American Language Supplement 2 (13 page)

1
I am indebted here to a list prepared in 1945 by Dr. James F. Bender.

2
All four of these pronunciations are ordained in Broadcast English No. I; London, 1928.

3
Mather Flint on Early Eighteenth Century English Pronunciation; before cited, pp. 159–60.

4
His authorities are A Dictionary of All the Words Commonly Us’d in the English Tongue, by Thomas Dyche; London, 1723, and Walker’s Dictionary.

5
Stress on First Syllable Spreading in English Use, by Frederick W. Henrici, New York
Times
, July 21, 1940. “Through the centuries,” says Henrici, “there seems to be a glacier-like movement of the accented syllables of English words, slow but irrestible, toward the front.” In 1883 George R. Howells read a paper before the Albany Institute (published in its
Transactions
, Vol. X) in which he said: “There is a tendency to bring the accent as far forward in the word as possible. A few years ago not to say
balcóny
was regarded as evidence of want of culture, if not of illiteracy. Now we wonder that anybody ever pronounced it otherwise than
bálcony
.”

1
The English Language; New York, 1929, p. 111. Broadcast English No. I ordains
décadence, lámentable
and
ińteresting
.

2
Our Changing Language, by C. J. Gerling, St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, Feb. 26, 1935.

3
Palmer, Martin and Blandford give
inquíry
as the English form, and say that it is also used in America. But some water has gone under the bridges since they wrote in 1926.

4
Our Agile American Accents, by John L. Haney,
American Speech
, April, 1926, p. 379.

5
See AL4, p. 519.

6
Larsen and Walker say that the second syllable is stressed in England, but not in such combinations as
Princess Mary
, in which the first is stressed.

7
In Pronunciation of Medical Terms,
Journal of the American Medical Association
, Oct. 18, 1941, pp. 1377–78, Dr. A. Henry Clagett, Jr., recommended
abdómen
, but noted the prevalence of
ábdomen
, which is preferred, rather curiously, by Henry Cecil Wyld’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language, though not, apparently, by any other English authority. A number of other medical terms are accented differently in England and America. The English, for example, use
capillary, duódenum, esophágeal
and
éxhibit
, and make the first syllable of
fibrillation
rhyme with
bribe
. I am indebted here to Drs. Louis Hamman, Charles W. Wainwright and Benjamin M. Baker, Jr., of Baltimore. When penicillin was brought out the English used
pénicillin
, and it got the approval of the BBC, but Dr. Fleming, one of the discoverers of the new drug, preferred
penicillin
, and it has prevailed in both countries. See the
Lancet
(London), Nov. 20, 1943, p. 648.

8
There has been some effort among the elegant, in recent years, to convert
quinine
into
kin-éen
, but Webster 1934 prefers
qwéye-nine
, and so do most Americans.

9
The last six are listed in Radioese Needs Correction, by Charlton Andrews, New York
Times
, Dec. 20, 1931.

10
Pronunciation in the Schools, by Louise Pound,
English Journal
, Oct., 1922, p. 476.

1
This is Army usage. See
American Speech
, Feb., 1946, p. 75.

2
There is an elaborate discussion of the shifting of accents in The Standard of Pronunciation in English, by Thomas R. Lounsbury; New York, 1904, pp. 121 ff. Its historical aspects in the Germanic tongues are dealt with in The Genesis and Growth of English, by J. S. Armour; New York, 1935, who summarizes his conclusions on p. 92. Its effects (or lack of them) on the early French loans in English are described in The Accentuation of Old French Loan Words in English, by Henry Dexter Learned,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, Dec., 1922, pp. 707–21. The following is from The Laggard Art of Criticism, by Oscar Cargill,
College English
, Vol. VI, 1945, p. 245: “When atmospheric conditions altered the speech of Europeans settled in America, so that immigrants of all nationalities said
cóntents
when the dictionary then insisted on
conténts
, it was obvious that iambic verse, the great measure of the French and the English, did not provide a natural melodic line for the poets of this country.… Free verse, the emancipating invention of Walt Whitman, was the inevitable product of the long revolt against the heroic couplet; but it is significant that the poet’s most successful experiments all throw the accent forward, as the natural, incisive speech of his countrymen demanded.” I am indebted here to Thomas Pyles: A New Meteorological Theory of Stress,
Modern Language Notes
, Nov., 1945, p. 497. Wentworth, in his American Dialect Dictionary, pp. 497–98, gives some curious examples of the forward shift on the level of folk speech,
e.g., béhave, dispatch, cámpaign, pércent, résign, réquest, ádvice, défense, gúitar, ínsane, réprieve
and
súccess
. I have myself heard
dé luxe
in the name of an automobile.

3
American Speech
, April, 1934, p. 155.

4
The varying stress in the same word when used as noun or verb,
e.g., pérfect
and
to perféct, prótest
and
to protést, dígest
and
to digést
, remains fairly uniform in England and America, though of late there seems to be some tendency, in this country, to throw it forward in the verb also, as in
to rétail
. See Stress in Recent English as a Distinguishing Mark Between Disyllables Used as Noun or Verb, by A. A. Hill,
American Speech
, Aug., 1931, pp. 443–48, and The Sounds of Standard English, by T. Nicklin; Oxford. 1020, pp. 71 and 79

1
Broadcast English No. I, in which he had a principal hand, advises
réstarong
.

2
On Naturalizing Words, by A. Lloyd James,
Radio Times
(London), Feb. 7, 1930, p. 309. See also Fixing English Pronunciation, Manchester
Guardian
, Feb. 7, 1930.

1
Rather curiously, Americans have preserved what seems to be the correct Spanish pronunciation of
rodéo
, though
ródeo
is used among the Mexican and American cattlemen of the Southwest. I am indebted here to Mr. William C. Stewart, of Southbridge, Mass.

2
Says Logan Pearsall Smith in The English Language; New York, 1912, p. 36: “Speaking in general terms, we may say that down to about 1650 the French words that were borrowed were thoroughly naturalized in English, and were made sooner or later to conform to the rules of English pronunciation and accent; while in the later borrowings (unless they have become very popular) an attempt is made to pronounce them in the French fashion.”

3
The Englishing of French Words,
S.P.E. Tract No. V;
Oxford, 1921, p. 7.

1
London, 1930, p. 149.

2
Four years before this H. W. Fowler had said in Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, p. 194: “To say a French word in the middle of an English sentence exactly as it would be said by a Frenchman in a French sentence is a feat demanding an acrobatic mouth; the muscles have to be suddenly adjusted to a performance of a different nature, and after it as suddenly recalled to the normal state; it is a feat that should not be attempted.… All that is necessary is a polite acknowledgement of indebtedness to the French language indicated by some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound.”

3
The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation; New York, 1943, tackles
ch
with tongs and mallets. Thus it gives
ah-ler-herkst
for
allerhöchst, rike
for
reich, muhnch-ou-z’n
for
Münchhausen
, and
bahk
for
Bach
.

4
Miscellany, by Louise Pound,
American Speech
, Oct., 1941, p. 228.

5
The DAE says that it was first used in this country in the 1840s.

6
Some Established Mispronunciations, by Annina Periam Danton,
Words
, Nov., 1937, p. 177.

1
I am indebted here to Mr. K. L. Rankin.

2
Name It and You Can Have It,
Esquire
, Jan., 1938, pp. 102–69.

3
Supplement I, p. 414.

4
Quaint Americanizations, by L. Sprague de Camp,
American Speech
, April, 1938, p. 154.

5
Webster 1934 ordains
boor-bun
for
bourbon
, but the NBC Handbook makes it
boor-b’n
. In the bourbon country the prevailing and indeed almost universal pronunciation is
bur-b’n
. The Handbook recommends
boo-dwahr
for
boudoir, bool-yuh-base
for
bouillabaisse, boor-zhwah-zee
for
bourgeoisie
, and
boo-tuh-nyair
for
boutonnière
, with the accent on the final syllables of the three last-named.

6
Mrs. Post added some advice about honorifics and proper names. Europeans, she said, always use their own titles in addressing Americans, so we should use
Mister, Misses
or
Miss
in addressing them, thus avoiding the snares of
Monsieur, Signora
and
Fräulein
. “Certainly it is in much better taste,” she continued, “to call our American college
Noter Dayme
than to pronounce it as French, and yet we would (and should) say
Notrr Damme
when we mean the cathedral in Paris.” There is a wise discussion of this problem in Broadcast English No. VI, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1937, pp. 7 and 8.

1
Supplement I, p. 102.

2
Phonemes and their proponents are dealt with somewhat boorishly in Supplement I, p. 102. There is a more seemly discussion of them in The Program of the Prague Phonologists, by R-M. S. Heffner,
American Speech
, April, 1936, pp. 107–15. Heffner says that these Prague phonologists defined the phoneme as “a phonological unit not susceptible of analysis into smaller units,” but notes that when “one sound may be substituted for another without destroying or changing the meanings of the words, the two sounds represent phonic variants of the same phoneme.” He quotes another definition of the phoneme by a Dutch phonetician, Eijkman, to wit: “The phoneme is the sum-total of single anthropophonical conceptions formed in the mind through the blending of the impressions acquired by the pronunciation of one and the same speech sound of one language.” This definition he describes, with some plausibility, as “awe-inspiring.” The phoneme was launched upon humanity in 1916 by Ferdinand de Saussure, a French phonetician.

3
Says John C. Diekhoff in Milton’s Prosody in the Poems of the Trinity Manuscript,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, March, 1939, p. 165: “There are so many degrees of stress possible in the normal reading of English, and the question of stress is so complicated by questions of pitch and quantity, that to use the simple, unqualified designations
stressed
and
unstressed
of given syllables must be in some measure unsatisfactory. At best it represents halftruth.”

1
The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 223–24.

2
Speaking of English intonation in The Pronunciation of English; Cambridge (England), 1914, p. 60, Daniel Jones says that its range is “very extensive.” “Most people in speaking,” he goes on, “reach notes much higher and much lower than they can sing.… In declamatory style it is not unusual for a man with a voice of ordinary pitch to have a range of over two octaves, rising to F above the bass clef or even higher, and going down so low that the words degenerate into a kind of growl which can hardly be regarded as a musical sound at all.” The voices of Englishwomen, he adds, show a much narrower range, often limited to the octave and a half between G in the bass clef and D in the treble.

3
“The first complaint that I should make against our speech,” said John Erskine in Do Americans Speak English?,
Nation
, April 15, 1925, p. 411, “is that it is horribly monotonous – it hasn’t tune enough.” “Perhaps the most apparent general characteristic of American speech, so far as cadence is concerned,” said George Philip Krapp in The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 50, “is its levelness of tone. The voice rises and falls within a relatively narrow range, and with few abrupt transitions from high to low or low to high. To British ears American speech often sounds hesitating, monotonous and indecisive, and British speech, on the other hand, is likely to seem to Americans abrupt, explosive and manneristic.”

4
“Middle-class American speech seems to the English,” says Oscar Browne in Normal English Pronunciation; London, 1937, p. 91, “to be spoken in a pitch unduly high. A high pitch does not carry well and requires extra volume, particularly when the tone is again raised for emphasized syllables or words.” To which Krapp, just quoted, adds: “One reason for the relative levelness in pitch of American speech may be that the American voice in general starts on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice.”

5
At the annual convention of the Association of Shorthand Reporters of New York, in 1929, someone reported that the tempo of American speech was increasing. The gain at that time was said to be averaging ten words a minute every twenty years. See A Measure of Speech, New York
Times
(editorial page), April 1, 1929, and Anent London, by Michael Foley, Bayonne (N.J.)
News
, April 2, 1929.

1
“It is doubtful,” says Krapp, p. 51, “if on the whole American cultivated speech is any slower than British speech.” He adds that the drawl Englishmen note in American speech is “partly produced by the levelness of intonation, partly by the retention of secondary stresses in polysyllables.”