American Language Supplement 2 (14 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
2
i.e
., the upper Middle West.
1
I have had access to this instructive paper by the courtesy of Dr. Stene. An attempt to investigate the precise nature and significance of intonation is in The Intonation of American English, by Kenneth L. Pike; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1946. It includes, pp. 3–19, a review of previous writings on the subject, beginning with the Orthograpie of John Hart, 1569. Unhappily, it is not susceptible to summarization for the lay reader.
2
And not only to Americans. Compare the report of an anonymous New Zealander quoted by Frank H. Vizetelly in A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced; New York, 1917, p. vii: “I left England wondering what on earth the English voice was, and whereabouts in England people spoke English.… I heard the West End well-bred affectations produced, as it were, around a substantial marble wabbling in the region of the tonsils; I heard languid drawls, simpers, high-pitched silver-bell lisps; I heard terminal
aws
and clipped g’s and feeble
h’s
; but rarely did I hear what I should call just a fine, clear, interesting, voice speaking good plain English.”
3
There is a large amount of evidence to this end. I choose a specimen testimony by an English dramatic critic, Harry W. Yoxall, in American Plays and English Reviewers,
Vanity Fair
, July, 1923, p. 68. The occasion was the London premier of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie with an American company. “Americans and Englishmen,” said Yoxall, “seem to be under the delusion that because they speak more or less the same language they can automatically make themselves understood in each other’s countries. In reality there is so much difference in intonation, rhythm and stress that the unpractised ear on either side of the Atlantic has much difficulty in interpreting the words that issue from the visitor’s lips. It is quite certain that much of ‘Anna Christie’ … was clearly lost on the English house.… Englishmen speaking in the United States must abandon their national habit of swallowing the latter part of their sentences; Americans playing in London must … refine the nasal monotony of uneducated American speech and enunciate slowly and distinctly.”
4
The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 8 and 9.
1
Science and Poetry; London, 1925.
2
How Long Will Americans Speak English?, by Adelaide Stedman,
Christian Science Monitor
. I have no note of the date, but I think it was in 1937.
3
Amphi-Atlantic English,
English Studies
(Amsterdam), Oct., 1935, p. 176. Richard Heathcote Heindel records in The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914; Philadelphia, 1940, p. 277, the results of a poll of British school children in the 13–16 age group, made in 1936 and 1937. There was a strong agreement among them that “Americans speak very poor English.”
4
Inasmuch as I have been often accused of preaching, in my writings on speech a violent chauvinism, perhaps I may be permitted to note here that my general view of things American closely approximates that just described as the traditional English view. But the English dislike of American speech-ways I do not share. It seems to me that General American is better than any dialect now prevailing in the British Isles, and enormously better than Oxford English and its offshoots. It meets almost precisely the specifications for good English drawn up so long ago as 1531 by Sir Thomas Elyot in The Governour, to wit, that it must be “cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omitting no lettre or sillable.”
1
Pitch Patterns in English,
Studies in Philology
, July, 1926, p. 372.
2
Dr. Scripture, born in New Hampshire in 1864, had a Ph.D. degree from Leipzig and an M.D. from Munich. He became director of the psychological laboratory at Yale in 1892, and lectured at Columbia and the Johns Hopkins. Later he was professor of experimental phonetics at Vienna.
3
The Acoustical Nature of Accent in American Speech,
American Speech
, Feb., 1937, pp. 49–56.
4
Other phonologists have used the
x
-rays, the moving picture, the vibrograph, the resonator, the kymograph and, of course, the tuning-fork and the laryngoscope. Their reports bristle with talk of decibels, centroids of energy and other such things. So far, nothing comparable to the electrocardiograph and electrocephalograph has been devised to study speech, but no doubt it will come. See A Brief History of Palatography, by Elbert R. Moses, Jr.,
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Dec., 1940, pp. 615–25.
1
These categories were suggested by Dr. Joseph Tiffin.
2
An annual bibliography is in the Supplement to the
Publications of the Modern Language Association
. From 1934 onward
American Speech
printed one quarterly, prepared by Dr. S. N. Treviño, of the University of Chicago, whose own contributions have been numerous and valuable.
1
The Doctor; London, 1834–47, Interchapter XXV.
2
He called this alphabet Palaeotype. It is given in full in his Early English Pronunciation; London, 1869–74, Vol. I, pp. 3–12.
3
The International Phonetic Alphabet, by John S. Kenyon,
American Speech
, April, 1929, pp. 324–27.
4
Phonetic Transcription and Transliteration: Proposals of the Copenhagen Conference, April, 1925; Oxford, 1926. This report was prepared by Otto Jespersen and Holger Pedersen, both professors in the University of Copenhagen. There were twelve phoneticians in attendance, coming from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Holland, England and France. The English representative was Daniel Jones.
1
A Petition,
American Speech
, Oct., 1939, pp. 206–08.
2
Fourth edition, revised and enlarged; London, 1937. On pp. xxxvii and xxxviii he gives a list of other phonologists using it.
3
Cambridge (England), 1944.
4
p. 169.
1
pp. 11 and 14.
2
New York, 1919.
3
New York, 1925.
4
p. vi.
5
Knott died on Aug. 14, 1945.
6
Problems in Editing an American Phonetic Dictionary, by Kenyon and Knott,
American Speech
, Oct., 1936, pp. 227–31. Suggestions by Miles L. Hanley, L. Sprague de Camp, C. K. Thomas, Lee S. Hultzén and Cabell Greet were printed in
American Speech
, Dec., 1936, pp. 319–26. The Pronouncing Dictionary was finally published in 1944.
1
American Speech
complained in a review, April, 1935, p. 140, that many of the pronunciations also go back to Noah. “Professor Kenyon’s splendid piece of work,” it said, “is in the preface; in the body of the dictionary are regularly the old, often provincial and unrepresentative pronunciations.”
2
Dr. Kenyon tells me that he is not convinced that this system is simpler than the IPA, as I ventured to say in AL4, p. 320. “Some five years of dealing with it,” he says, “convinced me that it was more elaborate and complicated than that of the IPA with its one invariable symbol for every significant sound.” Perhaps I should have said “more familiar” rather than “simpler.” See Progress in Pronouncing Dictionaries, by Bert Emsley,
American Speech
, Feb., 1940, pp. 55–59; A Survey of English Dictionaries, by M. M. Mathews; London, 1933, pp. 90–92, and Pronouncing Systems in Eighteenth Century Dictionaries, by Esther K. Sheldon,
Language
, Jan.-March, 1946, pp. 27–41. The New Practical Standard Dictionary of 1946 uses a simplification of the Webster system, without any recourse to the IPA.
3
Mispronunciations?,
American Speech
, April, 1936, pp. 137–41.
4
American Dictionaries and Pronunciation,
American Speech
, Dec., 1938, pp. 243–54.
5
American Dictionaries and Variant Pronunciations,
American Speech
, Oct., 1939, pp. 175–80.
1
On Handbooks,
American Speech
, Feb., 1940, pp. 89–92.
2
His speech was delivered in April, 1933. A stenographic report of it was printed in the
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Feb., 1935, pp. 1–10.
3
A table showing how seven standard dictionaries disagree as to the pronunciation of different words is in Webster 1934, pp. lix-lxxviii. The dictionaries covered are Webster itself; the New English Dictionary and its Supplement; Oxford, 1888–1933; Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary, second edition, London, 1924; H. C. Wyld’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language; London, 1932; the Century Dictionary; New York, 1911; Funk and Wagnalls’s Standard Dictionary; New York, 1931, and the International French-English and English-French Dictionary, edited by Paul Passy, George Hempl and Robert Morris Pierce, 1904. The usage of 200 “educated, native-born citizens of the United States, not professional radio speakers,” is shown in Radio Pronunciations, by Jane Dorsey Zimmerman; New York, 1946.
1
Dr. E. H. Sturtevant, of Yale, in explaining his failure to use any sort of phonetic alphabet in his Linguistic Change: An Introduction to the Historical Study of Language; Chicago, 1917, p. v, said: “Such a notation would have required a long explanation, which some readers would have skipped, and which would have caused others to lay the book aside.” Dr. Leonard Bloomfield, also of Yale, agreed in The Stressed Vowels of American English,
Language
, June, 1935, p. 98: “Any transcription shocks and offends all but the few readers who have been inured to the free use of graphic symbols.”
1
Phonetic Transcriptions from
American Speech, American Speech Reprints and Monographs
, No. I; New York, 1936.
2
The text is in On Teaching Speech, by Greet, Baltimore
Evening Sun
(editorial page), Dec. 26, 1934. Under the title of The Young Rat it first appeared in Sweet’s Primer of Spoken English; Oxford, 1890, pp. 66–68. At Columbia the title was changed to Grip the Rat. Greet later changed it to Arthur the Rat, for
Arthur
allows for many more different pronunciations than
Grip
.
3
A more detailed account of the beginning of this enterprise, with a description of the apparatus used, is in American Speech Records at Columbia University, by Ayres and Greet,
American Speech
, June, 1930, pp. 333–58. See also Diction of Roosevelt and New Deal Aides Recorded for Columbia Language Study, New York
Times
, July 12, 1934.
4
In 1942 the Army and Navy, in association with the Linguistic Society of America and the Intensive Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, began teaching foreign languages to soldiers and sailors by the same method. Many (though apparently not all) of the recordings and manuals prepared for the purpose are now published by Henry Holt & Co. The linguistic theories embodied in the Intensive Language Program have been challenged by Ephraim Cross in Learning Foreign Languages: a Little Politics and Some Economics,
Modern Language Journal
, Feb., 1947, pp. 69–79.
5
Linguaphone for Languages; New York, 1945, p. 3. The course ran to sixteen ten-inch records of two sides each, and included “thirty conversational lessons and two lessons in phonetics.”
1
Talking Dictionaries,
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, April, 1941, pp. 274–81.
2
The IPA, almost always with modifications, may be found in the standard words on phonology,
e.g
., A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, by Kenyon and Knott, already cited.
American Speech
, with delicate humor, reprints it on the inside back cover of each issue – but without any explanation, understandable to a layman, of the significance of its symbols. They are used by all the philological journals, and are obtainable in various type faces. The Mergenthaler Linotype Company offers them in ten-point only but they come in both bold and Roman, and run to 202 characters. The Intertype Corporation offers but 38, but all of them come in both eight-point and ten-point, and some in other sizes up to fourteen. The Lanston Monotype Machine Company offers them in eleven faces, running variously from five-point to eleven. The American Type Founders, Inc., offers only a few of the characters, for it deals mainly in type faces that are not used in text composition. The Ralph C. Coxhead Corporation, which manufactures a typewriter called the Vari-Typer, offers three phonetic alphabets, one of more than 80 characters. Some sense of the inadequacy of the IPA must have been in the mind of Dr. Kenneth L. Pike when he wrote his revolutionary Phonetics: A Critical Analysis of the Phonetic Theory and a Technic for the Practical Description of Sounds; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1943. Unhappily, his method of representing sounds, though it tells a lot to a phonologist, is apt to be baffling to the layman, for it represents the ordinary sound of the letter
f
, for example, by
M
aIlDeCVoeIpfocAP
p
dal
d
tl
f
nran
s
nf
S
rp
F
Ss.
“Every vowel sound without exception,” said Hilaire Belloc in “The Contrast,”
1
“has taken on this side of the Atlantic [
i.e
., the American side] some different value from what it has on ours [
i.e
., the English side]. And in many cases the change is so great that the exact setting down of it in an accurate transliteration would involve a totally different spelling.” Even “a totally different spelling,” I am convinced, would not suffice to indicate these differences, for they are almost infinite in gradation and hence virtually innumerable. Consider, for example, the much debated
a
-sound, a favorite gauge of the disparity between English speech and American. At one end of the scale is the broad, solid
ah
that speakers of the Received English Standard put into such words as
fast, last, glass
and
dance
, and at the other end is the so-called flat
a
, as in
can
and
Daniel
, used by speakers of General American. Between the two stands the compromise of the Boston-Hudson Valley dialect, first given countenance, I believe, by Joseph E. Worcester in his “Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary” of 1830. But what, precisely, is this compromise
a?
There is actually no way to record it in print, even with the aid of the IPA and its extensions, for the sound sought to be recorded is not fixed, but variable, and in one form or another it runs all the way from virtual identity with the most extreme form of the English
a
to something that is very hard to distinguish from the
a
of General American. I have heard a group of six Bostonians, all talking at once, use six different variations of it, and in the New York region more are easily to be distinguished. In one community in Virginia, according to George P. Wilson, ten different ways of pronouncing
aunt
are in common use, and elsewhere in the State he has detected two more.
2
Most persons who attempt the compromise
a
, in fact, vary it considerably in their own speech, so that it is sometimes difficult to make out whether
they use it or do not use it. So with the other vowels: they are all in a state of flux, and Arthur J. Bronstein has hinted that something analogous to the Great Vowel Shift of 1500, which separated Modern English from Middle English, may be in progress.
1
