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By Amy Geiszler-Jones

Linguist Larry Davis has studied the spelling patterns in the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The journals were often illustrated with drawings of animals and other things the explorers encountered, as shown below.

The story of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, as they charted the American frontier in 1804, has always fascinated Larry Davis.

When Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Meriwether Lewis, "Undaunted Courage," hit bookstores in 1996, Davis immediately got a copy.

So it’s not surprising that when Davis, a linguist, decided to venture into analyzing written English for the first time that he focused on journals kept by the Corps of Discovery. Davis, chair and professor of English at WSU, usually concentrates on regional and social U.S. dialects.

He partnered with Charles Houck of Ball State and Clive Upton of the University of Leeds in England this past year to pour over the chronicles of the expedition that had hoped to find a water route to the Pacific but instead changed the face of the American West.

Upton, like Davis, had been struck by the language when he read "Undaunted Courage." Ambrose relied heavily on the journals of Lewis and Clark themselves, reprinting whole passages.

Upton happened to be visiting Davis when he was reading the book and asked Davis if anyone had ever approached studying the journals from a linguistic point of view.

No one had, so the three blazed a new trail in the research of the much-studied expedition. Upton presented their paper, "Sett out verry Eairly Wensdy: The Spelling and Grammar in the Lewis and Clark Journals," at a conference in August.

Other scholars had studied the words of the five men who chronicled the expedition, but usually to count and categorize misspellings. (One of the men, Sgt. Charles Floyd, died five months into the trip.)

"The main thing that motivated the (research) was that we got tired of the condescending attitude of scholars" since linguist Harry Criswell studied the journals in 1940, Davis said. "Everybody else would have comments like ‘the men’s erratic, but delightful and ingenious manner of spelling.’

"Well, it’s not erratic. It can be explained," Davis said of their findings. "Even though they were inconsistent in the spelling of individual words, it was very clear they were following some kind of pattern."

Their misspellings were "almost always explainable." Some explanations include what’s called analogic spelling, which means spelling caught as cought just as you would spell bought or fought. Another recognized pattern were the British spellings of colour, labour, and favour.

Some of the misspellings are very similar to ones still done by someone learning the English language, including American schoolchildren.

One word in Floyd’s journal, "youers," proved to be very puzzling. Eventually Davis and fellow WSU colleague Bryan Hay determined Floyd meant warriors.

"It gives us a notion about what the state of English was in the beginning of the 19th century, which is interesting to know," Davis said of their research. It helps chronicle the change of the English language in America.

Although he studied the journals for the language they contained, Davis couldn’t help but be fascinated by the incredible story they told.

"They seemed to be able to undergo these incredible privations with a lot of equanimity, I don’t know how else to explain it. They were very tough."