Discussions of the need for a Dictionary of Canadian English, during the past several years, have made it rather painfully obvious that most Canadians, lacking ready access to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American English, are unable to grasp the idea behind a dictionary based on historical principles. Others, while familiar with such works, have had little conception of the wealth of materials awaiting lexical exploitation in the field of Canadiana. It is understandable that Canadian scholars, inexperienced in the art of lexicography, should ifeel uncertain how to proceed about cultivation of ground that has for so long lain fallow. So that a beginning may be made, this selection of materials is offered as a suggestion of the lines that an historical Dictionary of Canadian English might follow.

James O. St. Clair-Sobell has touched on many interesting points in his “Notes on Spelling Pronunciation with Special Reference to Modern Standard Russian”, Canadian Slavonic Papers I (1956) : 66-75. The purpose of the present brief note is simply to rectify, as I think, what must be an analytical oversight in his discussion (70-71) of intervocalic / j /.

St. Clair-Sobell cites the statements of Isačenko and Shaxmatov to the effect that intervocalic / j / ‘lapses’ in certain environments. He continues : ‘But the “presence” of the intervocalic j is indicated by the quality of the preceding vowel and also by the quality of the following unstressed vowel.’ He then goes on to say (71) that many phoneticians and orthoëpists seem to have missed this dropping of the / j / , and that ‘in affected, that is, in spelling pronunciation the j is heard or it is imagined that the j is heard.’

With the publication of An Outline of English Structure in 1951 linguists were presented with a new phonetic analysis of English. But it was unfortunate that the authors were tempted to suggest that their work would serve as a “phonemic” analysis of English, or, at least, to allow others to interpret it in that way and to suggest that discrete phonetic items are phonematic; that is to pass off a linguistic analysis as a synthesis. In recent years the result has been that some linguists have attempted to combine the syntactical structures set out, for example, by Fries with the phonological analysis by Trager and Smith or, as in the case of Hill's Introduction to Linguistic Structures, to use an American idiolect (Hill's own) as a basis for a set of phonemes to explain English syntax in phonological terms.

It is customary to represent the German vowel system as consisting of seven short vowels / i / , / e / , / a / , / o / , /u/, / ö / , /ü/ and seven long vowels / i : / , / e : / , / a : / , / o : / , / u :/, / ö : / , / ü : /. In this analysis the short vowels have the phonetic value [I, ε, α, ɔ, U, œ, Y], whereas the long vowels are described as consisting of short vowel plus the phoneme / : /.

[: ] obviously does not only mean length, but it includes several features of quality, i.e. tenseness, fronting, and raising. It will be noted that the contrast tense-lax applies to every single pair: [i — I ] , [e — ε], [a — α], [o — ɔ], [u — U] [ö — œ], [ ü — Y].

Newfoundland place names derive from several linguistic bases — Portuguese, French, English, Basque, Breton, Micmac Indian, Gaelic and perhaps Scandinavian — with English and French names far out-numbering the rest. My study of the French element is still far from complete but, if it were, the limits of this paper would, of course, not admit of my treating it exhaustively. What I propose to do, then, is simply to give a short sketch of the history of the recording of the names and of their variety in the land of their adoption.

If for our present purpose we omit any reference to names which may have been given previously by the indigenous Indians or by early Scandinavian explorers, about which there is some conjecture but little evidence, the first names imposed in Newfoundland were Portuguese, which occur in maps produced within a few years of the discovery of the island in 1497.

The following notes are based on findings obtained in a pilot study of the speech of English-speaking residents of Montreal, which was carried out from 1957 to 1958. The data was obtained by circulating a questionnaire designed to elicit information on vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar and syntax. In general, the choice of items for inclusion in this questionnaire was restricted to those which illustrate differences between British and American usage. In the vocabulary section, a further restriction was made in that no items pertaining exclusively to rural life were included.

With respect to the selection of informants there were several deviations from the established methods of linguistic surveys. In most surveys it is usual to insist that informants belong to families which have been established in the area under investigation for several generations, and that they speak no other language but English.

Pour justifier le bref exposé qui va suivre, je voudrais rappeler l'effort considérable des linguistes américains qui se sont appliqués depuis 30 ans à renouveler complètement leur matiére en repensant les matériaux dont ils disposaient, voire en suscitant un ensemble systématique d'enquêtes linguistiques vraiment unique en son genre. Evoluant dans un milieu anglophone, ces linguistes (dont un nombre important venaient d'Europe) se sont tournés de prime abord vers les langues allogènes, afin d'éviter les ornières trop profondes de la “grammaire” traditionnelle. On a assisté dès lors à une floraison d'ouvrages strictement descriptifs sur la structure des langues amérindiennes, qui passèrent de ce fait d'une semi-obscurité à une vive lumière. Puis ce fut le tour de langues plus lointaines, réservées jadis, semble-t il, à l'exploration de savants européens en contact avec les populations de l'Asie et de l'Afrique par suite du jeu des influences politiques.