3 pp. xxxvii-xlvii.
4 This vowel is discussed at length in Notes on the Pronunciation of Hurry, by C. K. Thomas, American Speech, April, 1946, pp. 112–15, Thomas shows that the American u prevails west of a line beginning in northern Vermont, running southward through Massachusetts to the Connecticut border, then westward through southern New York and northern Pennsylvania, then southward through Pennsylvania to the Ohio river, then westward along the Ohio to the Mississippi, and then in a southwesterly direction through Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
1 The curious will find other discussions of the differences between English and American pronunciation, with examples, in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp, Vol. II; New York, 1925; English English, by Claude de Crespigny, American Speech, Nov., 1926, pp. 71–74; British and American Pronunciation, by Anne Currie, American Speech, April, 1928, p. 347; British and American Pronunciation, by Louise Pound, School Review, June, 1915, pp. 381–83; English – According to American Skedule, by St. John Ervine, London Evening Standard, Sept. 23, 1929; Beware of Affected Speech: Ten Pronunciations of the Anglophile, by F. Sherman Baker, Correct English, Jan., 1938, pp. 5–28; A Comparison of Certain Features of British and American Pronunciation, by C. M. Wise, Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1936, pp. 285–302; American Pronunciations, by H[ans] Kurath, S.P.E. Tract No. XXX; Oxford, 1928; A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly; New York, 1917, pp. xiv-xvii; Trends in American Pronunciation, by Arthur J. Bronstein, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Dec., 1942, pp. 452–56; Some Observations on American Speech, by J. Howard Wellard, Nineteenth Century and After, March, 1935, pp. 374–84; Concerning Briticisms, by Charles Wendell Townsend, American Speech, Feb., 1932, pp. 219–22; The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1919, Ch. III; American Pronunciation, by John Samuel Kenyon; 9th edition; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1945, pp. 82–86; Some Phases of American Pronunciation, by William A. Read, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April, 1943, pp. 217–44; Colby Discusses Briticisms and Use of King’s English, by Frank Colby, Providence (R.I.) Journal (and other papers), June 20, 1943; English Mispronouncing Section, Word Study, March, 1935, p. 3; From Evacuees Abroad, Liverpool Echo, April 18, 1941; The Story of Out Language, by Henry Alexander; Toronto, 1940, Ch. XIII.
1 I am indebted here to a list prepared in 1945 by Dr. James F. Bender.
2 All four of these pronunciations are ordained in Broadcast English No. I; London, 1928.
3 Mather Flint on Early Eighteenth Century English Pronunciation; before cited, pp. 159–60.
4 His authorities are A Dictionary of All the Words Commonly Us’d in the English Tongue, by Thomas Dyche; London, 1723, and Walker’s Dictionary.
5 Stress on First Syllable Spreading in English Use, by Frederick W. Henrici, New York Times, July 21, 1940. “Through the centuries,” says Henrici, “there seems to be a glacier-like movement of the accented syllables of English words, slow but irrestible, toward the front.” In 1883 George R. Howells read a paper before the Albany Institute (published in its Transactions, Vol. X) in which he said: “There is a tendency to bring the accent as far forward in the word as possible. A few years ago not to say balcóny was regarded as evidence of want of culture, if not of illiteracy. Now we wonder that anybody ever pronounced it otherwise than bálcony.”
1 The English Language; New York, 1929, p. 111. Broadcast English No. I ordains décadence, lámentable and ińteresting.
2 Our Changing Language, by C. J. Gerling, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 26, 1935.
3 Palmer, Martin and Blandford give inquíry as the English form, and say that it is also used in America. But some water has gone under the bridges since they wrote in 1926.
4 Our Agile American Accents, by John L. Haney, American Speech, April, 1926, p. 379.
5 See AL4, p. 519.
6 Larsen and Walker say that the second syllable is stressed in England, but not in such combinations as Princess Mary, in which the first is stressed.
7 In Pronunciation of Medical Terms, Journal of the American Medical Association, Oct. 18, 1941, pp. 1377–78, Dr. A. Henry Clagett, Jr., recommended abdómen, but noted the prevalence of ábdomen, which is preferred, rather curiously, by Henry Cecil Wyld’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language, though not, apparently, by any other English authority. A number of other medical terms are accented differently in England and America. The English, for example, use capillary, duódenum, esophágeal and éxhibit, and make the first syllable of fibrillation rhyme with bribe. I am indebted here to Drs. Louis Hamman, Charles W. Wainwright and Benjamin M. Baker, Jr., of Baltimore. When penicillin was brought out the English used pénicillin, and it got the approval of the BBC, but Dr. Fleming, one of the discoverers of the new drug, preferred penicillin, and it has prevailed in both countries. See the Lancet (London), Nov. 20, 1943, p. 648.
8 There has been some effort among the elegant, in recent years, to convert quinine into kin-éen, but Webster 1934 prefers qwéye-nine, and so do most Americans.
9 The last six are listed in Radioese Needs Correction, by Charlton Andrews, New York Times, Dec. 20, 1931.
10 Pronunciation in the Schools, by Louise Pound, English Journal, Oct., 1922, p. 476.
1 This is Army usage. See American Speech, Feb., 1946, p. 75.
2 There is an elaborate discussion of the shifting of accents in The Standard of Pronunciation in English, by Thomas R. Lounsbury; New York, 1904, pp. 121 ff. Its historical aspects in the Germanic tongues are dealt with in The Genesis and Growth of English, by J. S. Armour; New York, 1935, who summarizes his conclusions on p. 92. Its effects (or lack of them) on the early French loans in English are described in The Accentuation of Old French Loan Words in English, by Henry Dexter Learned, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1922, pp. 707–21. The following is from The Laggard Art of Criticism, by Oscar Cargill, College English, Vol. VI, 1945, p. 245: “When atmospheric conditions altered the speech of Europeans settled in America, so that immigrants of all nationalities said cóntents when the dictionary then insisted on conténts, it was obvious that iambic verse, the great measure of the French and the English, did not provide a natural melodic line for the poets of this country.… Free verse, the emancipating invention of Walt Whitman, was the inevitable product of the long revolt against the heroic couplet; but it is significant that the poet’s most successful experiments all throw the accent forward, as the natural, incisive speech of his countrymen demanded.” I am indebted here to Thomas Pyles: A New Meteorological Theory of Stress, Modern Language Notes, Nov., 1945, p. 497. Wentworth, in his American Dialect Dictionary, pp. 497–98, gives some curious examples of the forward shift on the level of folk speech, e.g., béhave, dispatch, cámpaign, pércent, résign, réquest, ádvice, défense, gúitar, ínsane, réprieve and súccess. I have myself heard dé luxe in the name of an automobile.
3 American Speech, April, 1934, p. 155.
4 The varying stress in the same word when used as noun or verb, e.g., pérfect and to perféct, prótest and to protést, dígest and to digést, remains fairly uniform in England and America, though of late there seems to be some tendency, in this country, to throw it forward in the verb also, as in to rétail. See Stress in Recent English as a Distinguishing Mark Between Disyllables Used as Noun or Verb, by A. A. Hill, American Speech, Aug., 1931, pp. 443–48, and The Sounds of Standard English, by T. Nicklin; Oxford. 1020, pp. 71 and 79
1 Broadcast English No. I, in which he had a principal hand, advises réstarong.
2 On Naturalizing Words, by A. Lloyd James, Radio Times (London), Feb. 7, 1930, p. 309. See also Fixing English Pronunciation, Manchester Guardian, Feb. 7, 1930.
1 Rather curiously, Americans have preserved what seems to be the correct Spanish pronunciation of rodéo, though ródeo is used among the Mexican and American cattlemen of the Southwest. I am indebted here to Mr. William C. Stewart, of Southbridge, Mass
.
2 Says Logan Pearsall Smith in The English Language; New York, 1912, p. 36: “Speaking in general terms, we may say that down to about 1650 the French words that were borrowed were thoroughly naturalized in English, and were made sooner or later to conform to the rules of English pronunciation and accent; while in the later borrowings (unless they have become very popular) an attempt is made to pronounce them in the French fashion.”
3 The Englishing of French Words, S.P.E. Tract No. V; Oxford, 1921, p. 7.
1 London, 1930, p. 149.
2 Four years before this H. W. Fowler had said in Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, p. 194: “To say a French word in the middle of an English sentence exactly as it would be said by a Frenchman in a French sentence is a feat demanding an acrobatic mouth; the muscles have to be suddenly adjusted to a performance of a different nature, and after it as suddenly recalled to the normal state; it is a feat that should not be attempted.… All that is necessary is a polite acknowledgement of indebtedness to the French language indicated by some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound.”
3 The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation; New York, 1943, tackles ch with tongs and mallets. Thus it gives ah-ler-herkst for allerhöchst, rike for reich, muhnch-ou-z’n for Münchhausen, and bahk for Bach.
4 Miscellany, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Oct., 1941, p. 228.
5 The DAE says that it was first used in this country in the 1840s.
6 Some Established Mispronunciations, by Annina Periam Danton, Words, Nov., 1937, p. 177.
1 I am indebted here to Mr. K. L. Rankin.
2 Name It and You Can Have It, Esquire, Jan., 1938, pp. 102–69.
3 Supplement I, p. 414.
4 Quaint Americanizations, by L. Sprague de Camp, American Speech, April, 1938, p. 154.
5 Webster 1934 ordains boor-bun for bourbon, but the NBC Handbook makes it boor-b’n. In the bourbon country the prevailing and indeed almost universal pronunciation is bur-b’n. The Handbook recommends boo-dwahr for boudoir, bool-yuh-base for bouillabaisse, boor-zhwah-zee for bourgeoisie, and boo-tuh-nyair for boutonnière, with the accent on the final syllables of the three last-named.
6 Mrs. Post added some advice about honorifics and proper names. Europeans, she said, always use their own titles in addressing Americans, so we should use Mister, Misses or Miss in addressing them, thus avoiding the snares of Monsieur, Signora and Fräulein. “Certainly it is in much better taste,” she continued, “to call our American college Noter Dayme than to pronounce it as French, and yet we would (and should) say Notrr Damme when we mean the cathedral in Paris.” There is a wise discussion of this problem in Broadcast English No. VI, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1937, pp. 7 and 8.
1 Supplement I, p. 102.
2 Phonemes and their proponents are dealt with somewhat boorishly in Supplement I, p. 102. There is a more seemly discussion of them in The Program of the Prague Phonologists, by R-M. S. Heffner, American Speech, April, 1936, pp. 107–15. Heffner says that these Prague phonologists defined the phoneme as “a phonological unit not susceptible of analysis into smaller units,” but notes that when “one sound may be substituted for another without destroying or changing the meanings of the words, the two sounds represent phonic variants of the same phoneme.” He quotes another definition of the phoneme by a Dutch phonetician, Eijkman, to wit: “The phoneme is the sum-total of single anthropophonical conceptions formed in the mind through the blending of the impressions acquired by the pronunciation of one and the same speech sound of one language.” This definition he describes, with some plausibility, as “awe-inspiring.” The phoneme was launched upon humanity in 1916 by Ferdinand de Saussure, a French phonetician.
3 Says John C. Diekhoff in Milton’s Prosody in the Poems of the Trinity Manuscript, Publications of the Modern Language Association, March, 1939, p. 165: “There are so many degrees of stress possible in the normal reading of English, and the question of stress is so complicated by questions of pitch and quantity, that to use the simple, unqualified designations stressed and unstressed of given syllables must be in some measure unsatisfactory. At best it represents halftruth.”
1 The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 223–24.
2 Speaking of English intonation in The Pronunciation of English; Cambridge (England), 1914, p. 60, Daniel Jones says that its range is “very extensive.” “Most people in speaking,” he goes on, “reach notes much higher and much lower than they can sing.… In declamatory style it is not unusual for a man with a voice of ordinary pitch to have a range of over two octaves, rising to F above the bass clef or even higher, and going down so low that the words degenerate into a kind of growl which can hardly be regarded as a musical sound at all.” The voices of Englishwomen, he adds, show a much narrower range, often limited to the octave and a half between G in the bass clef and D in the treble.
3 “The first complaint that I should make against our speech,” said John Erskine in Do Americans Speak English?, Nation, April 15, 1925, p. 411, “is that it is horribly monotonous – it hasn’t tune enough.” “Perhaps the most apparent general characteristic of American speech, so far as cadence is concerned,” said George Philip Krapp in The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 50, “is its levelness of tone. The voice rises and falls within a relatively narrow range, and with few abrupt transitions from high to low or low to high. To British ears American speech often sounds hesitating, monotonous and indecisive, and British speech, on the other hand, is likely to seem to Americans abrupt, explosive and manneristic.”
4 “Middle-class American speech seems to the English,” says Oscar Browne in Normal English Pronunciation; London, 1937, p. 91, “to be spoken in a pitch unduly high. A high pitch does not carry well and requires extra volume, particularly when the tone is again raised for emphasized syllables or words.” To which Krapp, just quoted, adds: “One reason for the relative levelness in pitch of American speech may be that the American voice in general starts on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice.”
5 At the annual convention of the Association of Shorthand Reporters of New York, in 1929, someone reported that the tempo of American speech was increasing. The gain at that time was said to be averaging ten words a minute every twenty years. See A Measure of Speech, New York Times (editorial page), April 1, 1929, and Anent London, by Michael Foley, Bayonne (N.J.) News, April 2, 1929.
1 “It is doubtful,” says Krapp, p. 51, “if on the whole American cultivated speech is any slower than British speech.” He adds that the drawl Englishmen note in American speech is “partly produced by the levelness of intonation, partly by the retention of secondary stresses in polysyllables.”
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’Ne
ill’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.”
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