In the United States the long a survives before r, l, k and m, as in charm, salt, walk and calm, but it has pretty well disappeared before s, th, n and f, as in pass, path, chance and laugh. Writing in the early 70s, William D. Whitney said that “until quite recently it was admitted in the United States in calf, halve, answer, chance, blanche, pant, can’t, alas, pass, bask, clasp, blaspheme, last, path, lath, laugh, staff, raft, after and in many other words like them,” but that, save in “local usage (I cannot say how extensive)”5 it was already being replaced by “the a of fat and fan,” or by some “intermediate” a.6 According to a writer in American Speech,7 the broad Southern a is now losing ground even in Tidewater Virginia, but is holding out better among the women than among the men. “This,” he says, “is probably because a man’s friends are more likely to resent what they regard as a speech affectation. I have known several cases in which the mother used the broad a and the father didn’t, and the children imitated the mother’s pronunciation. However, when the children grow up there is a tendency for the boys to adopt the short a.” When, at the Republican National Convention of 1944, Governor (later Senator) Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts made a speech in which he “pronounced pass as if it were spelled pahss” it brought forth what the Boston Herald described as a “mass snicker” from the assembled heirs of Lincoln.1 So far as I know, the only words in which Americans use the broad a and Englishmen the flat one are mall, as in the Mall, at Washington, and the proper nouns, Polack, Albany and Raleigh.2 In the case of Polack American usage has perhaps been influenced by German example.
The newspapers often engage in discussions of the “proper” pronunciation of a in this or that word, e.g., tomato, ate, again and to stamp, for it remains an article of American faith that there is a right way and a wrong way in all the situations of speech. Tomayto is the common form, and James F. Bender ordains it for radio announcers in the “NBC Handbook of Pronunciation,” but tomahto, which is English, is in use in the Boston Sprachgebeit and also in the Tidewater South, and seems to be making some progress among the elegant elsewhere. However, when Representative Allen T. Treadway, of Massachusetts, used it at a session of the House Committee on Ways and Means, in February, 1940, he was challenged by Representative Pat Cannon, of Florida, who demanded to know if he meant tomayto. “No,” replied Treadway. “I mean tomahto.” Cannon thereupon appealed to the Democratic majority in the committee, which decided in his favor. “We have a majority,” he declared triumphantly. “You mean tomayto.” Lieut. Col. F. G. Potts, of Mt. Pleasant, S. C., tells me that, south of Virginia, tomahto “sounds quite affected.” Occasionally, he adds, tomatto is heard.3 I have also encountered termayter and termatter, but only among hoi barbaroi.
Another debate that frequently engrosses the newspaper penologists has to do with again. Should it be pronounced as it is spelled or made agen? Palmer, Martin and Blandford say that the former is good English usage and Bender advises American crooners to use agen, but there is contrary advice and custom on both sides of the water. The NED shows that the word as we have it is descended from two different early Germanic words, the one represented by the Old High German gagen and the other by the OHG gegin. The former, prevailing in the South of England, produced again; the latter, agen. Down to the Nineteenth Century the English poets freely rhymed again with pen, but this was not true invariably, for Shakespeare, as Frank H. Vizetelly pointed out,1 also rhymed it on occasion with twain, plain and slain. The NED, whose A volume was published in 1888, ventured the opinion that again was then displacing agen in England, and this seems to be confirmed by the later English authorities, including Daniel Jones, but most American authorities, e.g., Webster 1934 and Kenyon and Knott, hold out for agen. The English authorities sanction et for ate,2 but in the United States it is generally regarded as a vulgarism, along with eat in the past tense.3 To stomp, in the sense of to beat down forcibly, as with the foot, is only provincial in England, but in the United States it is in relatively good usage, though no American would ever speak of a postage-stomp or of stomping a letter.4
The pronunciation of a in this or that situation has changed often within the past two centuries, for, as Parmenter and Treviño say, it is “of all vowels the least stable in quality.”5 Boswell records in his Life how puzzled Samuel Johnson was when Lord Chesterfield advised him that “the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state” and Sir William Yonge insisted that “it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat, and that none but an Irishman would pronounce it grait.” “Here,” marvelled the lexicographer, “were two men of the highest rank, the one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely.”1 In Webster’s time, as he records in his “Dissertations on the English Language,”2 reesin for raisin was in good usage in “two or three principal towns in America,” and in our own time the Hon. Al Smith, LL.D. (Harvard), preferred raddio to raydio. The question whether ration should have the a of passion or that of nation is still being debated, and Kemp Malone has sought to resolve it by showing that the word is really two words, one derived from the Latin and the other from the French, and that both pronunciations are correct.3 In 1943 a newspaper commentator4 reported that among the eminentissimos of the time, Roosevelt II, Winston Churchill, Elmer Davis, Leon Henderson, James F. Byrnes and Eddie Rickenbacker used rash-un, but that Harold L. Ickes and Claude Wickard used ray-shun.5
When it comes to e the chief battle in the Republic continues to be between the advocates of ee-ther and those who prefer eye-ther. In 1936 a lady phonologist named Miss Estelle B. Hunter, educational director of the Better Speech Institute of America, announced from Chicago that ee-ther and nee-ther were gaining on eye-ther and nye-ther as part of a movement in favor of General American and against “the sophisticated intonations of stage folk.”1 Noah Webster, in his “Dissertations,”2 called eye-ther and nye-ther “errors,” and classed them with desate for deceit, consate for conceit and resate for receipt, but he had to admit that the ey-sound was in general use “by the Eastern people,” though not common in the South and West. At that time (1789), if we are to believe him, ee-ther and nee-ther were favored in England. The Rev. John Witherspoon, in 1781, denounced Americans for using either in reference to more than two objects, but had nothing to say about the pronunciation of the word. John Pickering, in 1816, was likewise silent on the subject. J. Fenimore Cooper, in “The American Democrat” (1838), came out strongly in favor of eye-ther and nye-ther, which he described as “polite.” “This is a case,” he said, “in which the better usage of the language has respected derivations, for ei in German is pronounced as in height and sleight, ie making the sound of ee.” What German usage had to do with American standards he did not pause to explain. Nearly all the American authorities of the Nineteenth Century, including even the violently Anglomaniacal Richard Grant White, were in favor of ee-ther,3 and most of those of the present century have followed them,4 but it is my observation that eye-ther is holding out, and perhaps even making some progress. Certainly I have heard it of late in circles where, in my boyhood, it would have been derided.
One of the Briticisms that Americans appear to be most conscious of is the change of e to a broad a in clerk, Derby, Berkeley, etc. Wyld in his “History of Modern Colloquial English,”1 shows that this vowel shift began in the Thirteenth Century, and has left sediments in words that are now spelled with the a in both England and America, e.g., to bark, barley, barn, carve, dark, farther, farm, harvest, heart, hearty, hearken, hearth, marvel, parson, smart, star, starling, start and starve. There was a time when what Webster called “the yeoman of America,”2 like the contemporary English, used this broad a in many other words now showing e, e.g., mercy, servant, certain, clergy, (e)ternal, concern, learn, serpent, search, service, deserve, term and virtue,3 and it still survives in the dialect of Appalachia. Along with these words, though with the a of lash substituted for that of palm, are thrash and rassle. The latter, in fact, is
often used by highly refined sports reporters in reporting wrestling-matches. In the general speech the only notable survivor seems to be sergeant.4 But let us not forget the proper names Hartford, Barclay and Barney, the last-named a diminutive for Bernard, as in Barney Baruch. In England itself the a is not used invariably. H. W. Seaman tells me that though the Derby horse-race is the Darby “the inhabitants of Derby and Derbyshire pronounce the er in the moral or American way, and occasionally write to the papers protesting against the ar-sound.” Seaman says5 that stern (of a ship) is commonly pronounced starn in England, but in the adjective, according to Palmer, Martin and Blandford, the e of persuade is used. Wyld says that the change from er to ar started in the dialects of Southeastern England, and soon spread to East Anglia. It was rare in the London dialect before the Fifteenth Century, but became “increasingly fashionable until the last quarter of the Eighteenth,” when it began to recede from all words save those which had come to be spelled with a, e.g., dark.6
Crick for creek is commonly regarded as an Americanism, and it has been traced by the DAE to 1608, when Captain John Smith used it in his “Newes from Virginia,” but the NED shows that, in the forms of crike, krike and cryke, it was in English use before the discovery of America. The late William Allen Pusey (1865–1940), sometime president of the American Medical Association, was greatly interested in the distribution of crick, and spent a lot of time gathering evidence about it. He found that it was almost unknown in the rural parts of his native State, Kentucky, and that it was rare in the South below North Carolina. He concluded that it was a Northernism.1 Incidentally, crick in the neck is properly crick and not creek. The NED traces it to c. 1440 and says that it is “probably onomatopoeic, expressing the sudden check which the spasm causes.”2 Webster, in his “Dissertations,” recommended many pronunciations that have since become vulgar, e.g., heerd for heard and deef for deaf. For the former he had the support of Samuel Johnson,3 and for the latter the “universal practise in the Eastern States” and general usage “in the Middle and Southern.” He recorded that def was in use in England, but called it “a corruption,” and cited the rhymes of Chaucer and of Sir William Temple in support of his position. Of herd for heard he said: “The Americans were strangers to it when they came from England, and the body of the people are so to this day. To most people in this country the English pronunciation appears like an affectation, and is adopted only in the capital towns, which are always the most ready to distinguish themselves by an implicit imitation of foreign customs.” It was “almost unknown in America,” he added, “till the commencement of the late war [of the Revolution], and how long it has been the practise in England I cannot determine.” Webster, in those days, was a fiery linguistic patriot, and refused absolutely to follow English example. “If it is erroneous,” he said, “let it remain so: we have no concern with it. By adhering to our own practise we preserve a superiority over the English in those instances in which ours is guided by rules, and so far ought we to be from conforming to their practise that they ought rather to conform to ours.” But by the time he came to his “American Dictionary” of 1828 he was admitting hurd, though insisting that deaf was “more commonly deef” than def in America. While this dictionary was under way he was visited by Captain Basil Hall, R.N., and they fell into a discussion of the word. “Your way of pronouncing deaf,” he said to Hall, “is def – ours, as if it were written deef; and as this is the correct mode, from which you have departed, I shall adhere to the American way.”1 Webster was apparently the first lexicographer to make note of the so-called neutral vowel. Of it he said in the introduction to his 1828 Dictionary:
Let any man in genteel society or in public pronounce the distinct sound of in the last syllable of important, or the distinct sound of e in the terminations less and ness in hopeless, happiness, and he would pass for a most inelegant speaker. Indeed, so different is the slight sound of a great part of the unaccented vowels in elegant pronunciation from that which is directed in books of orthoepy that no man can possibly acquire the nicer distinction of sounds by means of books – distinctions which no characters yet invented can express.
A hundred and seven years later A. Lloyd James returned to this melancholy vowel in “The Broadcast Word,”2 as follows:
The preacher or public speaker is perpetually in difficulties with it, and especially when it occurs in the final position, where the temptation to dwell on it is irresistible. It cannot be a lengthened version of itself, and so it must assume the quality of a stressed vowel that varies from speaker to speaker and from word to word. The favorite variety is the long aa; it makes ever sound like evaa, scripture becomes scriptchaa, and idea becomes ideaa.
Difficulties with i in the United States occur mainly in relatively recent words of scientific provenance, e.g., appendicitis, iodine, quinine, and so on. Bender, in his counsel to radio message-bringers,3 follows what are probably the prevailing American pronunciations, which are far from consistent. Thus he gives the crucial i the diphthongal ai- sound in iodine, but the ee-sound in chlorine and bromine, and the sound it has in in in ephedrine. In appendicitis, bronchitis, tonsillitis, neuritis, gastritis and the like he ordains the ai-sound. Jones, in “An English Pronouncing Dictionary,” gives precisely the same pronunciations for England, but notes that iodine is accorded the ee-sound by English chemists, and that the ai-sound “is rapidly given place to” it. The ai-sound, he says, “is an old-fashioned pronunciation used by people who are ignorant of chemistry, but are familiar with the substance as a household commodity.” Kenyon and Knott note that the ee-sound is likewise preferred by chemists in America, and give iodin, with the last syllable rhyming with pin, as an alternative to iodeyn. Bender recommends kwi’-nin, with both i’s as in nine, for quinine, and so do Kenyon and Knott. Jones gives the i of pin to the first syllable and that of nine to the second. Vizetelly noted so long ago as 19171 that the highly artificial kin-ne’en was already going out. He appended an interesting note upon the orthoëpic adventures of the word in American dictionaries.2 The synthetic rival of quinine, atabrine, has not yet acquired a settled pronunciation. I have heard both atabreen and atabrine (rhyming with line) from equally tony medical men.
“American English,” says Louise Pound,3 “is losing its short o and turning it into a long open o, or into ah. Should one say dawg, fawg, bawg, or dahg, fahg, bahg? There is a different usage for different parts of the United States; and there is no consistency observed even for words within the same group, e.g., I say myself dawg but fahg. Some would-be purists go so far as to insist upon the vowel a of artistic in words like Florence, orange, coffee, horrid, although the real purist should strive for the preservation of the original short open o-sound, yet heard in British usage; not for the substitution of a sound which is not an o-sound at all.” During the ten years before 1944 Charles K. Thomas, of Cornell, investigated the pronunciation of horrid, orange, Florida, forest, borrow, foreign, horrible and a number of other such words by speakers from nineteen States. He found that the territory they came from could be divided into an Eastern-Southern ah-section and a Western short-o-section, with the two divided by a line running southward from central Vermont, then westward across New York and Pennsylvania, then southward through Maryland and part of Virginia, then generally westward to southern Missouri, and then southward again through Texas. He learned that in some parts of the ah-region the preference for it is overwhelming, e.g., Massachusetts, lower New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. Unfortunately, his inquiry, as I have said, covered but nineteen of the forty-eight States, and no one, so far as I know, has investigated the remainder.1 Harold Whitehall has shown2 that in colonial American o sometimes took a u-sound, or even an oo-sound. It still takes the former in among, company, and (at least in parts of the country) constable, but in nearly all other situations these aberrations have disappeared.
Hilaire Belloc says that to American ears the vowel used by the English in hot, coffee, soft, cough, lost,
off, gone, dog, etc., sounds “ridiculous.”3 A. Lloyd James says4 that it is a quite recent newcomer among English vowels, and that in Victorian days dawg, crawss, cawf, gawn and frawst were still “current in educated London speech.” He adds that awff for off survives. The usual English o seems to most American ears to be nearly identical with the u of hut, so that that word and hot are hard to distinguish. Sometimes, in the United States, a neutral vowel resembling the one in unaccented the is substituted for o, as in demuhcrat. There is occasional discussion in the newspapers of the o-sound in the second syllable of bureaucracy, with one faction advocating the o of rock and another an oh-sound that is supposed to be the French eau-sound. All the principal authorities, English and American, seem to favor the former, though they ordain the oh-sound in bureau and bureaucrat. It is obviously stress that supports the ock-sound. H. W. Fowler, in “Modern English Usage,”5 denounces bureaucracy itself, as “a formation so barbarous that all attempt at self-respect in pronunciation may perhaps as well be abandoned.” “It is better,” he goes on, “to give the whole thing up, and pretend that -eau- is the formative -o- that ordinarily precedes -crat, etc.; all is then plain sailing; it is only to be desired that the spelling could also be changed to burocrat, etc.”6
The vicissitudes of the u-sound in early American speech have been studied by Whitehall.1 It became, on the one hand, oo, on the other hand a diphthong apparently identical with that of how, and on the third hand, so to speak, various other sounds. These variations, in the main, have vanished, and one no longer encounters bull spelled bool, or blood rhymed with load, or dew with bough, or dust with host, but nooz for news still remains the prevailing pronunciation in the United States, despite the English preference for nyewz and the effort of generations of schoolma’ams to import and propagate it. Webster was against it, and in his “Dissertations”2 dismissed the intrusion of the palatal glide as a peculiarity of Virginia speech, and hence barbaric. In his Dictionary of 1828 he actually ordained fig-ur, vol-u, vol-um, moot (for mute), litera-tur, etc., but he had to admit that it was already “the practise [in the North] to give u the sound of yu in such words as nature, feature, rapture, which are pronounced nat-yur, feat-yur, rapt-yur,” and after his death in 1843 his heirs and assigns quietly inserted the y in figure, value and volume. Krapp has shown3 that old Noah, as on not infrequent other occasions, reported the educated speech of New England somewhat inaccurately, and Wyld has produced evidence that the yu-sound was already in wide use in England in the early Seventeenth Century.4 The whole question is discussed by Krapp at length and with much learning. At the present time the English seem to employ yu more often than Americans, but it is nevertheless in constant use in this country. Kenyon and Knott give both nyu and nu for new, with the former first, but Bender prefers the latter. Most Americans use doo for due, toob for tube, dooty for duty, and nood for nude, but I have never encountered a native who used moosic, booty (for beauty), poor (for pure), or aboose. Dew, like due, is commonly doo, but few is seldom if ever foo.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 12
