There remain, however, belated followers of White, especially in the New York region, who hope to achieve this impossibility, and occasionally they make some pother. This was the case, for example, during the years after 1918, when an Australian-born phonologist named William Tilly was appointed to foster speech elegance at Columbia, and proceeded at once to advocate a close approximation to the English standard.2 He acquired a number of ardent disciples, mainly female, among teachers of what used to be called elocution but is now denominated speech correction, and some of them went to the length of arguing that all Americans hoping to be really refined should imitate the imitation of English speech prevailing among the tonier sort of American actors.3 But this folly did not extend very far, and there is little sign that it will spread hereafter. In 1927 C. K. Thomas of Cornell printed a review of the subject1 in which he attempted to summarize professional opinion under five headings, to wit:
1. Is there a world-standard of English pronunciation?
2. What claim has the speech of southern England to be considered a world-standard?
3. What claim has the speech of southern England to be considered the standard for America?
4. Is there a distinct American national standard?
5. What are the criteria of a good standard?
Dr. Thomas found that the answer to the first question was no. He could find no trace of a generally acknowledged world-standard. On the one hand a few phonologists of small authority favored “the worldwide acceptance of the southern English standard,” but all the rest of the faculty seemed to favor national autonomy, and to regard it as inevitable. To the second question the answer was none. There were English authorities, to be sure, who defended Standard English as superior to any other form of the language, but there were other authorities, greater in number and fully equal in learning, who denounced it as one of the worst. The answer to the third question was likewise none. “The preponderance of authority,” concluded Thomas, “is strongly against community of standard for British and American pronunciation.” In answer to the fourth question he described the three major varieties of American, already discussed in this chapter – the Boston-New York, the Southern, and the Western or General –, and then found himself agreeing with Kenyon and Krapp that the last-named was already almost overwhelmingly dominant, and showed plain indications of increasing its area and authority in future. The answer to the last question resolved itself into a plea for letting nature take its course. “A good standard,” said Thomas, “is a natural growth, not a manufactured article; and attempts to improve on this standard are like attempts to graft wings on human shoulders.” In other words, the voice of the people, in the last analysis, must decide and determine the voice of the people. That the voting is now running heavily in favor of General American must be manifest. Kenyon, writing in 1927, rehearsed the evidence for it then visible;1 the evidence available today is even more impressive, and it would undoubtedly be more impressive still if General American were studied as diligently as New England English has been studied. The Eastern colleges yearly outfit a ponderable number of Indianans, Iowans and Oregonians with the broad a, but most of them resume the flat a as soon as they return home, and meanwhile the Linguistic Atlas of New England finds two flat a’s in half past within the very shadow of the Boston Statehouse.2
The subject was revived in 1944 when the New York State Department of Education appointed a committee to draw up rules for the certification of teachers of “speech correction” in the public schools of the State. Thomas, who was one of its members,1 found a sharp difference of opinion among his colleagues about the standard of pronunciation that should be recommended. Some were apparently in favor of General American, but others inclined toward the standard that had been advocated by Tilly. Thomas resolved to ask the advice of a number of outside phonologists of distinction, and accordingly prepared a questionnaire. Its first question was: “In a course of phonetics for prospective teachers of speech correction what standard or standards of pronunciation would you include? ” This was sent to the following:
V. A. Anderson, Stanford University; author of “Training the Speaking Voice.”
A. C. Baugh, University of Pennsylvania; author of “A History of the English Language.”
W. Cabell Greet, Columbia University; editor of American Speech and speech consultant to the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Miles L. Hanley, University of Wisconsin; associate director of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada.
Hans Kurath, Brown University (now Michigan); director of the Linguistic Atlas and author of “American Pronunciation.”
Mardel Ogilvie, State Teachers College, Fredonia, N. Y.; president of the New York State Speech Association.
J. M. O’Neill, Brooklyn College; former editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Louise Pound, University of Nebraska; former editor of American Speech; former president of the American Dialect Society and of the American Folk-Lore Society.
Loren Reid, University of Missouri; former president of the New York State Speech Association.
K. R. Wallace, University of Virginia, editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Harold Wentworth, Temple University; compiler of the “American Dialect Dictionary.”
Robert West, University of Wisconsin; co-author of “Phonetics” and former president of the Speech Correction Association.
A. B. Williamson, New York University; former president of the Association of Teachers of Speech.
G. P. Wilson, Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina; editor of the Publications of the American Dialect Society.
The replies were thus summarized by Thomas:
Almost all the contributors recommend that General American be included in the content of the course. Several recommend that it be the principal content; not one rejects it. Since, however, many of the students in the course will speak some other type of American English provision must be made for their speech needs as well. If we follow the … threefold classification of American pronunciation into Eastern, Southern and General American, it will probably be salutary for the student to have some acquaintance with all three types.… It is noteworthy that not one of the contributors recommends the inclusion of the South British standard, and that several of them specifically reject it.1
One of the members of the Department of Education committee, Mrs. Raubicheck, objected to this referendum on the ground that the two New Yorkers consulted were not specialists in phonetics. She accordingly sent Thomas’s questions to six others, all of them directly interested in teaching speechways. They were:
Almira M. Giles, Brooklyn College.
Edward W. Mammen, College of the City of New York.
Dorothy L. Mulgrave, New York University.
E. J. Spadino, Hunter College.
Margaret Prendergast McLean, author of “American Speech.”
Jane Dorsey Zimmerman, Teachers College, Columbia, associate editor of American Speech.
This jury was somewhat more favorable to Tilly than the fourteen philologians polled by Thomas, but only Miss McLean rejected the claims of General American. “I should include,” she said, “the pronunciation given as Eastern Standard by Kenyon and Knott2 or that given by Daniel Jones in ‘An English Pronouncing Dictionary.’ ”3 Miss Giles preferred “acceptable varieties of Eastern speech,” and explained that by acceptable she meant varieties showing all forms of the a in half, from that of hat to that of father, but added that she thought the course should also “touch briefly on General American and Southern standards.” Mammen was of the opinion that “both Eastern and General American should be acceptable.” Miss Mulgrave said: “If it were apparent that teachers were trained for New York State only I should be loath to recommend them as teachers of speech correction.… There seems to be no need to act as though New York has seceded.” Spadino voted for “General American, with little importance given to geographical distinction,” and described
it as “a dialect embracing both Northern and Eastern regional pronunciations as defined and recorded in Kenyon and Knott,” but did not say how these dialects were to be reconciled. Mrs. Zimmerman proposed to “make the standard of pronunciation a very flexible one” and to “include in it all commonly used variants which are consistent with good voice, clear articulation, accurate patterns of stress, phrasing and intonation, and which are acceptable to the professional or social group to which the student belongs or to which he wishes to belong.” It will thus be seen that the Raubicheck jury, like that of Thomas, favored a thoroughly American standard, with special emphasis on the prevailing usage, and had but little to say for the effort to bring American speech into harmony with British.1
Lay opinion runs strongly in favor of General American, as was demonstrated by tests made by Walter H. Wilke and Joseph F. Snyder, of New York University, in 1940–42. They recorded by phonograph the speech of thirty-two persons from all parts of the country, and circulated the recordings among 2470 persons in forty localities, asking for preferences. The jury consisted mainly of “college students in elementary courses,” but there were also some high-school students and miscellaneous adults. It was chosen to be representative of “that sector of the population likely to discriminate between the generally acceptable and sub-standard speech, yet typical enough of fairly well-educated persons to avoid any biases due to special study and emphasis on details of speech.” The result of the poll was overwhelmingly favorable to General American. Of the thirty-two samples the five at the top of the list all belonged to it, and it also got more votes than any other form further on. The runner-up was Southern American. The Eastern speech of the Boston area came out very badly, and that of New York City even worse. “More widely used in the United States than any other dialect,” concluded the authors, “the General American type has the additional advantages that it is favorably regarded in all sections and that it is not identified with any single region. This experiment supports the view that General American is likely to dominate in the trend toward a more homogeneous national language.”1 Of considerable significance is the fact that Southern American got more votes than the speech of the Boston-New York region. To most Americans of other sections the latter shows what James M. Cain calls the “somewhat pansy cast” of Oxford English,2 but Southern speech is everywhere regarded more tolerantly, partly, perhaps, because of what the Hartford Courant once described as the “honeyed languor” of the sub-Potomac voice, and partly because it is most familiar to the North and West in the talk of Negroes, and is thus associated with suggestions of the amiable and the amusing.3 In the early days of the radio the primeval announcers sought to prove their elegance by affecting what W. Cabell Greet has described as speech of “an Eastern United States or pseudo-British type.”4 chiefly marked by long a’s, suppressed r’s, eye-ther for ee-ther, and the use of such multilated forms as secretry and ordinry, but it did not please the customers and before long there were many protests against it in the newspapers. In 1930 Josiah Combs, of Texas Christian University, for long an astute and diligent student of American speechways, flung himself upon it in American Speech,5 and in 1931 he returned to the attack as follows:6
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 o
f Pronunciation for NBC broadcasters3 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
American Language Supplement 2 Page 4
