Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (6 page)
Their attempts at imitating British pronunciation are, in most cases, foolish and stupid.… We wonder what would happen should they invade the stronghold of Oxford English as spoken by the tea- and cricket-hounds of that leisurely old university!… This Oxford pronunciation (the most offensive and illogical in the English-speaking world) is not practised by the majority of educated Englishmen. It is merely a link in the chain of icy exclusiveness long practised and fostered by loyal Oxfordians and their representatives in politics and among the landholding classes. It does not hesitate to assimilate, slur, chop, swallow and cut; in short, it stoops to anything in pronunciation that will make it as difficult as possible for average folks to imitate.
The early radio announcers, a generally uncultured and even barbaric class of men, recruited largely from the ranks of bad newspaper reporters, were not altogether to blame for their unhappy tendency to imitate English speech, for they were under pressure from various prophets of refinement, some of them of apparent authority. Part of this pressure came by way of the theatre and the movies, which still followed, more or less, the traditional stage pronunciations, already noticed. When the American Academy of Arts and Letters began offering gold medals to actors for chaste and genteel diction it soon became apparent that those following English models were favored, for among the early winners were George Arliss, Edith Wynne Matthison and Julia Marlowe. Meanwhile, the showmen’s weekly, the
Billboard
, had employed a speech corrector named Windsor P. Daggett to police the pronunciation of public performers of all sorts, and he argued eloquently for the pseudo-English standard prevailing in the days of Augustin Daly.
1
But public opinion turned out to be strongly against any movement to extend this artificial polish to the speech of the current announcers, commentators and crooners, and as time wore on the radio companies were heavier and heavier beset by complaints against the lade-da pronunciation of some of their hirelings. On February 4, 1931 the Columbia Broadcasting System sought to allay the uproar by setting up a school for announcers, and appointing the late Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly as its head. Vizetelly was born in London and lived there until he was well in his twenties, but he was no advocate of Oxford English and at once announced to his students that he was eager to “help in spreading the best traditions of American speech, which does not suppress its consonants nor squeeze the life out of its vowels.”
2
In another lecture he said:
Those who have been there tell us that only an Oxford man can understand a man from Oxford and that neither would want to understand anyone else.… Thank God that we talk to be understood, and that in the aggregate the voices of our announcers are clear, clean-cut, pleasant, and carry with them the additional charm of personal magnetism, which cannot be said of the delivery of the Cockney-bred announcers of London.
The effects of Vizetelly’s pedagogy were soon visible,
1
and in a little while the effort to talk like English actors was only a memory in the CBS studios, though not many members of the staff ever really attained to that “charm of personal magnetism” which he had so politely ascribed to them. On his death he was succeeded by Dr. W. Cabell Greet, editor of
American Speech
, whose views regarding American speech standards have been noted a while back. When World War II began Greet devoted himself to the preparation of manuals showing the correct pronunciation of the multitudinous foreign proper-names that swarmed in the news.
2
In the meantime he listened to broadcasts at the heroic rate of 600 a month, and kept his ears open for slipshod or affected pronunciations.
3
In 1939, after two years of this service, he thus summed up his observations:
The announcer is, of course, a kind of actor, and it is difficult for most actors to speak naturally.… They may play a part well, but without a part … their speech is likely to ring false and pretentious.… To appear in mufti is as difficult a task for an actor as for a uniformed official. And that is the announcer’s job.…
Listeners are the arbiters of his success, and they have not hesitated to criticize. The criticisms are usually of two kinds: the announcer either does not pronounce a word correctly, or he speaks a highfalutin, unreal English with a so-called British accent.… Most listeners nowadays will sympathize with an announcer who is in revolt against the pseudo-correctness and the insincere voice of the typical announcers of the 20s, who were encouraged in their fake culture by the Academy’s medal for good diction.
1
The National Broadcasting Company, for a while, hesitated to appoint a speech expert to ride herd on its announcers,
2
but in the end it followed the CBS by recruiting Dr. James F. Bender, director of the speech and hearing clinic at Queens College, Flushing, L. I., and speech clinician at the Vanderbilt Clinic, New York, and the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital. Bender turned out to be an advocate, like Greet, of the General American pronunciation, and when he prepared a Handbook of Pronunciation for NBC broadcasters
3
he based it upon the speech of various eminent announcers who used that form of speech, and said in his introduction:
While there are those in America who are strongly in favor of imposing Received Standard Pronunciation [
i.e
., Oxford English] upon American broadcasters – “to hasten the day when all English-speaking people will speak alike” – they are not numerous. Seemingly they are enchanted by speech that is radically different in some respects from varieties used by most educated Americans.… That pronunciation is best that is most readily understood, and that pronunciation is most readily understood that is used by most people.… If the station is a local one the broadcaster would do well to pronounce words as the educated people of his community pronounce them.… [But when he] speaks over a powerful or nation-wide hook-up he desires to use a pronunciation that is most readily understood by the majority of his listeners. In such an event the broadcaster would be well advised to use a pronunciation widely known among phoneticians as General American, the standard presented in this book.
Bender listed about 13,000 terms, some of them proper names, but mostly words in the ordinary American vocabulary. He ordained the flat
a
in
dance, grass, aunt
, etc., a clear terminal
r
, the retention of every syllable in such words as
secretary
, and the American pronunciations in
schedule, laboratory
, etc. He pursued the subject in various magazine and newspaper articles,
1
and became a frequently quoted authority. His labors, following those of Vizetelly and Greet, unquestionably influenced many American broadcasters,
2
but others, especially among the more vapid news commentators, still affect something they take to be the English standard. Said a popular writer on speech, Frank Colby, in 1946: “I have invented the term
microphonitis
to describe … this rash of
culchah
that is often induced by the radio germ. The disease manifests itself by the patient’s aping of the British … : ‘I have
bean aghast
at the
vahst disahster
at the
aircrahft plahnt
.’ ”
3
In the early days of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a government monopoly, most of its announcers and commentators affected a somewhat extreme form of Oxford English. There were, in consequence, a great many protests from listeners in the North of England and in Scotland and Ireland, to whom this dialect was as strange, and indeed as offensive, as it would have been to Americans. In response to their protests the BBC appointed, in 1926, an Advisory Committee on Spoken English headed by the Poet Laureate, Dr. Robert Bridges, organizer in 1913 of the Society for Pure English
4
and a diligent student of speechways. The other members were Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Logan Pearsall Smith, Daniel
Jones, A. Lloyd James and George Bernard Shaw. On the death of Bridges, in 1930, Shaw succeeded him as chairman, and in 1933 the committee was considerably enlarged. It has since included representatives of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and among its members have been H. C. K. Wyld,
1
S. K. Ratcliffe, Rose Macaulay, Lord David Cecil, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Lascelles Abercrombie and I. A. Richards. It now includes four so-called consultant members, all of them professional phonologists. When the BBC wants advice about the pronunciation of a given word or group of words it is submitted to these consultants, and they formulate their recommendation. This recommendation is then considered by the full committee, which, if it agrees, relays it to the BBC, which in turn announces what it is, thus giving all interested persons a chance to approve or protest before it is put into effect. The consultants have leaned, generally speaking, to the Southern form of English, but some of the members of the general committee,
e.g
., Shaw and Bridges, have been tart critics of it, and in consequence modifications of it have been tolerated. Beginning in 1928 the BBC has printed a number of pamphlets listing the committee’s recommendations.
2
Candidates for jobs as announcers are selected very carefully and put through rigid examinations. Each is asked to read, before a microphone, a short news bulletin, an S.O.S. in French, a programme of music in French, German and Italian, and a piece of literary prose. There is a professional phonetician in attendance, and he reports to a board of BBC officials as to whether
1. the candidate’s voice is of good microphone quality;
2. it is free of speech defects, however small;
3. his pronunciation is likely to be intelligible to all listeners;
4. he reads the foreign languages tolerably; and
5. he reads intelligently.
One of the consultants, the late A. Lloyd James, professor of phonetics at the School of Oriental Studies, London, reported that “most candidates fail in this test.” Many, he said, are rejected “because
their English accent is … too much like what is sometimes called
haw-haw” i.e
., the extreme form of the Oxford accent. “The standard of performance in foreign languages,” he added, “is usually exceedingly low, even in the case of university men with degrees in modern languages.” The most expected of them, when it comes to German and Italian, is that they should know “more or less how intelligent people who talk about music and have a general knowledge of what is passing in the world pronounce the names of German and Italian composers, authors, politicians and scholars.” But “during a period of three years, during which at least fifty candidates were heard, all but one were floored by
Gianni Schicchi
.”
1
Those who pass this test are taken on as probationers and put to school to experts in English and the various foreign languages. If, after three months, they seem to be giving satisfactory service they get permanent jobs. About half of them have been through public schools (in the English sense) and either one or the other of the two older universities.
As I have said, the committee has included, from time to time, members who were by no means enamoured of Oxford English. So long ago as 1910, sixteen years before he was recruited, Dr. Bridges had described this dialect as “a degraded form of English.”
2
What chiefly aroused his indignation was its slaughter of the final
r
in such words as
danger, pleasure, character
and
terror
. Not only, he pointed out, was the consonant obliterated, but the verbs preceding it were given the nondescript sound often described as neutral, such as appears, for example, in
thuh
for
the
. Thus
danger
became something on the order of
danguh
and
pleasure
became
pleasuh
. “Many of these corrupted vowels,” he said, “are still carefully pronounced in the north of the island.
3
We have only to recognize the superiority of the northern pronunciation and encourage it against London vulgarity, instead of assisting London jargon to overwhelm the older tradition,
which is quite as living
.
4
If one of the two is to spread at the expense of the other, why not assist the better rather
than the worse? A Londoner will say that a Scotchman
1
talks strangely and ill: the truth is that he himself is in the typical attitude of vulgar ignorance in these matters.” He seems to have been outvoted in many of the decisions of the BBC committee, and in 1929 he printed a somewhat elaborate criticism of its first list of pronunciations.
2
In support of this criticism he recruited an advisory committee of his own, including Lord Balfour, Lord Grey of Fallodon, Earl Russell, H. G. Granville-Barker and C. T. Onions. But the end result was not of much importance, for though one or another of these advisers objected to 99 of the 322 pronunciations listed, only 29 of them were opposed by two or more of the committeemen, and none was opposed by all five. Shaw seems to have had no part in this effort to police policemen. He occasionally broke into the newspapers with general assaults upon Oxford English,
3
but it was seldom possible to make out just what he objected to. Another Irish playwright, St. John Ervine, was a great deal more forthright. In a series of articles contributed to London newspapers from 1926 to 1938,
4
he argued that the Oxford pronunciation was, in large part, no more than glorified Cockney. “The English,” he said in one of these diatribes,
are a lazy lot, and will not speak a word as it should be spoken when they can slide through it. Why be bothered to say
extraordinary
when you can get away with
strawdiny?
… Many of the Oxford Cockneys are weaklings too languid or emasculated to speak their noble language with any vigor, but the majority are following a foolish fashion which had better be abandoned. Its ugliness alone should make it unpopular, but it has the additional effect of causing confusion.
