American Language Supplement 2 (11 page)

2
Quoted by George H. McKnight in Modern English in the Making; New York, 1928, p. 484.

3
“If we examine the structure of any language,” he said in his Dissertations on the English Language; Boston, 1789, pp. 27–29, “we shall find a certain principle of analogy running through the whole. We shall find in English that similar combinations of letters have usually the same pronunciation, and that words having the same terminating syllable generally have the accent at the same distance from that termination.… In disputed points, where people differ in opinion and practise, analogy should always decide the controversy.”

4
Brander Matthews says in Essays on English; New York, 1921, p. 216, that the German
Bühnenaussprache
was revised in 1898 by a committee consisting of five professors of language and six actors and managers. American actors of the tonier sort still use some of the traditional pronunciations of the English stage, but Frank Vizetelly says in A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced; New York, 1917, p. ix, that these affectations are but little imitated outside the theatre, even in England. He gives some curious specimens –
aitches
for
aches, bird
for
beard, kwality
(with the
a
as in
at
) for
quality, rallery
for
raillery, Room
for
Rome, yur
for
your, moo-errn
for
mourn, ge-irl
for
girl
, and
England
with the
e
of
end
.

1
Said C. K. Thomas in the
Quarterly Journal of Speech Education
, Nov., 1927, p. 452: “The West, since it grew up with its attention on more urgent questions than niceties of speech, developed a more natural type, mainly free from the artificialities of polite speech.”

2
In Sources of Pronunciation,
American Speech
, June, 1929, pp. 416–19, J. S. K[enyon?] discussed acutely the four dominant influences, to wit, tradition, analogy, borrowing and spelling. The last-named, he said, is always most powerful in the middle ground between the illiterate and the “educated and cosmopolitan.” The overwhelming majority of Americans, as of other folk, have always stood in that middle ground.

3
I am reminded of this by Mrs. Delia H. Biddle Pugh, of New York, who writes: “In country schools in the old days spelling-classes stood up and spelled
extraordinary
as
E X ex, T R A tra, extra, O R, or, extraor
, and so on. This influenced the American tendency to give full value to every syllable.” Certainly it worked powerfully against such English forms (borrowed in Boston and New York) as
extraw’n’ry
.

4
This is the conclusion, on the college level, of J. M. Steadman, Jr., in The Language Consciousness of College Students,
American Speech
, Dec., 1926, p. 131. “The imitation of the teacher as a superior linguistic authority,” he says, “is by far the most important single cause of change.”

1
Says Eilert Ekwall in American and British Pronunciation; Upsala, 1946, pp. 29 and 32: “Educated American pronunciation on the whole remains at the stage which British pronunciation had reached about the time of the Revolution, while modern British pronunciation has left that stage far behind.… Educated American was under the influence of Standard British all through the colonial period, an influence probably stronger in the later than in the earlier part.”

2
His strictures are dealt with at length in Supplement I, pp. 4–14.

1
This judgment was confirmed forty-two years later by another Scotsman, John M. Duncan, whose Travels in America was published in Glasgow in 1823. In Vol. II thereof he said: “The inferior orders of society in America certainly speak more accurately than the inferior orders in Britain.… Here, however, my concessions stop. The educated classes do not speak by any means so accurately in America as in Britain; there are more deficiencies in grammar, in accent, in pronunciation.” I am indebted here to Dr. J.-M. Carrière, of the University of Virginia.

2
On Sept. 27, 1760, he wrote from London to David Hume: “I hope … that we shall always in America make the best English of this island our standard, and I believe it will be so.” But this was before the Revolution.

3
See Supplement I, pp. 18–20.

4
Here I am indebted again to Allen Walker Read’s Amphi-Atlantic English, before quoted.

1
This was in 1841. It had been taught at Randolph-Macon College since 1839 and at the University of Virginia since 1825.

2
p. 94.

3
Lectures on the English Language; fourth edition, revised and enlarged; New York, 1870, p. 676.

1
The essay making up the book were first published in the
Galaxy
in 1867, 1868 and 1869, and appeared between covers in 1870.

2
Preface dated New York, July 8, 1870. The passage is on p. 8 of the New Edition, Revised and Corrected; New York, 1876.

3
p. 62.

4
Galaxy
, April, p. 523.

1
Every-Day English; New York, 1881, p. 89. It will be noted that White put the word
America
into ironical quotation marks – a banal indication of his Anglomania. This animosity to the vernacular was denounced by Dante, so long ago as the first years of the Fourteenth Century, in II Convivio. He found five causes for it, thus summarized by Gordon Hall Gerould in The Gawain Poet and Dante,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, March, 1936, p. 33: “blindness in discernment, mischievous self-justification, desire of vainglory, the prompting of envy, and abjectness of mind, or cowardice.” Of the last-named Dante said: “On account of this abjectness many disparage their own vernacular and praise that of others; and all such men as these are the abominable wretches in Italy who regard as low their precious vernacular, which, if it be low in anything, is only so in so far as it is heard in the bawdy mouth of these adulterers.”

2
White was a New Yorker, born in 1821, and after trying medicine and the law took to journalism. He soon attained to notice as a musical and dramatic critic, and in 1853 began a series of studies of Shakespeare which eventually produced the Riverside edition of the Bard, published in 1883. He had no training in philology, but was a very cocksure fellow, and did not hesitate to pit his opinions against those of such authorities as William D. Whitney. During the Civil War he served gallantly as a Federal jobholder in New York. His son Stanford, born in 1853, was the celebrated architect, put to death by Harry K. Thaw on June 25, 1906.

3
His address was delivered on June 8, and got a great deal of attention in the newspapers. It was printed in The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1905.

1
Born in New York in 1843, he spent the years 1855–59 in Europe, and in 1869 settled in England, where he remained until his death in 1916. He was perhaps the champion Anglomaniac of all time, not even excepting Walter Hines Page.

2
Presidential address in New York, Dec. 1. This address was printed in the
English Journal
, Jan., 1917, and reprinted in The Standard of American Speech and Other Papers; Boston, 1926. A brief account of Scott is in Supplement I, pp. 134 and 135n.

1
British and American Pronunciation: Retrospect and Prospect,
School Review
, June, p. 392. Said William Schack in the
Millgate
, Oct., 1938, quoted in the Manchester
Evening News
, Sept. 28: “To an American vaudeville audience a broad
a
is as funny as a bit of slapstick comedy; and it would take a brave man to say
cahn’t
in many an American gathering.”

2
The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1919. See especially his discussion of the broad
a
, p. 64.

3
American Pronunciation; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1924; ninth ed., 1945. Kenyon says, p. vi, that he has “based his observations on the cultivated pronunciation of his own locality – the Western Reserve of Ohio.” He adds: “this is fairly representative of … the speech … which is virtually uniform in its most noticeable features from New York State west, in a region north of a line drawn west from Philadelphia.”

4
Pronunciation: a Practical Guide to American Standards, by Thorlief Larsen and Francis C. Walker; London and New York, 1930.

5
p. 15.

6
Some of their other recommendations are hardly in accord with the general American practise. See, for example, the pronunciations they recommend for
triolet, to annex, to convoy, abdomen, mamma, obscurantist, ordinarily
and
panegyrist
.

1
The report was published by the Commission on Trends in Education of the Modern Language Association; New York, 1945. The quotation is from pp. 5 and 6. The special committee consisted of Thomas Clark Pollock, of New York University; William Clyde DeVane, of Yale; and Robert E. Spiller, of Swarthmore. The report was approved by the Commission on Trends in Education on Sept. 17, 1944, and passed for publication by the Executive Council of the association on Dec. 27.

2
Tilly was born in 1860 and died in 1935. He went to Germany in 1887, taught at the University of Marburg from 1892 to 1902, and then set up a phonetic institute in Berlin. On the outbreak of World War I he was interned by the Germans, but in 1916 they released him and he went to London. In 1918 he came to New York.

3
Some of the extravagances to which this would have led were noticed a little while back. Very few American actors, in fact, have ever succeeded in acquiring an English accent that really fools the English. One of those who made the grade was Edwin Booth. On Nov. 24, 1880, he wrote from London, where he was presenting his repertoire: “The purity of my English is invariably praised, and even admitted by the carpers. Think of a blarsted Yankee speaking English!” But he seems to have fallen into his native American when he was off guard, for he added: “Wish I could speak as good English off as I do on the stage.” See Memories and Letters of Edwin Booth,
Century Magazine
, Dec., 1893, p. 240. The old-time elocutionists all affected a pseudo-English pronunciation, chiefly marked by ludicrously broad
a
’s. The English themselves no longer imitate actors as they did in the Eighteenth Century. Said Henry Cecil Wyld, in The Historical Study of the Mother Tongue; London, 1906, p. 356: “The English of the stage … differs from the English of good society partly in being more archaic, partly also in being marred by certain artificialities and affectations of pronunciation.” Said Thomas A. Knott, then general editor of the Webster Dictionaries, in an address to the Eastern Public Speaking Conference in New York City, April, 1933: “[If you are training] a college student who is a member of the debating team of the State University of Illinois … you don’t want to teach him London stage speech. His audiences would laugh. Some of them wouldn’t even understand what he was trying to talk about.” This address was printed as How the Dictionary Determines What Pronunciations to Use, in the
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Feb., 1935, pp. 1–10. A survey undertaken in 1941 by “a member of the faculty at Pennsylvania State College,” reported in General American Speech, Dayton (O.)
Journal
, editorial page, Nov. 21, 1941, showed that 52% of the male film stars then reigning in Hollywood used the General American pronunciation. The rest varied between the Boston-New York City variety and efforts to imitate Oxford English. But among male stars of the legitimate stage only 24% used General American. The rest used the broad
a
and dropped their
r
’s. See Stage Versus Screen, by Marguerite E. DeWitt,
American Speech
, Jan., 1927, pp. 165–81.

1
Recent Discussions of Standardization in American Pronunciation,
Quarterly Journal of Speech Education
, Nov., pp. 442–57. The title of this journal was abbreviated to the
Quarterly Journal of Speech
in 1928. It is the organ of the National Association of Teachers of Speech.

1
Maître Phonétique
, Jan.-March, 1927, pp. 3 and 4.

2
Vol. II, Part I, Map 80. Miss M. E. DeWitt hints in EuphonEnglish; New York, 1924, p. 49n, that something resembling the English standard is taught at Columbia, Hunter College, Smith and Vassar, but she does not enter into particulars. She even adds the State University of Iowa, but this is hard to credit. She notes that the New York Singing Teachers’ Association “has adopted Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary,” which rests squarely upon the English standard, but that fact is of no significance, for singers, for obvious reasons, always use the Italian
a
. Incidentally, it may be noted that Jones himself, in his preface to his dictionary, p. x, says: “Several American teachers (mostly from New York and the Northeastern part of the United States) have informed me, somewhat to my surprise, that RP [
i.e
., Received Pronunciation, his name for the English standard] or RP with slight modifications would be a suitable standard for teaching in American schools. Personally, I cannot think that any attempt to introduce this pronunciation into America is likely to meet with success.”

1
The others were H. J. Heltman, of Syracuse (chairman); Miss Agnes Rigney, of State Teachers College, Geneseo; Miss Mary Zerler, of the Yonkers public schools; and Mrs. Letitia Raubicheck, of the New York City public schools.

1
A Symposium on Phonetics and Standards of Pronunciations,
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Oct., 1945, pp. 318–327.

2
i.e
., the Boston-New York City standard.

3
i.e
., the Southern English or Oxford standard.

1
A Footnote on Phonetics and Standards of Pronunciation,
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Feb., 1946. pp. 51–54.