The American Language (1923)/Chapter 7

"Language," said Sayce, in 1879, "does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an exercise of memory."^[1] The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English grammarians and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J. Ellis and the massive lesson of Grimm's law; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of German philologists, they have turned from orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and the latest and best native grammar, that of Sweet, is frankly based upon the spoken English of educated Englishmen—not, remember, of conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk. Unluckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. "No two persons," says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,^[2] "pronounce exactly alike." Moreover, "even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style." The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute shades of difference, and admit other differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring to exhibit their pronuncia​tion. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it,^[3] found himself, in the end, with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and Ellis brought it to 390.^[4] Other phonologists, English and Continental, have gone floundering into the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced to a far greater economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably unsurmountable. It is, as White says, "almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the sound of any word." "Only the voice," he goes on, "is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words are the most delicate, fleeting and inapprehensible things in nature.…Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to apprehend and distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given."^[5] Certain German orthoëpists, despairing of the printed page, have turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche GrammophonGesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen speeches in a great many languages and dialects, including English. The phonograph has also been put to successful use in language teaching by various American correspondence schools.

In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print the numerous small differences between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and very careful observer^[6] the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this direction, he says, one must look for the true characters of "the English accent." Despite the opinion of Krapp, a very competent authority, that "the American voice in general starts on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice,"^[7] ​I incline to agree with White that the contrary is the case. The nasal twang which Englishmen observe in vox Americana, though it has high overtones, is itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched, as all constrained and muffled tones are apt to be. The causes of that twang have long engaged phonologists, and in the main they agree that there is a physical basis for it—that our generally dry climate and rapid changes of temperature produce an actual thickening of the membranes concerned in the production of sound.^[8] We are, in brief, a somewhat snuffling people, and much more given to catarrhs and coryzas than the inhabitants of damp Britain. Perhaps this general impediment to free and easy utterance, subconsciously apprehended, is responsible both for the levelness of tone of American speech, noted by Krapp, and for the American tendency to pronounce the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them. "To British ears," says Krapp,^[9] "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." The American, in giving extraordinary six careful and distinct syllables instead of the Englishman's grudging four, may be seeking to make up for a natural disability. Marsh, in his "Lectures on the English Language," sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one hand, he argued that the Americans of his day read a great deal more than the English, and were thus much more influenced by the spelling of words, and on the other hand he pointed out that "our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs…to a more Southern type than that of England," and that "in Southern latitudes…articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern regions." In support of the latter proposition he cited the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that of English, Danish and German—rather unfortunate examples, ​for the pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Spanish. Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent toward the ends of words, and that this helped to bring out all the syllables. A superficial examination shows a number of examples of that movement of accent in American: advertisement, paresis, pianist, primarily, telegrapher, temporarily. The English accent all of these words on the first syllable except advertisement, which is accented on the second; Americans usually accent primarily and telegrapher on the second, temporarily and advertisement on the third, and paresis and pianist on the second. Again there are frontier and harass. The English accent the first syllables; we accent the second. Yet again there is the verb, to perfect. Tucker says^[10] that its accentuation on the second syllable, "bringing it into harmony with perfume, cement, desert, present, produce, progress, project, rebel, record, and other words which are accented on the final syllable when used as verbs, originated in this country." But when all these examples have been marshalled, the fact remains that there are just as many examples, and perhaps many more, of an exactly contrary tendency. The chief movement in American, in truth, would seem to be toward throwing the accent upon the first syllable. I recall mamma, papa, inquiry, ally, recess, details, idea, alloy, deficit, armistice and adult; I might add defect, excess, address, magazine, decoy and romance.

A factor which may have had a great deal to do with the establishment of precise habits of pronunciation in the United States is discussed at length by Henry Cecil Wyld, in his "History of Modern Colloquial English."^[11] This factor, he says, has been responsible in England for many artificialities, including especially spelling pronunciations. It may be described briefly as the influence of a class but lately risen in the social scale and hence a bit unsure of itself—a class intensely eager to avoid giving away its vulgar origin by its speech habits. The great historical changes ​in Standard English, says Wyld, were synchronous with the appearance of new "classes of the population in positions of prominence and power in the state, and the consequent reduction in the influence of the older governing classes." He lists some of the events that produced such shifts in the balance of power: "the break-up of the feudal system; the extinction of most of the ancient baronial families in the War of the Roses; the disendowment of the monasteries, and the enriching of the king's tools and agents; the rise of the great merchants in the towns; the Parliamentary wars and the social upheaval of the Protectorate; the rise of banking during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." These changes, he said, brought forward an authority which ranged itself against both "the mere frivolities of fashion, the careless and half-incoherent babble of the fop" and "the lumbering and uncouth utterance of the boor." Precision in speech thus became the hall-mark of those who had but recently arrived. Obviously, the number of those who have but recently arrived has always been greater in the United States than in England, not only among the aristocracy of wealth and fashion but also among the intelligentsia. The average American schoolmarm, the chief guardian of linguistic niceness in the Republic, does not come from the class that has a tradition of culture behind it, but from the class of small farmers and city clerks and workmen. This is true, I believe, even of the average American college teacher. Such pedants advocate and practise precision because it conceals their own cultural insecurity; if they are still oafs at heart they can nevertheless speak English in what they conceive to be the proper manner of professors, and so safeguard their dignity. From them come most of the gratuitous rules and regulations that afflict schoolboys and harass the writers of America. They are the chief discoverers and denouncers of "bad English" in the books of such men as Mark Twain, Dreiser and Hergesheimer.

But in discussing such influences, of course, it is well to remember that they are very complex, and that one conceals and modifies another. "Man frage nicht warum," says Philipp Karl Buttmann. "Der Sprachgebrauch lasst sich nur beobachten."^[12] Meanwhile, the greater distinctness of American utterance, whatever its genesis ​and machinery, is palpable enough in many familiar situations. "The typical American accent," says Vizetelly, "is often harsh and unmusical, but it sounds all of the letters to be sounded, and slurs, but does not distort, the rest."^[13] An American, for example, almost always sounds the first l in fulfill; an Englishman makes the first syllable foo. An American sounds every syllable in extraordinary, literary, military, dysentery, temporary, necessarily, secretary and the other words of the -ary-group;^[14] an Englishman never pronounces the a of the penultimate syllable. Kindness, with the d silent, would attract notice in most parts of the United States; in England, according to Jones,^[15] the d is "very commonly, if not usually" omitted. Often, in America, not infrequently retains a full t; in England it is actually and officially offen. Try an Englishman and an American with any word ending in -ing, say sporting or ripping. The latter will pronounce the final g; the former will usually omit it. Or with any word having r before a consonant, say card, harbor, lord or preferred. "The majority of Englishmen," says Menner, "certainly do not pronounce the r…; just as certainly the majority of educated Americans pronounce it distinctly."^[16] Henry James, visiting the United States after many years of residence in England, was much harassed by this persistent r-sound, which seemed to him to resemble "a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth."^[17] So sensitive to it did he become that he began to hear it where it was actually non-existent, save as an occasional barbarism, for example, in Cuba-r, vanilla-r and California-r. He put the blame for it, and for various other departures from the strict ​canon of contemporary English, upon "the American school, the American newspaper, and the American Dutchman and Dago." Unluckily for his case, the full sounding of the r came into American long before the appearance of any of these influences. The early colonists, in fact, brought it with them from England, and it still prevailed there in Dr. Johnson's day, for he protested publicly against the "rough snarling sound" and gave all the aid he could to the natural phonetic process which finally resulted in its extinction.^[18] Today, extinct, it is mourned by English purists, and the Poet Laureate denounces the clergy of the Established Church for saying "the sawed of the Laud" instead of "the sword of the Lord."^[19]

But even in the matter of elided consonants American is not always the conservator. We cling to the r, we are relatively careful about the final g, we give nephew (following a spelling pronunciation, historically incorrect) a clear f-sound instead of the clouded English v-sound, and we boldly nationalize trait and pronounce its final t, but we drop the second p from pumpkin and change the m to n, we change the ph (=f) sound to plain p in diphtheria, diphthong and naphtha,^[20] we relieve rind of its final d, we begin to neglect the d in landlady, handsome, grandmother, etc., and, in the complete sentence, we slaughter consonants by assimilation. I have heard Englishmen say brand-new, but on American lips it is almost invariably bran-new. So nearly universal is this nasalization in the United States that certain American lexicographers have sought to found the term upon bran and not upon brand. Here the national speech is powerfully influenced by Southern dialectal variations, which in turn probably derive partly from the linguistic limitations of the negro. The latter, even after two hundred years, has great difficulties with our consonants, and often drops them. A familiar anecdote well illustrates his speech habit. On a train stopping at a small station in Georgia a darkey threw up a window and yelled "Wah ee?" The reply from a black on the platform was "Wah ​oo?" A Northerner aboard the train, puzzled by this inarticulate dialogue, sought light from a Southern passenger, who promptly translated the first question as "Where is he?" and the second as "Where is who?" A recent viewer with alarm^[21] argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language. "Like the French," he says, "we have a marked liaison—the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to c'meer (= come here).…Hoo-zat? (= who is that?) has as good a liaison as the French vous avez." This critic believes that American tends to abandon t for d, as in Sadd'y (== Saturday)^[22] and siddup (= sit up), and to get rid of h, as in ware-zee? (= where is he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to Chapter IX. Even, however, in the standard speech there is a great slaughter of vowels. A correspondent of education, accustomed to observing accurately, sends me the following specimens of his own everyday conversation:

But here, of course, we come upon the tendency to depress all vowels to the level of a neutral e—a tendency quite as visible in English as in American, though there are differences in detail. The two languages, however, seem to develop along paths that tend to diverge more and more, and the divergences already in effect, though they may seem slight separately, are already of enough importance in the aggregate to put serious impediments between mutual comprehension. Let an Englishman and an Amer​ican (not of New England) speak a quite ordinary sentence, "My aunt can't answer for my dancing the lancers even passably," and at once the gap separating the two pronunciations will be manifest. Add a dozen everyday words—military, schedule, trait, hostile, been, lieutenant, patent, laboratory, nephew, secretary, advertisement, and so on—and the strangeness of one to the other is augmented. "Every Englishman visiting the States for the first time," said an English dramatist some time ago, "has a difficulty in making himself understood. He often has to repeat a remark or a request two or three times to make his meaning clear, especially on railroads, in hotels and at bars. The American visiting England for the first time has the same trouble."^[23] Despite the fact that American actors always imitate English pronunciation to the best of their skill, this visiting Englishman asserted that the average American audience is incapable of understanding a genuinely English company, at least "when the speeches are rattled off in conversational style." When he presented one of his own plays with an English company, he said, many American acquaintances, after witnessing the performance, asked him to lend them the manuscript, "that they might visit it again with some understanding of the dialogue."^[24] American speech is just as difficult for Englishmen.

In Chapters II and III, I have already discussed historically the pronunciation of a in the United States—not, I fear, to much effect, but at all events as illuminatingly as the meagre materials so far amassed permit. The best study of the pronunciation of the letter today is to be found in George Philip Krapp's excellent book, "The Pronunciation of Standard English in America," from which I have already quoted several times.

This work is the first adequate treatise ​upon American phonology to be published, and shows very careful observation and much good sense. Unluckily, Krapp finds it extremely difficult, like all other phonologists, to represent the sounds that he deals with by symbols. He uses, for example, exactly the same symbol to indicate the a-sound in cab and the a-sound in bad, though the fact that they differ must be obvious to everyone. In the same way he grows a bit vague when he tries to represent the compromise a-sound which lies somewhere between the a of father and the a of bad. "It is heard…chiefly," he says, "in somewhat conscious and academic speech," as a compromise between the former, "which is rejected as being too broad," and the latter, "which is rejected as being too narrow or flat." This compromise a, he says, "is cultivated in words with a, sometimes au, before a voiceless continuant, or before a nasal followed by a voiceless stop or continuant, as in grass, half, laugh, path (also before a voiced continuant, as in paths, calves, halves, baths, when the voiced form is a variant, usually the plural, of a head form with a voiceless sound), aunt, branch, can't, dance, fancy, France, shan't, etc." Krapp says that this a-sound is commonly an affectation, save in New England, and, as we have seen, it originated as an affectation even there. The flat a, on the contrary, is "widely distributed over the whole country," and may be regarded as the normal American a. Krapp notes "the purist tendency to condemn [the flat a]" and goes on:

Meanwhile, "the dictionary and academic prestige" of the broad a, whatever its precise form, has established it pretty generally in the United States in certain words which formerly had the flat a. Those in which it is followed by lm offer examples: psalm, palm, balm and calm. They were once pronounced to rhyme with ram and jam, but their pronunciation that way has begun to seem provincial and ignorant. Krapp says that the a has likewise broadened in alms, salmon and almond, but it is my own observation that this is not yet generally true. The first syllable of salmon, true enough, does not quite rhyme with ham, but it is nevertheless still very far from bomb. The broad a, by a fashionable affectation, has also got into vase, drama, amen and tomato—in the last case probably helped by the example of Southern speech, in which a few words, notably master, tomato and tassel, have shown the broad a for many years. Its intrusion into tomato has been vigorously denounced by an Englishman, Evacustes A. Phipson. "It is really distressing," he says, "to a cultivated Briton visiting America to find people there who…follow what they suppose to be the latest London mannerism, regardless of accuracy. Thus we find one literary editress advocating the pedantic British pronunciation tomahto in lieu of the good English tomato, rhyming with potato, saying it sounds so much more 'refined.' I do not know whether she would be of the same opinion if she heard one of our costermongers bawling out: ''Ere's yer foine termarters, lydy, hownly tuppence a pahnd.' Similarly, we sometimes hear Anglomaniac Americans saying vahz for vase. Why not also bahz, and cahz?"^[26] The introduction of the broad a into drama is a pure affectation, and first showed itself, I believe, at the beginning of the heavily self-conscious movement which culminated in the organization of the Drama League of America, a society largely composed of college professors and social pushers. Amen, with the broad a, is now almost universal, save in the rural districts. E. W. Howe tells a story of a little girl in Kansas whose ​mother, on acquiring social aspirations, entered the Protestant Episcopal Church from the Methodist Church. The father remaining behind, the little girl had to learn to say amen with the flat a when she went to church with her father and amen with the broad a when she went to church with her mother.^[27] In Canada, despite the social influence of English usage, the flat a has conquered, and along the Canadian-New England border it is actually regarded as a Canadianism, especially in such words as calm and aunt. The broad a, when heard at all, is an affectation, and, as in Boston, is sometimes introduced into words, e. g., amass, which actually have the flat a in England.

A broad a, though somewhat shorter than the a of father (a correspondent compares it aptly to the a in the German mann) is very widely substituted, in the United States, for the o in such words as got, hot, rob, nobby, prophet, stock and chocolate. The same correspondent suggests that it shows itself clearly in the sentence: "On top of the log sat a large frog." To his English ears, this sentence, from American lips, sounds like "Ann tahp uv thu laug sat a lahrge fraug." The same a is also occasionally heard in dog, doll, horrid, hog, orange, coffee and God, though it has a rival in the au-sound of audience.^[28] Here, as Krapp observes, there is a considerable variation in usage, even in the same speaker. The man who uses the first a in God may use the au-sound in dog. I believe that the former is generally looked upon as more formal. I have often noticed that a speaker who puts the au-sound into God in his ordinary profane discourse, will switch to the purer a-sound when he wants to show reverence. The broad a in father seems to have very little influence upon cognate words. Save in New England one never hears it in ​gather, lather and blather, and even there it is often abandoned for the flat a by speakers who are very careful to avoid the latter in palm, dance and aunt. Krapp says that the broad a is used in "some words of foreign origin," notably lava, data, errata, bas-relief, spa, mirage and garage. This is certainly not true of the first three, all of which, save exceptionally, have the flat a. Garage, at one time, threatened to acquire the flat a, too, and so became a rhyme for carriage, but I believe that a more correct pronunciation is prevailing. In a number of other classes of words the pronunciation of the a varies. In patriot and its derivatives, for example, the a is sometimes that of hat and sometimes that of late. In radish the a is sometimes that of cab and sometimes a sort of e, hard to distinguish from that of red. In such proper names as Alabama, Montana, Nevada and Colorado the flat a is commonly heard (especially in the states themselves), but a broad a is not unknown. The usual pronunciation of again and against gives them a second a indistinguishable from the e of hen, but the influence of the schoolmarm has launched a pronunciation employing the a of lane.

The other vowels present fewer variations from standard English. A spelling pronunciation often appears in pretty, making the first syllable rhyme with set; it always rhymes with sit in standard English. The use of the long e in deaf, though ardently advocated by Noah Webster, has almost disappeared from cultivated speech; it persists, however, in the vulgate, and is noted in Chapter IX. In the same way the i-sound, as in sit, has disappeared from get, yet, chest and instead; even the vulgate is losing it. So, again, the old ai-sound, as in laid, has vanished from egg, peg, leg and their cognates, though here the vulgate preserves it. As Krapp shows, the neutral e, toward which all our vowels seem to be tending,^[29] shows signs of itself disappearing. This is particularly noticeable, in American, in such words as moral, quarrel and real, which be​come mor'l, quar'l and re'l, each a single syllable. In the vulgar speech this neutral e is also dropped from other words, notably poem, diary, violet and diamond, which become pome, di'ry, vilet and di'mond. Even in the standard speech it grows shadowy in the second syllable of fertile, hostile, servile, fragile, agile, reptile, etc. In standard English these words are pronounced with the second syllable clearly rhyming with vile. The long e-sound in creek is maintained in standard American, but changed to the short i-sound of sit in the vulgate. Sleek has divided into two words, slick and sleek, the former signifying cunning and ingratiating and the latter referring especially to appearance. Of late there has been a strong tendency to abandon the old e-sound in such terms as bronchitis and appendicitis for an ai-sound, as in pie and buy; this is a senseless affectation, but it seems to be making progress. A contrary movement to abandon the old ai-sound in iodine, quinine, etc., for an e-sound, as in sleep, has better support in etymology, but is apparently less popular. Chlorine is always pronounced with the e-sound, but iodine continues to be iodyne, and kin-een for quinine still sounds strange. In two other familiar words the ai-sound has been supplanted in American: in sliver by the short i of liver, and in farina by an e-sound. Both have the ai-sound in standard English. Been, in America, almost always is bin; bean never appears save as a conscious affectation. But in England bean is invariably heard, and in a recent poem an English poet makes it rhyme with submarine, queen and unseen.^[30]

I have already mentioned the displacement of o by ah or au in such words as dog and God. "Whenever the o-sound is fully stressed and long, and especially when it is final, it tends," says Krapp, "to become diphthongal, starting with o and closing with [the] u [of bush], as in dough, doe, toe, tow, flow, floe, chateau, etc."^[31] But in British speech a greater variety of diphthongal shadings occur, "some of them familiar in the exaggerated representations of Englishmen and their speech on the American stage. In the speech of many, perhaps of most, Americans there is scarcely any trace of diphthongal quality in the sound." Usage in the pronunciation of u still differs ​widely in the United States. The two sounds, that of oo in goose and that of u in bush, are used by different speakers in the same word. The oo-sound prevails in aloof, boot, broom, food, groom, proof, roof, rood, room, rooster, root, soon, spook, spoon and woof, and the u-sound in butcher, cooper, hoof, hoop, nook, rook and soot, hut there are educated Americans who employ the oo-sound in coop, hoof and hoop. In hooves I have heard both sounds, but in rooves only the oo-sound. Rooves seems to be extinct in the written speech as the plural of roof, but it certainly survives in spoken American. In words of the squirrel, syrup and stirrup class Americans commonly substitute a u-sound for the e-sound used by Englishmen, and squirrel becomes a monosyllable, squr'l. In words of the com class, save company, Americans substitute a broad a for the u used by Englishmen; even compass often shows it. The English are far more careful with the shadowy y preceding u in words of the duty class than Americans. The latter retain it following m, f, v and p, and usually before r, but they are careless about it following n and g, and drop it following l, r, d, t, th and s. Nyew, nyude, dyuke, enthyusiasm and syuit would seem affectations in most parts of the United States.^[32] Schoolmasters still battle valiantly for dyuty, but in vain. In 1912 the Department of Education of New York City warned all the municipal high-school teachers to combat the oo-sound^[33] but it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to insert the y in induced. In figure, however, Americans retain the y-sound, whereas the English drop it. In clerk, as everyone knows, the English retain the old a-sound, which is historically correct, and make the word rhyme with lark; in the United States it rhymes with lurk. Finally, there is lieutenant. The Englishman pronounces the first syllable lef; the American invariably makes it loo. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is relatively recent. "I never heard it," he reports, "in my boyhood."^[34] He was born in New York in 1821.