Excerpt from The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States I am thus neither teacher, nor prophet, nor reformer, but merely inquirer. The exigencies of my vocation make me almost com pletely bilingual; moreover, I have a hand for a compromise dialect which embodies the common materials of both languages, and is thus free from offense on both sides of the water - as befits the editor of a magazine published in both countries. But that compromise dialect is the living speech of neither. What I have tried to do here is to make a first sketch of the living speech of these States. The work is confessedly incomplete, and in places very painfully so, but in such enterprises a man must put an arbitrary term to his labors, lest some mischance, after years of diligence, take him from them too suddenly for them to be closed, and his laborious accumula tions, as Ernest Weekly says in his book on English surnames, be doomed to the waste-basket by harassed executors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.