3 His address was delivered on June 8, and got a great deal of attention in the newspapers. It was printed in The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1905.
1 Born in New York in 1843, he spent the years 1855–59 in Europe, and in 1869 settled in England, where he remained until his death in 1916. He was perhaps the champion Anglomaniac of all time, not even excepting Walter Hines Page.
2 Presidential address in New York, Dec. 1. This address was printed in the English Journal, Jan., 1917, and reprinted in The Standard of American Speech and Other Papers; Boston, 1926. A brief account of Scott is in Supplement I, pp. 134 and 135n.
1 British and American Pronunciation: Retrospect and Prospect, School Review, June, p. 392. Said William Schack in the Millgate, Oct., 1938, quoted in the Manchester Evening News, Sept. 28: “To an American vaudeville audience a broad a is as funny as a bit of slapstick comedy; and it would take a brave man to say cahn’t in many an American gathering.”
2 The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1919. See especially his discussion of the broad a, p. 64.
3 American Pronunciation; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1924; ninth ed., 1945. Kenyon says, p. vi, that he has “based his observations on the cultivated pronunciation of his own locality – the Western Reserve of Ohio.” He adds: “this is fairly representative of … the speech … which is virtually uniform in its most noticeable features from New York State west, in a region north of a line drawn west from Philadelphia.”
4 Pronunciation: a Practical Guide to American Standards, by Thorlief Larsen and Francis C. Walker; London and New York, 1930.
5 p. 15.
6 Some of their other recommendations are hardly in accord with the general American practise. See, for example, the pronunciations they recommend for triolet, to annex, to convoy, abdomen, mamma, obscurantist, ordinarily and panegyrist.
1 The report was published by the Commission on Trends in Education of the Modern Language Association; New York, 1945. The quotation is from pp. 5 and 6. The special committee consisted of Thomas Clark Pollock, of New York University; William Clyde DeVane, of Yale; and Robert E. Spiller, of Swarthmore. The report was approved by the Commission on Trends in Education on Sept. 17, 1944, and passed for publication by the Executive Council of the association on Dec. 27.
2 Tilly was born in 1860 and died in 1935. He went to Germany in 1887, taught at the University of Marburg from 1892 to 1902, and then set up a phonetic institute in Berlin. On the outbreak of World War I he was interned by the Germans, but in 1916 they released him and he went to London. In 1918 he came to New York.
3 Some of the extravagances to which this would have led were noticed a little while back. Very few American actors, in fact, have ever succeeded in acquiring an English accent that really fools the English. One of those who made the grade was Edwin Booth. On Nov. 24, 1880, he wrote from London, where he was presenting his repertoire: “The purity of my English is invariably praised, and even admitted by the carpers. Think of a blarsted Yankee speaking English!” But he seems to have fallen into his native American when he was off guard, for he added: “Wish I could speak as good English off as I do on the stage.” See Memories and Letters of Edwin Booth, Century Magazine, Dec., 1893, p. 240. The old-time elocutionists all affected a pseudo-English pronunciation, chiefly marked by ludicrously broad a’s. The English themselves no longer imitate actors as they did in the Eighteenth Century. Said Henry Cecil Wyld, in The Historical Study of the Mother Tongue; London, 1906, p. 356: “The English of the stage … differs from the English of good society partly in being more archaic, partly also in being marred by certain artificialities and affectations of pronunciation.” Said Thomas A. Knott, then general editor of the Webster Dictionaries, in an address to the Eastern Public Speaking Conference in New York City, April, 1933: “[If you are training] a college student who is a member of the debating team of the State University of Illinois … you don’t want to teach him London stage speech. His audiences would laugh. Some of them wouldn’t even understand what he was trying to talk about.” This address was printed as How the Dictionary Determines What Pronunciations to Use, in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Feb., 1935, pp. 1–10. A survey undertaken in 1941 by “a member of the faculty at Pennsylvania State College,” reported in General American Speech, Dayton (O.) Journal, editorial page, Nov. 21, 1941, showed that 52% of the male film stars then reigning in Hollywood used the General American pronunciation. The rest varied between the Boston-New York City variety and efforts to imitate Oxford English. But among male stars of the legitimate stage only 24% used General American. The rest used the broad a and dropped their r’s. See Stage Versus Screen, by Marguerite E. DeWitt, American Speech, Jan., 1927, pp. 165–81.
1 Recent Discussions of Standardization in American Pronunciation, Quarterly Journal of Speech Education, Nov., pp. 442–57. The title of this journal was abbreviated to the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1928. It is the organ of the National Association of Teachers of Speech.
1 Maître Phonétique, Jan.-March, 1927, pp. 3 and 4.
2 Vol. II, Part I, Map 80. Miss M. E. DeWitt hints in EuphonEnglish; New York, 1924, p. 49n, that something resembling the English standard is taught at Columbia, Hunter College, Smith and Vassar, but she does not enter into particulars. She even adds the State University of Iowa, but this is hard to credit. She notes that the New York Singing Teachers’ Association “has adopted Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary,” which rests squarely upon the English standard, but that fact is of no significance, for singers, for obvious reasons, always use the Italian a. Incidentally, it may be noted that Jones himself, in his preface to his dictionary, p. x, says: “Several American teachers (mostly from New York and the Northeastern part of the United States) have informed me, somewhat to my surprise, that RP [i.e., Received Pronunciation, his name for the English standard] or RP with slight modifications would be a suitable standard for teaching in American schools. Personally, I cannot think that any attempt to introduce this pronunciation into America is likely to meet with success.”
1 The others were H. J. Heltman, of Syracuse (chairman); Miss Agnes Rigney, of State Teachers College, Geneseo; Miss Mary Zerler, of the Yonkers public schools; and Mrs. Letitia Raubicheck, of the New York City public schools.
1 A Symposium on Phonetics and Standards of Pronunciations, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Oct., 1945, pp. 318–327.
2 i.e., the Boston-New York City standard.
3 i.e., the Southern English or Oxford standard.
1 A Footnote on Phonetics and Standards of Pronunciation, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Feb., 1946. pp. 51–54.
1 American Speech Preferences, Speech Monographs, Research Annual, Vol. IX, 1942, pp. 91–110. I am indebted for this to Miss Elda O. Baumann, of Kalamazoo, Mich. See also the World Almanac, 1941, p. 676.
2 Said Thomas A. Knott in the address lately quoted: “If you seize upon a student from … Red Wing, Minn., and return him to Red Wing talking like a native of Cambridge, Mass.,… you probably have done him an irreparable injury.” Knott explained that he had in mind an effort to make this student “regarded as an effective person in his community.”
3 This attitude, unhappily, has been changing since certain imprudent Negro leaders, like certain imprudent Jewish leaders, began objecting to the presentation of their people as humorous characters. Whatever has been gained for dignity by this reform has been more than lost in good will. Such saviors of the downtrodden always forget that people laugh with a comedian rather than at him, and that the general feeling he leaves behind him is one of friendliness. Potash and Perlmutter probably did far more to allay anti-Semitism in the United States than all the Zionists and Communists.
4 A Standard American Language?, New Republic, May 25, 1938, p. 69.
5 Broadcasting and Pronunciation, June, 1930, pp. 420–23.
6 The Radio and Pronunciation, Dec., 1931, pp. 124–29.
1 The Spoken Word, Billboard, Apr
il 4, 1928.
2 I am indebted here to Mr. Jesse S. Butcher, of the CBS. Vizetelly was born in 1864. He came to America in 1891 as associate editor of the Standard Dictionary, and became its chief editor in 1914, dying in that office in 1938. He wrote many books on speech, and edited many others. He was the editor for years of The Lexicographer’s Easy Chair in the Literary Digest. He took to the radio in 1924.
1 So late as April 26, 1931 the Chicago Radio Weekly was still denouncing both the CBS and the NBC for attempting to “oust the American language from the American home … and supplant it with English as she is spoken in England, or in the ‘better’ social centers of America, which is practically the same thing,” but this was before Vizetelly really got under way.
2 War Words: Recommended Pronunciations; New York, 1943; World Words: Recommended Pronunciations; New York, 1944. In his introduction to the latter he said: “The recurring question, ‘Which is correct?’ is best met by the doctrine of levels of usage. Ask not only which is correct, but correct for what purpose. To the style appropriate for the pulpit, the Supreme Court, after-dinner speaking, conversation, familiar speech, and so on we must add the style appropriate to radio. Radio is peculiar: though the subject matter may be serious and formal, the radio audience hears it in the familiar surroundings of home. The platform and pulpit styles become incongruous; the listeners wish the broadcaster to be natural and friendly, but well spoken and easily understood.”
3 The announcers of local stations, of course, were not bound to follow his recommendations, and though many of them did so others continued to fill the air with unearthly pronunciations, especially of foreign proper names. On June 25, 1944, a Cambridge reader of the Boston Herald reported in horror that he had heard Cherbourg pronounced Chair-boor.
1 The Announcers Have a Word For It, Broadcasting, Oct. 15, 1939, pp. 24 and 62.
2 Under date of May 26, 1931, its acting manager of press relations, Mr. Walter C. Stone, wrote to me: “We have never designated an individual or a group to censor our announcers. They are, however, constantly under the scrutiny of different members of our Program Department, and when one of them makes a bad slip he is quickly called on the carpet and shown his error.”
3 New York, 1943.
1 For example, This Problem of Pronunciation, Printers Ink, March 24, 1944, pp. 32–36; Ninety Millions Speak General American, New York Times Magazine, Aug. 27, 1944, pp. 17 and 29; If You Were a Radio Announcer, the same, Feb. 25, 1945, p. 23, and How Do You Pronounce It?, the same, July 15, 1945, p. 20.
2 Under date of Nov. 16, 1937 Dr. H. K. Croessmann, of Du Quoin, Ill., wrote to me: “Graham McNamee’s accent, twelve or fifteen years back, was very Eastern and broad. Today I listen as carefully as I can for this and don’t hear it. He might be a native Illinoisan who never left the State.” There is a discussion of the standards of Greet and Bender in Standards in American Speech, by Brobury Pearce Ellis, Saturday Review of Literature, June 1, 1946, pp. 5–42.
3 Take My Word For It, Syracuse Post-Standard (and other papers), Jan. 16, 1946. Here Colby slipped on disaster. It would not be disahster but disahsta.
4 The Society had to suspend operations on the outbreak of World War I, but resumed after the Armistice in 1918. In its Tract No. 1, issued in Oct., 1919, there is a statement of its objects and a list of its first members.
1 Dr. Wyld died in 1945.
2 They are entitled Broadcast English, and numbered. No. I, published under date of June, 1928, contained 322 words. In a second edition, published in 1932, this number was increased to 503, and in a third edition, in 1935, to 779 No. II (1930) was devoted to English place-names, No. III (1932) to Scottish place-names, and No. IV (1934) to Welsh place-names. These will be noticed in Chapter X, Section 3.
1 The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 21 and 22.
2 His essay was first published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, edited by A. C. Bradley. He revised and republished it as A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation; Oxford, 1913.
3 He might have added, “as also in all of the United States save the Northeastern seaboard and the South.”
4 Bridges’ italics.
1 Bridges’ use of this term, abhorrent to all Scotsmen, showed that he was not one himself. He was born in Kent, “the England of England,” in 1844, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and spent most of his long life at Oxford.
2 This was the list in Broadcast English No. I, already referred to. His criticism was published in S.P.E. Tract No. XXXII.
3 For example, in the London Times, Jan. 25, 1934. The substance of his criticism is in AL4, pp. 329 and 330.
4 For example, the Curse of Refanement, London Daily Mail, Aug. 30, 1926; English as Pronounced by the English and Americans, Variety, Oct. 9, 1929 (reprinted from the London Evening Standard); Ham Acting, London Observer, Feb. 9, 1936; the Oxford Cockneys, the same, Feb. 13, 1936, and Open Your Vowels, the same, March 13, 1938.
1 pp. 46, 48, 328, 329.
2 Private communication, June 17, 1938. Mr. Jones spent two years in the United States. I should add that he finds “certain features of American pronunciation definitely displeasing, at least to a musician’s ear, particularly the flat a and the broad o.”
3 Gentleman, Gent., Man, Query (London), No. 3.
4 Voice That Lost Us the U.S. Market: Effeminate Accents Spoiling British Pictures, London Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, March 28, 1938.
5 In the London Sunday Express, quoted in Many Mediums Strive to Tell British of U.S., by William W. White, Washington Post, July 15, 1942. I am indebted for this to Mr. Don Bloch.
1 Quoted in Oxford Accent Rated Low, by Frank Colby, Rochester (N.Y.) Times-Union, June 25, 1946.
2 He explains in a footnote that he means “public school in the English sense, not in the American sense.” The difference is explained in Supplement I, pp. 479n and 487n.
3 An English Pronouncing Dictionary; fourth edition, revised and enlarged; London, 1937, p. ix.
4 Jones’s name indicates Welsh descent, but he does not give his birthplace in Who’s Who. He was educated at Radley, University College School and Cambridge. He has written many other books on phonetics, including volumes on the pronunciation of Chinese, Russian, French, Sinhalese and Sechuana.
5 English Pronunciation: A Practical Handbook for the Foreign Learner; Cambridge (England), 1944, p. 1.
6 James was also a Welshman, educated at University College, Cardiff, and at Cambridge. In 1940 he lost his mind, and on January 14, 1941 he killed his wife, a violinist named Elsie Owen. Sent to an asylum, he soon afterward committed suicide. He was the author of many able books and papers on phonetics. His discussion of Southern English is in The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 153–72.
7 The Sounds of Standard English; Oxford, 1920, pp. 10 and 11.
1 His defense of Oxford English is set forth in S.P.E. Tract No. XXXVII, published in 1932.
2 Wyld was educated at Charterhouse, and at Heidelberg, Bonn and Oxford. He taught at Liverpool before being called to Oxford in 1920.
3 A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 2. This book traces the history of English pronunciation from the Middle English period to modern times, and is extraordinarily learned and valuable. Unhappily, consulting it is made very difficult by the lack of both index and word-list.
4 The Best English: A Claim for the Superiority of Received Standard English, S.P.E. Tract No. XXXIX; Oxford, 1934, p. 614.
5 Standards of Speech, by Elizabeth Avery, American Speech, April. 1926, p. 367.
6 Predicts Radio Standardizing Spoken English, New York Herald Tribune, March 12, 1936.
1 The New York Herald Tribune report, just quoted.
2 The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, p. 163.
3 Our Spoken Language; London, 1938, p. 161.
1 Before this it was apparently unheard of. Helge Kökeritz says in Mather Flint on Early Eighteenth-Century English Pronunciation: Uppsala, 1944, p. xlv,
that so late as 1685 “a gentleman could apparently speak Scottish or Northern English in London and still be a gentleman.”
2 A History of Colloquial English, before cited, pp. 2 and 3.
3 A Dictionary of English Pronunciations With American Variants, by H. E. Palmer, J. Victor Martin and F. G. Blandford; Cambridge (England), 1926, p. xii.
4 Is There an American Language?; Hong Kong, 1938. Many lay testimonies might be adduced. For example, Why Girls are Refaned, by Brevier, London News Chronicle, June 15, 1936: “Accent is the big barrier between classes in this country. Without the right accent, whether real or assumed, no girl will go far in the office world.” American English, by H. B. Cohen, Boston Herald, June 19, 1934: “There is a certain coterie in England which makes pronunciation a test. If you pronounce words its way, you belong; if not, you don’t. You must say blackin’ and puddin’; you must pronounce the t in valet and the s in Calais.… It is little things like this that show a man up.”
5 The King’s English, by W. Cabell Greet, Baltimore Evening Sun (editorial page), May 13, 1936. After describing it Greet was moved to demand: “If the King of England is strong enough to refuse the Oxford-BBC accents, now in positions of extraordinary prestige, cannot the free-born American teachers of speech be strong enough to resist the temptation of the unholy and really ridiculous American imitations of those accents?”
1 His pronunciation was analyzed at some length in Churchill’s Accent, by Frank Colby, Boston Globe, June 13, 1943.
2 There is occasional newspaper discussion of the pronunciation of other American politicians. Examples: Mr. Hoover at the Microphone, Ottawa Journal (editorial), Aug. 13, 1932; How Do You Say It?, by James F. Bender, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 22, 1944, p. 47 (Roosevelt II and Thomas E. Dewey); Under My Hat, by Hannen Swaffer, London Daily Herald, March 3, 1938 (Glenn Frank).
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