Page:The American Language.djvu/285

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PROPER NAMES IN AMERICA
269

republic was born.[1] And so, in our own time, we have seen the Swedes and Norwegians shouldering the native from the wheat lands of the Northwest, and the Italians driving the decadent New Englanders from their farms, and the Jews gobbling New York, and the Slavs getting a firm foothold in the mining re- gions, and the French Canadians penetrating New Hampshire and Vermont, and the Japanese and Portuguese menacing Ha- waii, and the awakened negroes gradually ousting the whites from the farms of the South.[2] The birth-rate among all these foreign stocks is enormously greater than among the older stock, and though the death-rate is also high, the net increase remains relatively formidable. Even without the aid of immigration it is probable that they would continue to rise in numbers faster than the original English and so-called Scotch-Irish.[3]

Turn to the letter z in the New York telephone directory and you will find a truly astonishing array of foreign names, some of them in process of anglicization, but many of them still ar- restingly outlandish. The only Anglo-Saxon surname beginning with z is Zacharias,[4] and even that was originally borrowed from the Greek. To this the Norman invasion seems to have added only Zouchy. But in Manhattan and the Bronx, even among the necessarily limited class of telephone subscribers, there are nearly 1500 persons whose names begin with the letter, and among them one finds fully 150 different surnames. The Ger- man Zimmermann, with either one n or two, is naturally the most numerous single name, and following close upon it are its derivatives, Zimmer and Zimmern. With them are many more German names: Zahn, Zechendorf, Zeffert, Zeitler, Zeller, Zellner, Zeltmacher, Zepp, Ziegfeld, Zabel, Zucker, Zucker- mann, Ziegler, Zillman, Zinser and so on. They are all repre- sented heavily, but they indicate neither the earliest nor the most formidable accretion, for underlying them are many Dutch

  1. A. B. Faust : The German Element in the United States, 2 vols.; Boston, 1909, vol. ii, pp. 34 et seq.
  2. Richard T. Ely: Outlines of Economics, 3rd rev. ed.; New York, 1916, p. 68.
  3. Cf. Seth K. Humphrey: Mankind; New York, 1917, p. 45.
  4. Cf. William G. Searle: Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum ; Cambridge, 1897.