The movement of stress toward the first syllable, of course, is by no means of American origin. It has been going on in English since Chaucer’s day and there has been a considerable acceleration since the Eighteenth Century. Kökeritz has shown3 that in 1723 alcove, balcony, bombast, confiscate and expert were all stressed on the second syllable, and that these pronunciations survived at least until 1791.4 So late as c. 1825, in fact, Samuel Rogers the poet was saying: “Cóntemplate is bad enough but bálcony makes me sick.”5 Kökeritz also shows that advertise, complaisance, fornicator and paramount were accented on the third syllable down to 1791. But his study offers proof of a number of forward shifts between 1723 and 1791, e.g., arbitrator, expedite and reconcile, in which the stress moved from the third syllable to the first, and inbred, mischievous and theatre, in which it moved from the second to the first. Rather curiously, he also turns up a few words in which the stress was on the first syllable in 1723, but has since moved back, e.g., accessory, cement, construe, escheat and utensil. But the prevailing movement is in the other direction, and is still in progress. “Twenty years ago,” says Ernest Weekley, “decádent was permissible; now décadent is the rule. Such accentuations as laméntable, interésting are not uneducated, but archaic.”1 It is in the United States, however, that the movement seems to have most momentum. A great many examples, some from presumably educated levels, are in my collectanea, e.g., dísplay, mágazine, dírect,2 ínquiry,3 állies, áddress, mústache, ádvertising, détail, cément, cígarette, épitome,4 múseum, lócate, détour, áddict, rébate, ánnex, rébound, rómance, décoy, máma, pápa,5 príncess,6 quándary, ábdomen,7 quínine,8 éntire, fénance, tríbunal,9 récess, ídea, déject, bóuquet, pólice,10 éxcess, discharge1 and résearch.2 There is some exchange in fashions of pronunciation across the water. The English, after holding out a while for armístice, seem to have yielded to ármistice, but so far not many Americans have succumbed to the English áristocrat.3 Running against the current, barráge and gárage survive in the United States against the English bárrage and gárage. But the American réveille balances the account by resisting the English revéille, pronounced revélly.4
In this matter of pronouncing loan-words there is much confusion in both countries, for it is just here, say Kenyon and Knott, p. xlvii, that “usage is most unsettled and uncertain.” The English it seems to me, are rather more bold than we are in naturalizing foreign words, especially proper names, and the example of Calais, pronounced Calis, rhyming with pálace, since Shakespeare’s time, is in point. The consultors of the BBC do not hesitate to recommend essentially English pronunciations of such words as carillon, chauffeur, conduit, cotillion, cul-de-sac, décor, liqueur, guillotin and harem, and they appear to have a hearty contempt for the French u and the German ö (they convert Röntgen, for example, into Runtgen), but in many other cases they are at pains to preserve something resembling foreign pronunciations, e.g., in compère (the English equivalent of the American master of ceremonies or m.c.), fête, enceinte, fiancée, hors-d’oeuvre, ennui, entourage, embonpoint and ski. The late Lloyd James discussed the difficulties of the problem in “Broadcast English No. I.” “In early days,” he said, “such words were read as English words. French was read as though it were English, and the matter ended there. But since we have begun to learn French and to speak it with some attempt at giving our effort a French sound, it is thought desirable to give French words as near an approximation to their French pronunciation as possible.” When James said we he meant, of course, the English upper class; the common people of England, like those of the United States, know no French, and show no desire to learn any. The result is inevitably a series of sorry compromises. “The only French sound in the average English pronunciation of the word restaurant,” observed James sadly, “is the s, which is the same in English and French.”1 His colleagues, on the BBC board, I gather, have often been at odds over a given word, and sometimes they have changed their decisions. At their eighth meeting, for example, holden on January 17, 1930, they ordained that ski should be skee,2 but by the time the third edition of “Broadcast English No. I” came out in 1935 it had become the correct Dano-Norwegian shee.
Most American authorities seem to be willing to let nature take its course. They have learned by bitter experience that their admonitions, at best, never reach below the penthouse of the educational structure, and that the plain people go ways of their own. Because of the presence of so many foreigners in the Republic, these Americans on the lower levels have picked up many more loanwords than Englishmen of the corresponding class, and not a few of those that have come in by word of mouth have retained more or less correct pronunciations, e.g., the French rouge, the Spanish cañon, adobe, siesta, corral, frijole, mesa, patio, sierra and tortilla,1 and the German sauerkraut, pumpernickel, hausfrau, katzenjammer and delicatessen. In other cases loan-words have been preserved only by changes in spelling, as in ouch (autsch) and bower (bauer). In yet other cases they have succumbed to folk-etymology, e.g., the Dutch koolsla, pronounced cole-slaw, which has become cold-slaw; or suffered changes in their vowels, e.g., the Spanish peon (whose derivative, peonage, rhymes the first syllable with see), loafer (from the German laufer), and smearcase (from schmierkáse). Hofbráu has become huffbrow, rathskeller has become ratskiller, wanderlust has acquired a last syllable rhyming with rust, the sch of schweizer has become a simple s, and the German u of bummer has become the English u in rum. The late Brander Matthews believed in the inevitability of such changes, and refused to denounce them. “The principle which ought to govern,” he once said,
can be stated simply. English should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful, and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. No doubt this is today a counsel of perfection; but it indicates the goal which should be strived for. It is what English was capable of accomplishing prior to the middle of the Seventeenth Century.2 It is what English may be able to accomplish … if we once awaken to the danger of contaminating our speech with unassimilated words, and to the disgrace which our stupidity or laziness must bring upon us, of addressing the world in a puddingstone and piebald language.3
Here, I suspect, Matthews’s facile talk of a moral obligation was rather more pedagogical than wise: there is no actual offense to God, I am advised by my chaplain, in trying to pronounce French words like a Frenchman. A more plausible objection to it was stated by Larsen and Walker in “Pronunciation: A Practical Guide to American Standards,”1 to wit:
Setting up a foreign standard of pronunciation for isolated words and phrases in an English context … would throw them out of harmony with the passage as a whole. Especially in the case of French the foreign language is so entirely different from English in intonation, in accent, and in tenseness of utterance that a perfect rendering of isolated French words … would involve an awkward shift of the whole vocal machinery. Borrowed words and phrases are adequately pronounced with a certain amount of compromise between the foreign sounds and the corresponding native sounds.2
They follow this with lists of French, German and Italian words in which an ingenious attempt is made to approximate the pronunciations of the original languages without setting the 100% American tasks beyond the power of his tongue, and on the whole they succeed admirably, though they encounter the usual difficulties with the German ch,3 the French l, u and nasal n, and the Italian c. When a foreign word in wide use presents difficulties the plain people sometimes dispose of it by inventing a shortened form, as in bra (pronounced brah) for brassière.4 Not infrequently a loan which has had polite treatment in the higher levels is dealt with barbarously when it becomes known lower down. This happened, for example, to coupé. It was commonly pronounced in an approximation of the French
manner so long as it designated a four-wheeled, one-horse carriage,5 in use only among the relatively rich, but when it was applied, c. 1923, to a new model of Ford car it quickly became coop.6 In the same way chauffeur became sho-f’r, liqueur became lik-kewer,1 chassis became shassis or tshassis, and chic came close to chick. Hors-d’oeuvre has always been a stumbling block to Anglo-Saxons, and when, in Prohibition days, it began to be given to the embalmed fish, taxidermized eggs, salted nuts, salami, green and black olives, pretzels, pumpernickel and fragments of Leberwurst that were served with cocktails it was mauled very badly. In 1937 the sponsors of a Midwest Hotel Show at Chicago offered a prize for a likely substitute, and it was won by Roy L. Alciatore of New Orleans with apiteaser. One contestant proposed that the term be naturalized as horse-doovers. In 1938 the quest was resumed by a popular magazine,2 and at about the same time the Hon. Maury Maverick of Texas, the foe of gobbledegook,3 proposed dingle-doos.4 Many Americans, in despair, have turned to the Italian antipasto, which is much less painful to the national larynx.
In 1935 Emily Post, then the unchallenged arbiter of elegance in the United States, was appealed to for advice about pronouncing the French words currently in vogue. She replied that those which had “already been Americanized” should be turned into “plain English,” e.g., menyou for menu and valet with a clear t; and that those having sounds nearly equivalent to English sounds should be given the latter, e.g., mass-her for masseur (“emphasis is the same on both syllables”), boo-kay for bouquet,5 brass-yair for brassière, voad-veal for vaudeville, and showfur, not showfer or showf’r (“accent both syllables equally or else slightly on the last”), for chauffeur. Such words as garage, demi-tasse and fiancé she described as “stumbling blocks,” and advised her customers, in the last two cases, to substitute black coffee and either betrothed or man I’m going to marry.6
The bare sounds of spoken speech, of course, constitute only one of its characters, and that character, as the professors of phonemes1 have taught us, is a variable quality, for a given phoneme may change its vowel, and yet remain the same phoneme, or, at all events, a pair of diaphones.2 Even syllable stress changes more or less with the position of a word in a sentence and with the mood and intent of the speaker; hence it cannot be reduced to rigid rules. There are students of speech who hold that neither is as important, in distinguishing one dialect from another, as intonation, or, as some of them call it, pitch pattern.3 When an American hears a strange Englishman speaking it is not the unfamiliar pronunciation that chiefly warns him to be on his guard, nor even the occasional use of unintelligible words; it is the exotic speech tune. Between the two forms of the language, says Hilaire Belloc,
there is not only a difference in rhythm and in tonal inflection – that is, in the musical notes of a sentence – but there is also a spiritual difference.… Different parts of the same phrase are emphasized. That means not only a difference in the sense of rhythm but some subtle difference in the mind of the speaker. So far as rhythm is concerned the main difference would seem to be … one which I have discovered in many other departments of the national life beyond this medium of speech. The American rhythm is shorter. If you hear an Englishman pronounce a long sentence, such as, “I shall be very glad to see him again after such a long interval,” and then compare it with the way in which the average American would pronounce identically the same printed words, you will discover … that the number of emphatic syllables in the English intonation is less than in the American. To take a metaphor from the movement of water, the waves are shorter and steeper. Further, the phrase lifts in tone at the end in English and falls in American.1
Unhappily, there is a good deal of conflict of opinion regarding the precise nature of the difference in intonation between typically English and typically American speech. Some observers report that, to their ears, Englishmen cover a wider range of tone in speaking, and carry it higher than Americans;2 others, while agreeing that Americans pitch their voices within a very narrow range,3 hold that their gamut lies further up the scale than that of the English.4 Some think that Englishmen speak the faster, and some believe that Americans do.5 In each case this may be only fresh evidence of the familiar fact that strange speech always sounds over-fast.1 To these witnesses, all of them born to some form of English, I add the testimony of an alert and professionally trained foreigner who acquired it as a second language. She is Dr. Aasta Stene, a Norwegian philologian who went to England during World War II, spent the better part of four years there, and then came to the United States. On May 3, 1946, at a linguistic conference at the University of Wisconsin, she read a paper entitled “Unlearning My English,” in which she discussed illuminatingly the differences noted by a foreigner trained in observing speechways between American English and the English of the English universities. She found that she needed to make only a few changes in her vocabulary in order to be understood by Americans, but that otherwise her acquired English had to be considerably modified in this country. She said:
My delivery is slower than in England, or in Norway for that matter. The average rate of speech in England seems to me to be appreciably faster than in the part of the United States I have got to know.2 Retaining the faster English tempo results in the listener not understanding.… I find myself speaking considerably more loudly than in Britain. It is not acceptable here to speak as mutedly as is common in casual conversation in England. The threshold of accepted audibility is higher in America than in England.…
During the first few days I found that although, with English intonation patterns, I would occasionally rise to (or fall from) a higher level in my voice range than Americans do, the larger proportion of my speech-continuum was below my medium pitch level, and that this fact was socially unfortunate, as in much of American speech a more considerable proportion rises above medium pitch. In order not to create the impression of being bored, uninterested or supercilious I have had to increase the proportion of syllables pitched above the medium. But at the same time I have probably reduced the number rising to really high pitch.…
A wide pitch range is sometimes called for in English, but the fact that every intonation group has to come to roost at low pitch, and that a reduced pitch range is frequently used even for emphasis, keeps a considerable proportion of speech units at a low pitch level. In American a greater proportion of syllables reach into fairly high pitch levels. Such wide intonation ranges in British would indicate emphasis, but they are used in American in statements that cannot be considered emphatic. Consequently, American speech sounds to an ear conditioned to English patterns as if it is uniformly emphatic.1
Finally, there is the question of timbre. To most Englishmen American speech is unpleasantly harsh and unmusical, whereas to most Americans that of Englishmen is throaty and gurgling.2 These differences not only make it hard, on occasion, to take in the idea sought to be conveyed by a speaker from the wrong side of the Atlantic;3 they also produce emotional responses that are nearly always hostile, for each dialect has its characteristic speech tunes, and hearing a strange one substituted for a familiar one is always disconcerting and sometimes extremely irritating. Said A. Lloyd James:4 “It is the intonation that hurts. English spoken on Swedish intonation may sound petulant, on Russian intonation lugubrious, on German intonation offensive, on French intonation argumentative, on many American intonations casual or cocksure.… What foreign languages sound like when spoken on British or American rhythms and intonations is best left to a lively imagination.” James then quoted I. A. Richards: “Not the strict logical sense of what is said, but the tone of voice and the occasion are the primary factors by which we interpret.”1 To which an American testimony may be added: “Many as the differences of word and usage are, the vital difference which is dividing English and American speech far more rapidly than any change of vocabulary is the divergence in enunciation, pronunciation, and quality of voice. The same words sound quite different on English and American tongues.”2 There are Englishmen who, in the
ir more reflective moments, admit that something is to be said for the superior clarity of American pronunciation, but they seldom hold to that line long. The general tune of American speech affects them as unpleasantly as the cockney whine of the Australians, and their discomfort relights in them the old passionate conviction of their nation that everything American is not only inferior, but also villainous and ignoble. Thus their typical attitude to the gabble of Americans, says Allen Walker Read, is “one of utter loathing.”3 It should be added at once that when they give voice to that loathing they fill the Americano with sentiments which match it precisely.4
The study of pronunciation, as I have hitherto noted, is of comparatively recent growth, and it was not until a time within the memory of persons still relatively young that anything resembling scientific method was applied to it. Even so late as 1926 Dr. Kemp Malone could say in a professional paper, and with perfect truth, that “intonation, or pitch variation in speech,” though “probably the most important constituent in the sum total of speech peculiarities that give one an accent,” was “yet but little studied.”1 To be sure, the individual constituent sounds of English had been investigated with more or less diligence, and various attempts had been made to devise an alphabet that would represent them better than the conventional alphabet, but there was but little study of the traits of the spoken language as a whole. The pioneer in this field was Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905), father of the inventor of the telephone, whose “Visible Speech” was published in 1867. But his ideas got much more attention in Europe than in the United States, and it was not until 1901, when Dr. E. W. Scripture, who was not a philologian but a medical man, brought out a volume called “Elements of Experimental Phonetics,” that the new method of approach began to attract any considerable number of Americans.2 It was given a vigorous impulse when Dr. C. E. Seashore, the Swedishborn professor of psychology at the State University of Iowa, began to apply its devices to the investigation of music, and since the time of Malone’s lament it has flourished in a way that must delight him. Its practitioners have got together a really formidable armamentarium of instruments for detecting and recording precisely what goes on during the speaking of a sentence, and some of their discoveries, though rather beyond the comprehension of the layman, are of considerable importance.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 6
