"Hipsaw" and "John Canoe"

Abstract

T THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING settlers of the seventeenth century, America included not merely those colonies which ultimately formed the United States but all areas of the New World where they had established themselves and their language. Before 7o00, English colonies had been founded not only in Jamestown, Plymouth, and other places along the Atlantic coast but also in Bermuda (I 6i 2), the Leeward Islands (I1623 and later), Barbados (I1627), the Bahamas (c. 1650), Surinam (I650), Jamaica (1655), British Honduras (I1662), St. Lucia in the Windward Islands (I663), the Virgin Islands (I666), Turks and Caicos Islands (I 678), and sporadically along the Central American shore. Hudson Bay had been explored and a post set up; the Hudson's Bay Company began its permanent control in 167o. All these English-speaking colonies, strung out over a length of more than 4,500 miles, grew side by side during the colonial period with exchanges of population, trade among themselves, and connections with the mother country, so that in many respects they shared a common experience. The subsequent separation of the United States, its phenomenal development, and the much slower changes in the other colonies have led to remarkable linguistic differences which for a variety of reasons we tend to forget. In particular, the continuation of near-colonial ways of life in the Caribbean down into the twentieth century has contributed to striking linguistic conservatism. Despite the resultant differences, the term American English, in the light of actualities, would better include in our minds every kind of English spoken in the New World rather than exclusively that of the United States. Yet in historical lexicography this total area of research was so huge that it proved convenient and even necessary to divide it. The Dictionary of American English and the Dictionary of Americanisms virtually limited themselves to the United States and did not try to include Canada; the Dictionary of Jamaican English1 limited itself to Jamaica rather than the entire Caribbean. The Dictionary of Canadian English is still to be made, and variants other than Jamaican within the Caribbean (e.g., Trinidadian, Barbadian) should also be sought and published. For the fact is that many problems involve, if not the entire hemisphere, a much greater part of it than has yet been studied as a whole. Especially during the first century of colonization, a considerable degree of interchange contributed to the growth of the language. The two words which form the