NF Rebel Spelling Mistakes

[Manassas 1861]

90% of ACW soldiers were able to read and write. The myth is most Rebs had not education, but a majority did of some sort of education. But many had difficulty in spelling and grammar. You can see many mistakes in their letters. Mistakes include:

Once - wonst
Get - git
Uneasy - oneasy
Fit - Fiten
Any - airy
Ain't - haint
Not any - nairy
It - hit
Chickamauga - Chick a mooga
Chattanooga- Chat a nooga
Circumstances - sir come stances

And many others.

 

[Sheltowee]

I'm thinking "airy" and "nairy" are dialect products and not necessarily spelling mistakes.

Commonly used today- in my area.

 

[Rhea Cole]

It is a mistake to approach a historic letter like a sixth grade teacher with an eagle eye & a sharp red pencil. I always tell folks who ask me how to read letters & journals to read them out loud. People write like they talk. It is often surprising how much of an accent the phonetic spelling will come through.

One interesting thing about the language of mountain & back holler folk is that their peculiar accent is one they came by honestly.

Nashville being the way it is, I had a long chat with the actor Michael York on this subject. He was in town to do a speaking part at the symphony. We met at a members meet & greet.

I asked him if he would use my East Tennessee hill folk accent to do the Shakespeare reading. He laughed said he wouldn't dare. What followed was a very intense monologue about both the accent of an isolated area of England & its mountain folk cousins here.

Shakespeare spoke what amounts to hill billy English. The rhythm of a poem spoken by an Appalachian speaker is as close as you can get to what it sounded when written.

Dr. Charles Wolfe, my late friend, traveled all over the Southeast collecting recordings of the spoken word & music. He discovered an octogenarian couple who were troubadours descended from generations of troubadours in Kentucky. They knew hundreds of songs by heart. There was one that only a few lines had survived until they sang eight verses.

You will find Dr. Wolfe's name on the Smithsonian collections of country songs & others. An afternoon spent with Charlie was one well spent.

Anyways, many of what we recognize as characteristic mountain & county black vocabulary is, in fact, a legacy of Elizabethan England. So, read the passages out loud & let the sounds of the Old Country, wherever it was, flow.

 

[John Hartwell]

Phonetic spelling is not the same as misspelling, particularly before the standardization of English orthography, which has only been "completed" [sort of] within the past century.

I've heard it said that in an Elizabethan performance of Hamlet, Ophelia would have sounded more like Minnie Pearl than like Emma Thompson.

And, it's not just southern accents. Lincoln's favorite humorist, Artemus Ward, wrote in a back-country Yankee dialect that you can still hear in England today, in rural areas of East Anglia and the East Midlands. Overhearing conversations in a pub outside of Luton in Bedfordshire back in 1973, I could have sworn I was in the downeast Maine town where I spent my summers growing up. [Ayuh!]

 

[JackADriscoll]

I don't know about y'all but we still say fiten do something

 

[bankerpapaw]

Pretty near - Purt near

 

[Borderruffian]

Y'all ah fixin' to proof check in Yank spelling too in Yankee Bill?

 

[Josh The Lighthouse Guy]

Sumpter.

 

[nc native]

Census records for my direct ancestors who served for the Confederacy in the Civil War showed that four out of nine could not read or write. Two had some college education and the other three probably had what would be equivalent to an elementary school education at best. As would be expected, the college attendees were officers and the rest were privates with the exception of one corporal.

 

[Belfoured]

My ancestor who served in the Army of the Potomac was schooled through what today would be 6th grade. His diaries contain spellings such as "beenz" ("beans"), "uven" ("oven") - and then you'll hit the occasional "reconnaissance" and "fatigue" and "Weitzel" (Godfrey, who was one of his early CO's until he moved on to bigger and better rank/things). The grammar wasn't high end, either - but during his three years in the army he had a subscription to the Scientific American. You figure it out.

 

[Nathan Stuart]

In my view, spelling and/or grammatical imprecisions are an irrelevant consideration when evaluating personal eyewitness accounts (e.g. letters) of historical events. That's provided the meanings can be deciphered. If anything, spelling or grammar mistakes seen in written letters add authenticity and believability to the contents read.

One must judge such materials according to the standards of that time, not of today, in terms of rules of spelling or grammatical construction.

 

[Rhea Cole]

In my view, spelling and/or grammatical imprecisions are an irrelevant consideration when evaluating personal eyewitness accounts (e.g. letters) of historical events. That's provided the meanings can be deciphered. If anything, spelling or grammar mistakes seen in written letters add authenticity and believability to the contents read.

One must judge such materials according to the standards of that time, not of today, in terms of rules of spelling or grammatical construction.

I agree, there are cultural factors that can be quite baffling. Recently, the daily journal of a teenage girl living at the plantation at the end of my street was discovered. With great anticipation I opened the envelope containing my copy.

Page after page of beautifully written weather observations, quotes of CSA patriotic poems from the newspaper & census data on who came to visit or those visited filled day after day… ho-hum, I have seen this kind of thing before.

Every day young ladies were required to write in their journals. Every day, they presented them to their mothers for inspection. Understandably, the hopes, dreams, fears & joys that can make journals so fascinating are completely missing.

Perhaps that is why nobody reads George Washington's diary. Apart from historical meteorological studies, there is nothing to be learned.

I have a copy of Signal Corps Captain McClintock's meticulous daily entry journal. He stood next to Sherman during the Battle of Altona, the siege of Atlanta & was atop the cotton press when Sherman made contact with the USS Daisy, marched through the Carolinas & the victory parade.

McClintock barely missed a day writing in his journal. An example of the typical entry:

"General Sherman announced that Atlanta has fallen today."

Really gripping isn't it? Fortunately, he brought home a trove of original documents as well as the journals. His great granddaughter contributed them to the Huntington Library in CA. The archive includes the signal log of Kennesaw Mountain Station during the Battle of Altona & Sherman's handwritten signal announcing Lee's surrender. It is available online from the Huntington Library.

The lesson being that memoirs, journals, letters & diaries are only meaningful within the context of archives that surround them. There are objective facts & there are human experiences… the two often overlap in the most surprising ways.

 

[Belfoured]

I agree, there are cultural factors that can be quite baffling. Recently, the daily journal of a teenage girl living at the plantation at the end of my street was discovered. With great anticipation I opened the envelope containing my copy.

Page after page of beautifully written weather observations, quotes of CSA patriotic poems from the newspaper & census data on who came to visit or those visited filled day after day… ho-hum, I have seen this kind of thing before.

Every day young ladies were required to write in their journals. Every day, they presented them to their mothers for inspection. Understandably, the hopes, dreams, fears & joys that can make journals so fascinating are completely missing.

Perhaps that is why nobody reads George Washington's diary. Apart from historical meteorological studies, there is nothing to be learned.

I have a copy of Signal Corps Captain McClintock's meticulous daily entry journal. He stood next to Sherman during the Battle of Altona, the siege of Atlanta & was atop the cotton press when Sherman made contact with the USS Daisy, marched through the Carolinas & the victory parade.

McClintock barely missed a day writing in his journal. An example of the typical entry:

"General Sherman announced that Atlanta has fallen today."

Really gripping isn't it? Fortunately, he brought home a trove of original documents as well as the journals. His great granddaughter contributed them to the Huntington Library in CA. The archive includes the signal log of Kennesaw Mountain Station during the Battle of Altona & Sherman's handwritten signal announcing Lee's surrender. It is available online from the Huntington Library.

The lesson being that memoirs, journals, letters & diaries are only meaningful within the context of archives that surround them. There are objective facts & there are human experiences… the two often overlap in the most surprising ways.

Another factor is the author's interests. I have my ancestor's diaries for his three years of service. One "annoying" thing is that his entries on the days of an important event - such as a battle - often give as much space to the weather, etc as they do to the event. He had a scientific bent so I guess that makes sense but I wish he'd asked himself "why is today different from other days?"

 

[Josh The Lighthouse Guy]

I'm working with a volunteer to transcribe, edit, and annotate some journals by a ship captain, 1877-1882. His spelling varies from quaint to strange, and occasionally cryptic. Born and raised in England so it's not even the American schools to blame, but he was a career mariner.

 

[R. Porter]

Thirty years ago children learning to write in a local school were encouraged to use what they knew to spell words in their assignments. You would see phonetic spellings all over the place. As they learned grammar and spelling these would drop out until by high school if you wrote in dialect other kids in class would laugh at you because of your poor spelling and bad grammar. Even the teacher might miss the fact that dialect was being used. Accents and speech patterns become lost among the rules of grammar and spelling, which, after all, are somewhat arbitrary. The sounds of our ancestors' speech would come as a surprise to most today.

I grew up next to Richmond, VA, and heard a number of different segments, elements, and patterns of speech, so everything didn't sound quite the same. I also grew up listening to television which attempted to strive for no accent unless there was a character in a show who was trying to sell their part with an over done regional speech pattern that might not be that close to accurate. I don't feel that I have much of an accent; unless I get very tired, then a little slips out. I don't know where that little comes from and even then it does not occur to me that I have an accent (oh no, no, no! I'm not the one with the accent, you're the one with the accent!)

Years ago while watching a program on PBS about Northern Ireland I was surprised to see an interview with a local on the northwest coast of Ireland where the local sounded like they grew up right down the street from me. They didn't sound Irish at all to my ears and I wondered if they might actually be a recent transplant.

 

[Pollaco]

Bell Wiley's book "The Life of Johnny Reb" contains many guotes from letters sent back home from the front.It seems the Texans were the worst spellers or maybe they were just used as an example more often.The example that comes to mind is a Texan who wrote to his sister about his clothes. He refers to a pair of drawers as a "par of drass".

 

[marktwainenjoyer]

I'm having a lot of fun with this in my novel. It's in the first person and the main character is a Southerner (well, ish--he's from Missouri) who fights for the Union:

And then his gun it slipped out of his hands and landed on his toe and that fellow's face got even whiter and then he let out this one long, "owwwwww!" and hopped around holding his foot till he fell over and the mud it made a sad soft squelch around him. So there warn't no Rebs in Cleveland, though they did manage to bust up Gluck and Forester a little; and I was rotten glad there warn't no Rebs around. We couldn't a licked a one-armed, half-blind, ninety-year-old Reb, the way we was.

"Let him go. He's white."
"How d'you know? You done his genie-ology or somethin'?"

Ain't - haint

Lol, I can see this being very confusing for some folks for whom hain't=haven't; e.g. "I hain't got no more chaw, Billy Bob."

I could have sworn I was in the downeast Maine town where I spent my summers growing up. [Ayuh!]

Just out of curiosity, how would you write a Downeast Maine accent in print?

 

[Belfoured]

I'm having a lot of fun with this in my novel. It's in the first person and the main character is a Southerner (well, ish--he's from Missouri) who fights for the Union:






Lol, I can see this being very confusing for some folks for whom hain't=haven't; e.g. "I hain't got no more chaw, Billy Bob."


Just out of curiosity, how would you write a Downeast Maine accent in print?

The buses used by the U Maine hockey team for road trips have large "AYUH" bumper stickers. I am not making up the following story. When I was in law school I spent one summer working for a guy who did carpet installation. He got a large gig for a job in Maine, just over the NH border and not that far from MA. A couple of us had to take one of the vans and meet our boss at the job site. In the days before GPS, etc we got into Maine on Route X and decided we needed local directions. We finally come across an old-timer sitting on his front porch. We ask him "can we take this road to [ ]?" He sizes us up and then says "Ayuh, but ain't they got enuff their own?" I have no clue whether he was doing the "Mainer" thing for some "Furr'ners" or it was authentic but it didn't matter - it was vintage Downeast material.

 

[marktwainenjoyer]

The buses used by the U Maine hockey team for road trips have large "AYUH" bumper stickers. I am not making up the following story. When I was in law school I spent one summer working for a guy who did carpet installation. He got a large gig for a job in Maine, just over the NH border and not that far from MA. A couple of us had to take one of the vans and meet our boss at the job site. In the days before GPS, etc we got into Maine on Route X and decided we needed local directions. We finally come across an old-timer sitting on his front porch. We ask him "can we take this road to [ ]?" He sizes us up and then says "Ayuh, but ain't they got enuff their own?" I have no clue whether he was doing the "Mainer" thing for some "Furr'ners" or it was authentic but it didn't matter - it was vintage Downeast material.

Thanks!!!

 

[Bentonville]

I read this book on families writing to Richmond complaining about socks, blankets and hats. The writing was amazing. Funny part was some letters where spelled phonetically with excellent punctuation.

The ones that were well composed in some cases anyway were flowery with a lack of punctuation at all.

(I should really keep track of what I read so I sound like I'm full of it.)