⁷ de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (2 vols.; New York, 1945), II, 67–68.Google Scholar

²⁸ Alonso, Amado, “Primeros problemas históricos del castellano en América,” II° Congreso Internacional de Historia de América (Buenos Aires, 1938), pp. 607–621 Google Scholar. See also Henríquez-Ureña, Pedro, Sobre el problema del andalucismo dialectal de América (Buenos Aires, 1932).Google Scholar

²⁹ Malmberg, Bertil, “L’espagnol dans le nouveau monde—problème de linguistique générale,” Studia linguistica, I, 2 (1947), 97–99 Google Scholar; Capdevila, Arturo, Babel y el castellano (Madrid, n. d.), pp. 85–129.Google Scholar

³⁰ Daviault, loc. cit., pp. 26–30. Entwistle (op. cit., p. 264), Vigil, Carlos Martinez (Arcaísmos españoles usados en América [Montevideo, 1939]) and Mendonça (op. cit., pp. 119–121, 240–245, 252–256)Google Scholar point out archaisms in American Spanish and Portuguese, while Mencken, H. L. does so for American English in The American Language (4th ed.; New York, 1936), pp. 124–129 Google Scholar, and in Supplement I, pp. 224–226. Research which would specify to what extent such archaisms are passive survivals, to what extent they have actively served specifically American functions and to what extent they are independent recreations of medieval usage might illuminate much cultural and institutional history of the New World.

³¹ Tomás Navarro Tomás, cited in Herrero Mayor, op. cit., p. 174.

³² Malmberg, loc. cit., p. 87. This point is elaborated for the United States in Mencken, American Language, pp. 354–356, and for English-speaking Canada in Henry Alexander, “The English Language in Canada,” Royal Commission Studies, p. 13.

³³ Gabriela Mistral, cited in Herrero Mayor, op. cit., p. 172.

³⁴ Entwistle, op. cit., pp. 239–247; Mendonça, op. cit., pp. 142–172.

³⁵ Raimundo, Jacques, O elemento afro-negro na lingua portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro, 1933)Google Scholar; Mendonça, Renato, A influência africano no português do Brasil (2nd ed.; São Paulo, 1935).Google Scholar

³⁶ Neologisms have been less abundant in the Spanish and Portuguese than in the English of the New World. The Iberian languages, or the attitudes which they reflect, do not lend themselves to extremities of neologistic contortion and invention. Moreover, the protean socio-economic effects of the United States’ mercantile and later industrial capitalism have, until the twentieth-century, been only mildly paralleled to the south.

³⁷ Entwistle, op. cit., pp. 237–238. See also Malmberg, loc. cit., pp. 79–86.

³⁸ Whitman, Walt, Democratic Vistas (New York, 1949), p. 55.Google Scholar

³⁹ Estrada, Ezequiel Martínez, Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro (2 vols.; Mexico City, 1948), II, 442–443.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Tocqueville, op. cit., II, 65–69. George Santayana wrote of the North American: “… the urgency of his novel attack upon matter, his zeal in gathering its fruits, precludes meanderings in primrose paths; devices must be short cuts, and symbols must be mere symbols.” (Character and Opinion in the United States [New York, n. d.], p. 174.)

⁴¹ Lawrence, David Herbert, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York., 1923), pp. ix, 8.Google Scholar

⁴² Mendonça, op. cit., p. 218.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 216–229, 266–267.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 98–100

⁴⁵ de Holanda, Sérgio Buarque, Raízes do Brasil (2nd ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1948), pp. 215–218.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Trend, J. B., The Language and History of Spain (London, 1953), pp. 173–174.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Torres-Rioseco, Arturo, New World Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949), p. 117.Google Scholar

Canadian French has traits comparable to those of American Portuguese and Spanish. Harsh or decisive sounds are mollified by vowel shifts and consonantal palatalization. The speech tone is “monocorde, lourd et nasalisé,” the “pronunciation est gutturale, l’articulation insuffisante.” (Daviault, loc. cit., pp. 31–32.)

Of language in the United States Marryat remarked in 1839: “The Americans dwell on their words when they speak—a custom arising, I presume, from their cautious, calculating habits; and they have always more or less of a nasal twang. I once said to a lady, ‘Why do you drawl out your words in that way?’ ‘Well,’ replied she, ‘I’d drawl all the way from Maine to Georgia, rather than clip my words as you English people do.’” ( Marryat, Frederick, A Dairy in America [3 vols.; London, 1839], II, 222.Google Scholar) The verbs reckon, believe, calculate, expect, guess and such qualifiers as pretty, sort of, kind of and couple of have been heavily worked in the United States as a form of wary noncommitment. (Mencken, American Language, pp. 319 ff., 471–473.) And Canadian English, according to Alexander loc. cit., p. 15), has a monotony and even articulation which deprive it of “light and shade.”

⁴⁸ Alonso, op. cit., p. 78. Similarly, when American English throws the accent forward (inquiry, research, centenary) or back (mischievous, exquisite, primarily), the effect is to even out irregularities of stress. Mencken suggests that indecisive, evenly distributed accentuation betrays the social parvenu who is apprehensive that his speech may disclose his vulgar origin. (American Language, pp. 323–327.)

⁴⁹ Castro, Américo, La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico (Buenos Aires, 1941), passim.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Mallea, Eduardo, cited in Mayor, Herrero, op cit., pp. 169–170.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Estrada, Martínez, op. cit., II, 459–460.Google Scholar

It is worthwhile to note that the linguistic vulgarismo of the New World, which smoothes out words and phrases, freeing them of layered connotations, has disclosed literary possibilities. The modernistas of Rubén Darío’s generation and the imagists of Amy Lowell’s were led to inspect the pure tactility of words, to array them as counters for inducing a play of sensations. Gertrude Stein found that the colloquial flow of speech, although semantically thin, is fresh and evocative when one heeds its rhythmic patterns. Human utterance, she wrote, is never repetitious “because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.” ( Stein, Gertrude, Selected Writings [New York, 1946], p. xiii.Google Scholar)

⁵² Brinton, Daniel G., The Güegüence (Philadelphia, 1883).Google Scholar

⁵³ Castro, op. cit., pp. 125–128. For the bowdlerization of American English see Mencken, , American Language, pp. 284–311 Google Scholar, and Supplement I, pp. 565–661.

⁵⁴ Alonso, op. cit., pp. 69–72, 138.

⁵⁵ One is reminded of the conversation of Mr. Scully in Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”: “a combination of Irish brogue and idiom, Western twang and idiom, and scraps of curiously formal diction taken from the story books and newspapers.” (Selected Prose and Poetry [New York, 1950], p. 197.)

⁵⁶ Herskovits, op. cit., pp. 111 ff.

⁵⁷ Faine, Jules, Philologie créole (2nd ed.; Port-au-Prince, 1937), pp. 1–3.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 4.

⁵⁹ Hearn, Lafcadio, Gombo Zhèbes (New York, 1885), pp. 4–5 Google Scholar; Tinker, Edward Larocque, Gombo—the Creole Dialect of Louisiana (1936), pp. 8–10.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ See Herskovits, op. cit., pp. 276–291 and passim. Hermann Keyserling quotes some interesting speculations of C. G. Jung on this point in America Set Free (New York, 1929), pp. 34–36.

⁶¹ Leyburn, James G., The Haitian People (New Haven, 1941), pp. 297–304.Google Scholar

⁶² Price-Mars, C. F., Formation ethnique, folk-lore et culture du peuple haïtien (Portau-Prince, 1939), pp. 118–121.Google Scholar