American Language Supplement 2 (10 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
With this most American phonologists agree. The late George Philip Krapp made some effort to use the IPA in both “The Pronunciation of Standard English in America,”
2
and the second volume (on pronunciation) of “The English Language in America,”
3
but in the former volume he sounded a warning to the whole faculty (including himself) that no such artificial alphabet could ever solve the problem of representing all the shades of sound in print. He said:
The professional student of phonetics seems to find it hard to resist the fascination which the game of inventing symbols exerts. The conventional alphabet is obviously inadequate for any scientific purposes, and scores of phonetic alphabets have been invented to take its place. If a phonetic alphabet is an evil, it is a necessary evil. But moderation should be practised in the exercise of this evil, for once started, there is obviously no limit to the number of symbols one may devise as records of his observations. It may be said, moreover, that in the end not even the most elaborate phonetic alphabet can record all the shadings and nuances of speech sounds current daily in good use. For one seeking absolute completeness and precision, some device richer in possibilities than an alphabet must be discovered.
4
John S. Kenyon, in his “American Pronunciation,” first published in 1924, used the IPA “in such ways as to adapt it to the peculiarities of American pronunciation,” but apparently found it appreciably short of satisfying, for when he undertook his larger “Pronouncing Dictionary of American English” in collaboration with the late Thomas A. Knott in 1936
5
he issued a call for suggestions from other phoneticians.
6
Whether or not this call brought them anything of value I do not know, but they finally decided to retain the IPA in their dictionary, though with the addition of about twenty-five additional symbols for “less common English sounds and the sounds of foreign languages,”
e.g., y, w
and
h
upside-down, and
?
with the dot under the hook omitted. Their explanation of this vitaminized IPA occupied nearly a dozen pages of fine print in the introduction to their dictionary, and must have produced
some symptoms of cephalalgia in untutored users of that otherwise able and valuable work. The common, or dirt dictionaries of both England and the United States avoid the IPA with great diligence. Webster 1934, of which Knott was the general editor, offers an explanation of it in the prefatory “Guide to Pronunciation,” written by Kenyon, but in the body of the work it is abandoned for a system going back to Webster himself,
1
whereby such homely indicators as
ā, ǎ
and
ä
are interpreted by strings of everyday words running along the bottoms of the pages,
e.g., āle, ǎdd
and
ärm
.
2
There was a time, not remote from today, when the pronunciations ordained by Webster, like his spellings, were accepted as gospel by all right-thinking Americans, and especially by the corps of schoolma’ams, but of late there has been a disposition to question dictionary authority, for the news has got about that language does not follow a rigid pattern but is extraordinarily flexible and changeable. In 1936 Dr. Edward W. Mammen, of the College of the City of New York, printed an analysis of Webster 1934, the Standard, the Century, and various other dictionaries, showing that some of the pronunciations they recommended were not in accord with those then prevailing “in educated colloquial American English.”
3
In 1938 Dr. George P. Wilson, of the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, followed with another and more devastating paper,
4
in 1939 Dr. C. K. Thomas, of Cornell, joined the attack (somewhat mildly) with a third,
5
and in 1940 Dr. Karl W.
Dykema, of Youngstown College, came on with a fourth, covering both dictionaries and handbooks of “correct” English.
1
Even before these attacks, the aforesaid Knott had entertained the savants assembled for an Eastern Public Speaking Conference in New York with a disillusioning account of the way in which dictionary pronunciations are determined, born of his hard experience with Webster 1934.
2
The dictionary editor, he said, has to disregard the sounds of words in sentences, and deal with them in isolation, paying no attention to the influence of a given one upon its neighbors and
vice versa
. Again, he has to frame a pronunciation that will be suitable for the most careful and precise utterance,
e.g
., that of a public speaker, and pass over the looseness of “ordinary running colloquial.” How, then, are these somewhat pedantic pronunciations arrived at? Knott answered:
We habitually and periodically send around questionnaires containing a very carefully selected list of words with as many as sometimes six different known pronunciations, to just as many people as we dare, people of very widely different classes.… We include a limited number of college and university presidents,… a limited number of linguists and phoneticians,… as large a number as we dare of teachers, heads of departments of speech, [and] … a considerable number of heads of departments of English.… We select some lawyers. We select some of the principal public speakers down in Washington and from various parts of the country. We present them with just as many known pronunciations of these representative words that we have a decent record of, and ask them which one is the one that they prefer.
The answers, said Knott, usually show substantial votes for one or two of the pronunciations submitted. “We find about 125 out of 300 say that there is some one that they use prevailingly. Another hundred habitually use or hear type No. 2, and the other 75 are sprinkled out among the other candidates.”
3
Knott said that Webster
1934 did not use the IPA because “hardly anybody knows it yet.” “Take it out,” he went on, “to the first twenty-five teachers that you will meet in an ordinary city public-school system, and if there is one of them who has ever heard of it I should certainly be very, very greatly surprised.”
1
And then, in closing:
We probably get five letters every week from school teachers who tell us that such and such a word is not in the dictionary, and why isn’t it? We write back and say: “It is on page 1041, column 2, eight lines from the bottom.”
They don’t know the alphabet
.
Krapp’s longing for a device to record speech sounds that would be “richer in possibilities than an alphabet,” lately noticed, was already in process of realization when he wrote in 1918. It was the phonograph, which the International Correspondence Schools had been using to teach foreign languages since 1901. But its use for embalming and studying spoken American had to wait until 1924, when Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres, of Columbia University, presented five records of the national speech at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Three years later he and Dr. W. Cabell Greet began a diligent and systematic making of records at Columbia, and this accumulation went on until the beginning of World War II. The materials were obtained from various sources. In some cases radio speeches by eminent public characters,
e.g
., Roosevelt II and his lady, the Hon. Frances Perkins, General Hugh S. Johnson, Nicholas Murray Butler and Dorothy Thompson, were recorded, and in other cases volunteers from various parts of the country were recruited to provide specimens of their talk. The latter were found mainly on the campus of Columbia, where 14,000 students are gathered annually for the sessions of the Summer School. The director of this Summer School assigns a tree on the campus as a rally-place for the students from each State, so they sort out very conveniently, and finding individuals who spoke the
dialect, say, of Columbia, S. C. or Newburyport, Mass., was thus easy. Ayres and Greet were presently joined by Dr. Jane Dorsey Zimmerman, of Columbia, and advanced students were put to work, apparently as kitchen police duty, transcribing the phonograph records in a modified form of the IPA. These transcriptions were printed in
American Speech
under the editorship of Dr. Zimmerman, beginning in February, 1933, and continuing to the present day. In 1936 she brought out a collection of them running down to June of that year,
1
and in 1939 there was a revised edition coming to December, 1939. Most of the student guinea-pigs were set to reading a little fable called “Arthur the Rat,” originally drawn up by the English phonologist, Henry Sweet, to exhibit all of the customary sounds of English, and later improved by Dr. Hans Kurath and Dr. Greet.
2
By 1935 records of the speech of no less than 3200 speakers were on file, most of them obtained either from the radio or at Columbia, but also including a number made on trips of exploration by Greet and others.
3
Meanwhile, the Linguaphone Institute in New York undertook, on a large scale, the teaching of both foreign languages and English pronunciation by phonograph,
4
and in 1943 it added an American English conversation course in which the teachers were Ayres, Greet, Mrs. Zimmerman and various other phonologists.
5
It also
offered a course “in standard American pronunciation” prepared by Dr. Ray E. Skinner. Finally, it offered two courses in “The Sounds of English,” one based on American pronunciation, prepared by Greet, and one based on British pronunciation, prepared by James. In 1941, cheered by these experiments and doubtful about the usefulness of the IPA, Dr. Bert Emsley, of Ohio State University, proposed boldly that the pronouncing dictionaries of the future be not printed, but recorded on phonograph plates.
1
He said:
Pronouncing dictionaries have gone about as far as they can go, in print. Letters cannot duplicate a sound; they can only symbolize it. This situation resembles an older stage, when description of the sounds, which could not symbolize or represent them, had to be replaced, or at least supplemented, by respelling. Just as the Eighteenth Century advanced from description to respelling, it now appears that the Twentieth Century must go ahead from visible to audible devices.… Let us imagine an apparatus which will give (with or without general lexical information) an understandable and reputable pronunciation of any word on demand. Ultimately we should be able to hear the desired word alone, without going through
asphasia
to get to
asthma
. A list is not sufficient – there must be some way of sounding and repeating a wanted entry in isolation.
So far this clarion call has not been answered, but no doubt inventive men are busy with it.
2
1
See AL4, pp. 3–12, and Supplement I, pp. 1–33.
1
Encyclopedia Americana; New York, 1932, Vol. XXIII, p. 180.
1
Down to 1814 it had sold more than 3,000,000 copies, and down to 1889 62,000,000. Mrs. Emily E. F. Skeel, the lexicographer’s great-granddaughter, tells me that there were 304 editions before 1829. See AL4, p. 385.
2
Webster’s theory of the divine origin of language was set forth at length in his introduction to his American Dictionary of 1828, and it continued to appear in the successive editions thereof until twenty-one years after his death, when his heirs and assigns employed a German philologian named C. A. F. Mahn to revise it. In brief, old Noah accepted the statement of Genesis XI, 1 that after the Flood “the whole earth was of one language and of one speech” and concluded that this must have been what he called Chaldee. Also, he concluded that Chaldee remained the base of all the tongues inflicted upon the descendants of Noah when they built the Tower of Babel, and that it was thus the
Ur-Sprache
of the whole human race. See Etymology, Anglo-Saxon, and Noah Webster, by Charlton Laird,
American Speech
, Feb., 1946, pp. 3–15.
3
He also gave four clear syllables to
territory
. This American pronunciation was noted by General Thomas P. Thompson in the
Westminster Review
for Oct., 1933. “There are [American] mispronunciations,” he said primly, “which the English will never submit to; for example, a member of the Senate will never be excused for calling
territory Terry Tory
.” The English pronunciation makes it something on the order of
territry
.
4
Worcester
, to be sure, stumped him, and though he rejected
Wooster
he was willing to compromise on
Worster
. Also, he allowed that it was best to pronounce
Mishilimackanac
as if it were spelled
Mackinaw
. He spelled and pronounced
Chicago Chickaugo
.
1
They were not, of course, the first English lexicographers to interest themselves in pronunciation, but they seem to have been the first to exert any important influence. The principal dictionary makers before them,
e.g
., Samuel Johnson, devoted themselves mainly to vocabulary, morphology and syntax. An elaborate and excellent study of the subject is in Standards of English Pronunciation According to the Grammarians and Orthoepists of the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, by Esther Keck Sheldon. This is a thesis submitted in 1938 to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, where Mrs. Sheldon received the doctorate. It has not been published, but I have had access to it through the kindness of Dr. Robert C. Pooley, Dr. Miles L. Hanley and the author. It starts with Jean Palsgrave in the Sixteenth Century and ends with the attempts to reform and refine English pronunciation made by Sheridan, Walker and their contemporaries. “We think of the Eighteenth Century,” says Mrs. Sheldon, “as the time when the desire to regulate and fix the language, above all to reform its speakers, predominated.” See also Walker’s Influence on the Pronunciation of English, likewise by Mrs. Sheldon,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, March, 1947, pp. 130–46. I should note here, without detracting in the slightest from the value of her studies, that Henry Cecil Wyld calls attention in A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 1, to the unsatisfactory nature of written records of speech. It is sometimes very hard to make out precisely what sounds an author undertakes to represent.
2
James Boardman, who visited the United States in 1829, wrote in his America and the Americans; London, 1833: “The variations from the present usages of the mother-country in respect to many words and expressions really English can be accounted for by supposing the language now used in America to be the same imported by the Pilgrim Fathers and others to the period of the separation of the governments, since which the Americans have ceased to look to England as their model.” “There can be no doubt,” said Robert J. Menner, in The Pronunciation of English in America,
Atlantic Monthly
, March, 1915, p. 360, “that the number of native-born Americans at the time of the Revolution whose pronunciation was exactly the same as that of Englishmen was exceedingly small.” The archaisms that survived are discussed in AL4, pp. 124–29 and in Supplement I, pp. 224–26. Their tendency to persist in an immigrant language is well exemplified by the case of Icelandic.
1
Edward Everett, writing on June 19, 1827, said: “The great difference between the American and English mode of speaking … has seemed to me that we are apt … to pronounce every syllable. Great pains are generally taken in our schools … to teach boys to pronounce
extra-ordinary, min-i-a-ture
, etc., which are the things that first strike an English ear.” To say “the schools,” in 1827, meant to say Noah Webster.
2
“It has often happened to me in our own island,” said Sir Charles Lyell in his Travels in America in the Years 1841–2; New York, 1852, “without traveling into those parts of Wales, Scotland or Ireland where they talk a perfectly distinct language, to encounter provincial dialects which it is difficult to comprehend.”
3
Amphi-Atlantic English,
English Studies
, Oct., 1935, pp. 161–78, and British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Part VI, 1933, pp. 313–34. I am indebted to both papers for much of the foregoing and for more of what follows.
1
Jones taught mathematics at William and Mary and was chaplain to the Virginia House of Burgesses. He published both of his books in London in 1724. Later he came back to America, remaining until his death in 1760.
2
See AL4, pp. 12–23 and 28–48, and Supplement I, pp. 33–44 and 56–76.
1
See AL4, p. 35n.
2
Ramsay (1740–1815) was a Pennsylvanian who moved to South Carolina and there became a man of mark. He was a physician and served as a surgeon in the Continental Army. In 1776 he was elected to the South Carolina Legislature, and sat off and on until he was captured by the British in 1780. From 1782 to 1786 he was a member of the Continental Congress, and during the last two years its president. After the Revolution he returned to the South Carolina Legislature. He was murdered by a lunatic. Beside his History of the American Revolution, first published in 1789, he wrote a History of South Carolina, a History of the United States, and a biography of Washington. See AL4, p. 17.
1
See State of Birth of the Native Population, 1940, prepared under the supervision of Dr. Leon E. Truesdell, chief of the population division of the Census Bureau; Washington, 1944. In California, in 1940, 48.7% of the native population had been born in other States; in Oregon, 49.4%; in Wyoming, 55.2%, and in the District of Columbia no less than 60.7%. Of the 5,316,338 white inhabitants of New York City, 76,399 came from Massachusetts, 113,987 from the Carolinas, 128,954 from New Jersey, and 145,869 from Pennsylvania. Alaska contributed 108, Nevada 229, Wyoming 477, Idaho 552, South Dakota 967 and Delaware 2994. Nor is this movement into metropolitan cities only. Chattanooga, Tenn., with 128,163 inhabitants, had 50,488 born in other States – 1030 in Ohio, 595 in Texas, 462 in New York, 204 in Oklahoma, 148 in Massachusetts, 45 in Vermont, 32 in Maine, and 15 in New Hampshire.
2
Boston and New York, 1889, p. 63.
3
Early New England Pronunciation; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1927, p. 129.
1
The Assimilation of the Speech of British Immigrants in Colonial America,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
, Jan., 1938, pp. 70–79. The late Marcus L. Hansen in his chapter on The Settlement of New England in Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England; Providence (R.I.), 1939, p. 63, concluded that of the 4,000 families, embracing 20,000 individuals, who reached New England between 1628 and 1640, “the majority originated either in the eastern and southern counties of England, where Puritanism and agricultural change were in the air, or else in the western counties, where fishing and shipping were important occupations.”
2
Report of the Council,
Proceedings
of the society, April, 1885, pp. 342–71.
3
Neither of the high contesting parties seems to have made any use of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words; London, 1847; nor of Thomas Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English; London, 1857 (not to be confused with Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary in six vols.; London, 1896–1905), nor of the publications of the English Dialect Society, which began to appear in 1873; nor of Edward Moor’s Suffolk Words and Phrases; London, 1823.
1
English Sources of American Dialect,
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society
, April, 1886, pp. 159–66. J. R. Bartlett, in the second edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms; Boston, 1859, pp. xxv and xxvi, also favored this North Country theory, though without offering any evidence.
2
The American Accent and What it Really is,
Scottish Educational Journal
, Oct. 11, 1935, p. 1283, and The American Accent: What Was its Origin?, Edinburgh
Evening Dispatch
, Sept. 30, 1942.
3
Americanisms: The English of the New World; New York, 1872, p. 427.
4
p. 627. The old kingdom of East Anglia comprised the present counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, and part of Cambridgeshire. A list of books and articles on its speech in modern times is in Arthur G. Kennedy’s Bibliography of Writings on the English Language From the Beginning of Printing to the End of 1922; Cambridge and New Haven, 1927, pp. 383 and 384, and another is in A Bibliographical List of the Works That Have Been Published, or are Known to Exist in MS., Illustrative of the Various Dialects of English, edited by W. W. Skeat and published by the English Dialect Society; London, 1875. In the same works are bibliographies of the speech of the Midlands, the North Country and the West Country, and of most of the English individual counties.
1
The Origin of Dialectal Differences in Spoken American English,
Modern Philology
, May, 1928, p. 391.
2
Louisiana State University Studies
, No. XX; Baton Rouge, 1935.
3
pp. 72 and 73.
4
His material came mainly from A Word-List From East Alabama, by L. W. Payne, Jr.,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. II, Part IV, 1908, pp. 279–328, and Vol. III, Part V, pp. 343–91. Payne reported on Lee, Macon, Russell and Tallapoosa counties, Alabama, and Troupe, Harris and Muscogee counties, Georgia. This is low country, with an average altitude, except for a narrow peninsula making down from the Appalachian chain, of less than 600 feet.
1
The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, pp. 248
ff
. and Vol. II, p. 226.
2
pp. 63 and 64.
3
Southern Speech, in Culture in the South, edited by W. T. Couch; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1934, p. 614.
4
See Supplement I, pp. 511
ff
. A writer in
Town Topics
, April 26, 1906, p. 13, reported that this emulation became marked in the 80s. Americans, he said, then began “landing in England with a twang and returning with that twang made more abominable by the effort to inflect and produce the English language as Londoners of fashion do. This curious importation has grown and developed until now the result is of an alarming ugliness. Compounded of bastard Briticisms and inescapable nasalities, it is delivered from a mouth apparently abrim with steaming porridge.… The syllables cannot really be said to issue at all. They mingle in one blend of inchoate vowel sound; the consonants die before they are decently born.” The writer, with the lack of reticence characteristic of a society journalist, named some of the fashionables of the time who were most given to this lingual Anglomania: the Sloanes, Whitehouses, Havemeyers, Palmers, Stokeses, Brokaws, and Haggins. “Our spoken American,” he said, “is threatened from the top down, and slang and all the perishing inventions of the vulgate do not menace it one tithe as sombrely as does this mannered mouthing by our millionaires.” The increasing rage for English speechways had been lampooned by Mrs. Burton Harrison in The Anglomaniacs in 1887, and by Edgar Fawcett in A Gentleman of Leisure,
c
. 1880. See American English, by Gilbert M. Tucker,
Transactions of the Albany Institute
, Vol. X, 1883, p. 335.
1
A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English; Springfield (Mass.), 1944, p. xxxii, and American Pronunciation, by Kenyon alone, ninth ed., Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. vi. Kenyon is professor of English at Hiram College and rewrote the Guide to Pronunciation for Webster 1934. Knott was general editor of this Webster from 1926 to 1935, when he became professor of English at the University of Michigan and editor of the Middle English Dictionary. He died on Aug. 14, 1945.
2
The English Language in America; New York, 1925, Vol. I, p. 40.
3
For example, Lewis and Marguerite Shalett Herman in Talk American; Chicago, 1944, p. xi.
4
The Pronunciation of Short
a
in American Standard English,
American Speech
, June, 1930, p. 396.
5
Postvocalic
r
in New England Speech: A Study in American Dialect Geography,
Acts of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists
. Copenhagen, 1936, p. 198.
1
British and American Pronunciation: Retrospect and Prospect,
School Review
, June, 1915, p. 38.
1
It was almost the rule, between 1800 and 1835, for poor young men to earn their way through college by teaching school, and large numbers continued until they were ripe for politics or one of the professions. In the rural South and Middle West the custom survives more or less to this day.
