Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

by Edwin W. Bowen

This attitude will, no doubt, commend itself to the favor of the reflecting and judicious man much more forcibly than that spirit of assumed infallibility which is a sure sign, in an orthoepist, of insufficient knowledge and lack of preparation for his work. The business of a lexicographer is to record what good usage authorizes, not to tell us what we shall not use. The orthoepist who goes farther, and dogmatically asserts that a given pronunciation is correct and another incorrect, transcends the legitimate bounds of his province. Moreover, he arouses suspicion in the minds of the thoughtful as to his trustworthiness as a guide in matters of pronunciation. For no orthoepist records all the pronunciations sanctioned by good usage, and no one therefore can affirm positively that a given pronunciation of a word may not be warranted by reputable usage in some quarter. Even so high an authority and careful an observer as Ellis lapsed into error in his comment upon the pronunciation of trait, claiming that the silent final t was an unfailing shibboleth of British practice. As a matter of fact, the pronunciation of the final letter of trait, as Professor Lounsbury has clearly shown,[11] had been recognized by English orthoepists as allowable for more than a century. It is manifest that one can not afford to be very positive in English orthoepy: if he is, he will be compelled either to retract or to qualify some of his sweeping statements.

The pronouncing dictionary is, as a general rule, a good guide to standard usage, though it can not be relied upon implicitly. When the orthoepists are all agreed upon a particular pronunciation, one ought to be very chary of using one’s customary or pet pronunciation that differs. The chances are that it is not in good repute. But when, on the contrary, the orthoepists themselves differ, one may reasonably infer that no statement of any one of them about the proper pronunciation of a word, however positive it may be, ought to be recognized as a binding authority. For no pronouncing dictionary is an absolutely final authority. Nor can it ever justly claim to be, since the pronouncing dictionary purports to record only such pronunciations as are sanctioned by good usage, and good usage ever varies with the living speech, which, like all living things, is always slowly changing from century to century. The change is sometimes so gradual that hardly the lapse of a century will reveal it. Again, for one reason or another, it is so rapid in development that even a generation suffices to record it.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] See [A Question of Preference in Spelling].

[9] See [Vulgarisms With A Pedigree].

[10] See [Vulgarisms With A Pedigree].

[11] The Standard of Pronunciation in English, p. 230.

VULGARISMS WITH A PEDIGREE.

Never before was there so much enthusiasm manifested in linguistic studies as during the last quarter of a century, and even yet there is no indication of a waning interest. Not only have languages been studied in their relation to one another, but dialects also have come in for their share of attention in the pursuit of these studies. Nor has our own country been backward in contributing, through its dialectal and various philological associations, its quota to the science of philology. Authors in different parts of the country have written long and (it must be confessed, sometimes) tedious stories in the individual dialects of their respective localities. There are books in the dialect of the negro, as, for example, Thomas Nelson Page’s, to mention only one writer of a large class, those in the dialect of the Tennessee mountains, as, for example, Miss Murfee’s books, those in the dialect of the “Georgia cracker,” as the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, and a host of others in various parts of the country. These books are almost like the sands of the seashore for number.

So numerous and varied are the local dialects in this country that a contributor to the North American Review, some few years ago, ventured the thesis that from the very nature of the diverse and varied character of our local dialects, there can not be any such thing as a great national novel in the United States. While this, it must be admitted, is a somewhat extreme view, to which many do not feel prepared to subscribe, the fact yet remains that there are marked dialectal peculiarities in the spoken language of certain localities. These dialectal peculiarities, however, are fast disappearing before the onward march of the unifying influence of education, the printing press, and the railroad. When the leavening power of education has permeated the entire population of the country, there will result uniformity of speech, and dialectal variations from the common norm will linger but as a tradition.