Курсовая работа: Characteristic features of American English
grizzly bear, 1791, because some of the animals have a grizzly or gray color; in fact it's sometimes called the white bear, silver- tipped bear, etc. Shortened to grizzly by the early 1800s.
lightning bug, 1778. The English had called this beetle a glow worm since the 16th century and a firefly since 1658. [9. p.182 ]
There some words denoting the famous American animal which enriches the American English very much. [9. p.66 ]
Buffalo (Portuguese and Spanish bufalo from Greek boufdos, “ wild ox”) is, of course, a misnomer, a word Europeans had used for the smaller, weaker Indian and African ox. American buffalo is really the American bison (1796), but De Soto didn't know that when he first called it bufalo in 1544. The word appears in many American combinations, including:
buffalo beef, 1722, buffalo meat.
buffalo robe, 1723, also called buffalo rug, 1805. This Indian item
was first described by Marquette and Joliet in 1681; it served
many Indians and whites as robe, coat, blanket, and sleepingbag. buffalo-headed duck, 1731, now known as the bufflehead (1858), a
small, widely distributed duck with a large, squarish head. buffalo road, 1750; buffalo trace, 1823; buffalo trail, 1834. These are
all paths or trails worn by buffalo herds.
Buffalo Bill, William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), who had been a pony express rider and cavalry scout before earning this nickname as a buffalo hunter supplying large quantities of meat to Union Pacific Railroad construction crews in 1867-68. The name Buffalo Bill was given him by Ned Buntline (pen name of Edward Zane Carroll Judson, 1821 -86), a writer of adventure fiction and one of the first dime novelists. Cody himself gave us the term Wild West Show, opening Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Omaha, May 37, 1883. [9. p.67 ]
Such terms as in the buff(\n the skin, naked), the brownish yellow color called buff, and to buff (to polish as with an animal skin) do not come from our word buffalo but entered English in the 16th century via buffle, the French word for that Asiatic and African ox. [9. p.68 ]
2.3. Plants
Americans have given many of their native trees, grasses, flowers, and shrubs descriptive names, often by combining two old words. Thus they have:
bluegrass, 1751, being any of several American grasses of the for genus and having a bluish cast, earlier called Dutch grass (1671). Kentucky bluegrass, 1849, a type of bluegrass, Poa pratem valuable as pasturage and hay; Bluegrass region, Bluegrass country the Blue Grass, a region in Kentucky, 1860s; the Bluegrass Stof Kentucky, 1886. [9. p.62 ]
butternut, 1741, or white walnut (1743), called butternut from the oiliness of the nut. By 1810 butternut also meant the brownish dye obtained from the tree's bark, its color, and fabric dyed with it. During the Civil War Butternut (1862) meant a Confederate soldier, from the butternut dye used on some homemade uniforms. buttonwood, 1674, because of its buttonlike burrs. This name was given the tree in New England; Southerners called it sycameri (1709), thinking it was that familiar English tree.
honey locust, 1743, because the pealike pods have a sweet taste.
Johnny-jump-up, 1842, from its quick growth. Also called JoktM jumper, Johnny jump up and kiss me, 1859; johnny jump, 1894. The English call this the viola tricolor or heartsease (we use these names for any of the various American violets and wild pansies).
live oak, 1610,because, being an evergreen oak, it is "alive" all year.
poison ivy, 1784, earlier poison weed. It got its name because, as Captain John Smith wrote in 1624, "The Poysoned weed is much in shape like our English ivy." Colonists, who had never seen or heard of it until they landed in America, had to learn to recognize and avoid it, and care for its effects, by trial and error. It was particularly rampant in Virginia, all the more troublesome because it could be mistaken by uninitiates for the local climbing vine the Virginia creeper (1670s).
poison oak, 1743, so called because its lobelike leaves resemblethose of an oak tree. This plant also was troublesome in early Virginia where it seems to have gotten its name.
The early settlers and frontiersmen also borrowed many plant names from the Indians, French, and Spanish. Other plants and trees are named after people, as the Douglas fir (1884, for the Scottish botanist David Douglas who discovered it while collecting and exploring in the Northwest in 1825) and the poinsettia (named in 1836 for Joel Poinsett, who collected and sent back many rare plants, including this one, while serving as the first U.S. minister to (Mexico in 1825-29). Other native American plants were misnamed, merely because the settlers who first saw them thought they were identical to those back home in England when they weren't. Thus our beech, hemlock, laurel, and walnut are not the same as the English trees of the same names and our bay trees and bay bushes also differ from the English ones. [9. p.63 ]
2.4. Banknotes and coins
The word dollar comes from the German t(h)aler, a word the
Germans got from shortening Joachinistaler, a silver coin first minted in Joachimstal, Bohemia, in 1519 (Joachimstaler itself literally means "of the Saint Joachim valley," t(h)akr meaning "of the valley"). This original t(h)aler became such a common European coin that t(h)aler or da(h)ler soon became the general name for any large silver coin in various German states and the name of the basic coins of Denmark and Sweden, with the word being spelled dollar in England by 1581.
The first dollar widely circulated in America was a Dutch coin bearing the likeness of a lion. Brought here by the original Dutch settlers around 1620, it was a favorite of European merchants and sailors and continued to be brought to America and to circulate widely long after the English took over the Dutch lands in 1664 and turned the Dutch colony of New Netherland (so named by the Dutch in 1621) into New York and New Jersey. We called this Dutch dollar a lion dollar or lion by 1725. This Dutch dollar was not the only dollar the colonists had. The Spanish peso was also in wide use in all the American colonies and called a Spanish dollar from at least 1684. By the early 1750s any peso, whether from Spain or Spanish America, was called a Spanish dollar, Spanish mill(ed) dollar, or simply a dollar. [10. p.181 ]
With English money in short supply and colonial money uncertain, the most prized and trusted money was often gold and silver coins from Spain, France, Holland, Mexico, Portugal, Brazil— from just about every European country, possession, island, and even mission (the Spanish Jesuits in Tuban, Arizona, minted coins as early as 1707). Such gold and silver coins were brought to America by its original Dutch, French, Spanish, and German settlers and continued to come in through merchants, sailors, and pirates from the entire Western world. Besides British guineas, pounds, shillings, and pence, Dutch and Spanish dollars, and colonial bills and coins, early Americans used and talked about such coins as the:
peso. The Spanish peso (literally weight, from Latinpensum, something weighted) was worth eight Spanish reals (see below) and marked with a figure 8. We called this Spanish coin and its value peso, eight reals, piece of eight, and, of course, dollar.
picayune. This French coin (from French picaillon, a small copper coin) was widely circulated in Louisiana and Florida in the late 18th century and was still in wide use at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1855 we used picayune to mean trifling, of small value.