Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

by Edwin W. Bowen

Furthermore, the sounds which constitute words have to be learned by the tedious process of imitation, and in this very process the sounds are modified to a greater or less extent. In childhood—in fact, in infancy—we begin the slow and painful process of acquiring a vocabulary to express our ideas and we continue the work till death, ever imitating more or less closely the habits of speech of those about us. Thus language is modified perhaps without conscious effort, upon our part. By careful speakers the purity and the propriety of our speech are safeguarded. On the other hand, our language is corrupted and debased by those of careless and slipshod habits of utterance. In any case, however, whether upon the lips of the cultured and refined or upon the lips of the untutored and ignorant, the language is constantly undergoing modifications for better or for worse. Since it is true that a spoken language is ever changing and never remains fixed, how great and far-reaching must be the modification and change which our own English speech has undergone during the many generations of its history! Because our written language has experienced comparatively little alteration since the invention of printing, it does not follow that the spoken speech has remained constant and unchanged from century to century. Indeed, nothing is farther from the truth. But even our written language has been subjected to some minor alteration and slight modification since the days of Caxton, reputed the first English printer. Spoken English, which is the real, living language, has undergone infinite change during the last five centuries, and has diverged more and more from the idiom of Chaucer and Caxton, so that it is today almost an entirely different tongue. English orthography never has kept pace with the written language. Before the invention of printing our spelling failed to reflect the modifications which took place in the pronunciation of our tongue and the printing press served to establish and stereotype the conventional spelling then in vogue, which the characteristic conservatism of the Anglo-Saxon race has ever since preserved in its crystallized, fossilized form.

The printing press, therefore, is largely responsible for our inconsistent, archaic and unphonetic English orthography. When printing was introduced into England, such bewildering confusion and signal want of uniformity prevailed in writing and speaking the vernacular that expediency and business exigencies alike suggested a modification of our received spelling, and soon an imperative demand for simplicity and uniformity was felt among the printers. In response to this demand, and in order to facilitate the labor of the compositor and reader, a conventional mode of spelling was adopted and put into general use by the printers. Thus English orthography was taken from the direct control of the intellectual class who wrote books, and was turned over to a mechanical class who simply printed books. The intellectual class strove to make the spelling of our tongue conform to the pronunciation. With this object always in view English orthography was permitted a wide variation. A writer, therefore, enjoyed considerable latitude and freedom of choice and was untrammeled by the binding authority of tradition or convention. The mechanical class who undertook to establish our spelling for us at the same time that they printed our manuscripts experienced serious difficulty in their effort to represent an ever-varying orthography. Above all things they aimed to reduce English orthography to some uniform notation, and at length they achieved their purpose. Thus uniformity in our spelling was secured, but at the sacrifice of accuracy and precision; for the conventional orthography adopted by the early printers in England was by no means scientific or accurate even at the time of its adoption, and no attempt was made later to make the received orthography adequately reproduce the pronunciation. Consequently there arose a wide divergence between written and spoken English. Not the least important result is the loss of knowledge we have sustained as to how successive past generations of Englishmen spoke the vernacular. The result, which is obvious to everyone and frequently an embarrassment to some, is the innumerable obstacles which our archaic and inconsistent orthography necessarily places in the way of those of the present generation who have to learn English.

Sometimes, indulging in a little persiflage, we point with pardonable pride to the great achievements of our race and descant upon the marvelous beauty and flexibility of our noble English speech. We glory in the fact that “we speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke,” although we may not hold the faith and morals which Milton held. We look with leniency upon such an oratorical or poetic utterance as a harmless effusion of patriotic sentiment. Yet how few really are those who today know the tongue that Shakespeare spoke! Because we speak the vernacular we take it for granted, as a matter of course, that we speak the language and employ the idiom of Shakespeare, little reflecting how different our present-day English sounds from Elizabethan English. Very few persons, indeed, have an accurate knowledge of Shakespearean English. Our speech has taken a long step in advance since the halcyon days of Queen Elizabeth, and it is a far cry from the twentieth century to the sixteenth century English. Perhaps it is not wide of the mark to affirm that not one person in a thousand of those using English as their mother tongue could today understand a play of Shakespeare if read with the author’s own accent and pronunciation. Spoken with the original sound values, in accordance with authorized usage at the time of its production, the play of Hamlet would seem to us today a foreign tongue. With the words of Shakespeare’s plays according to our present fashion of pronunciation we are quite familiar, but we know no more how the master dramatist would have uttered them, as Ellis observes in his “Early English Pronunciation,”[2] than we know how to write a play in his idiom. The speech of Shakespeare has long since departed from us; and if acquired today, it must be acquired as a new tongue at the cost of untold study and unstinted toil. It would be necessary to delve into Elizabethan antiquities and consult contemporary authorities on English pronunciation in order to determine the accepted values of English sounds then in use and reproduce the vernacular of that remote age. This would involve a vast deal of patient labor and generous study, and even at this costly price we could only hope to ascertain Shakespeare’s speech with approximate accuracy of detail. So far has our spoken English today left behind the written English of the Elizabethan age.

Were it a physical possibility, it would be equally instructive and interesting to hear our English tongue uttered with the characteristic accents and sounds of each successive period of its history from the age of King Alfred to the Victorian era. What a vast and striking difference there must be registered between the received pronunciations of these several periods, embracing a lapse of time of well-nigh ten centuries! How they gradually shade into each other as the colors of the prism! History records a wide divergence of the speech of King Edward VII from that of King Alfred, and yet both of these are but extremes of the same English language which has enjoyed an unbroken continuity of development through so many centuries. How different our language must have sounded upon the lips of the leading English men of letters from Chaucer, Wickliffe, Langland, and Spenser, on down to Dryden, Milton, Pope, and Addison! When we speak of the English speech of a given period in the past, we naturally think of the pronunciation as being uniform all over England. We assume without sufficient warrant that there was a standard of pronunciation that prevailed throughout England in those remote times, just as there is a recognized standard, with but slight variation, that prevails in England and America at the present day. However, even today there is no absolute standard of pronunciation. An absolute, definite English orthoëpy does not exist in reality; it is only a phantom, a figment of a precisian imagination without a counterpart in nature. We use the phrase for convenience, to be sure, but there never has been any such thing as an absolute standard of pronunciation in English, and is not now. The nearest approach to it is a linguistic ideal to which the users of our English speech aim, with more or less conscious effort, to make their pronunciation conform.

Still, the educated pronunciation of England and America comes much nearer to a common standard today than was ever the case before in the history of the English language. In Elizabethan times the usage of London and the Court did not prevail throughout the various shires of England, where the pronunciation was somewhat provincial. The tendency of English pronunciation in modern times has been toward uniformity. But in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries it is almost a straining of the meaning of words, as Ellis truly remarks, to talk of a general English pronunciation. In those good old days there was no received standard of pronunciation in England, and every man was free to speak English according to his own sense of propriety. Indeed, prior to the age of Chaucer not only was there no standard of pronunciation, but there was no acknowledged standard of literary English. There were various provincial dialects and also a Court dialect, but none of these was of sufficient influence to triumph over the rest and to compel universal imitation and adoption. After the Elizabethan age local usage in the matter of English pronunciation declined steadily, and the standard of the metropolis gradually commended itself, with increasing influence, till it spread more or less completely over the entire country. Consequently at the time of the rise of the pronouncing dictionary, in the eighteenth century, when the great middle class had begun to attain to prominence, provincial pronunciation fell into disrepute, and people everywhere clamored for a guide to Court usage in the matter of English orthoëpy. From that time to the present there has been a close approach to uniformity of utterance in our English speech. But in the very nature of things there cannot, of course, be a standard pronunciation without absolute uniformity of utterance, and it need hardly be remarked that this does not exist. Nevertheless, the influence and dominance of the pronouncing dictionary are clearly in the direction of a standard pronunciation and have made possible the existing approach to that end. It is quite remarkable how potent the influence of the pronouncing dictionary is upon English pronunciation.[3] Despite the fact that such an orthoëpic authority is at best arbitrary, and somewhat artificial, it has enjoyed a kind of undisputed supremacy since the days of Dr. Johnson, the literary autocrat of the eighteenth century; and its tyranny seems not yet ended. For the English-speaking world still defers to the authority of the pronouncing dictionary and to that extent is under its thrall and has not the courage to challenge it and to assert its own independence in matters of orthoëpy.

Prior to the eighteenth century the pronouncing dictionary was unknown. It therefore cannot boast the authority of a long antiquity. There were, however, certain guides to correct orthoëpy even in those early times, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are preserved to us certain records of contemporary orthoëpists which throw light upon English pronunciation in those remote times. We are not therefore left to conjecture simply in this matter. These authorities, to be sure, leave much to be desired in any disputed question of our early pronunciation. Their descriptions of the accepted orthoëpy of their respective centuries as well as their graphic representations of the English sounds are far from lucid, and they sometimes make confusion worse confounded. Some of the orthoëpists were content to refer to Latin, Greek, or Hebrew sounds as a standard of comparison for English pronunciation, sublimely unconscious of the fact that the older pronunciation of these languages is not yet established to the satisfaction of all scholars and that the modern pronunciation varies with different countries. Others of them used key words the value of which it is extremely difficult to determine definitely. Others again refer to such unstable standards of comparison as contemporary French and Italian. Yet, amid the endless confusion and apparent conflict of these incomplete records, that eminent authority on our English speech succeeded, by dint of his laborious erudition and untiring patience, in solving the numberless difficulties with which the question of our early pronunciation was beset. By this achievement Mr. Ellis placed the world of scholars under lasting obligation by determining for us, with approximate accuracy, the successive values of our early English sounds down to the age of the pronouncing dictionary. Let Mr. Ellis give us in his own words a summary of his arduous investigation. “The pronunciation of English during the sixteenth century,” says he, “was thus rendered tolerably clear, and the mode in which it broke into that of the seventeenth century became traceable. But the seventeenth century was, like the fifteenth, one of civil war, that is of extraordinary commingling of the population, and consequently one of marked linguistic change. Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries our language was almost born anew. In the seventeenth century the idiomatic changes are by no means so evident, but the pronunciation altered distinctly in some remarkable points. These facts, and the breaking up of the seventeenth into the eighteenth century pronunciation, which when established scarcely differed from the present, are well brought to light by Wallis, Wilkins, Owen, Price, Cooper, Miege, and Jones, followed by Buchanan, Franklin, and Sheridan. It became, therefore, possible to assign with considerable accuracy the pronunciation of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, or rather of their contemporaries.”[4]

In the English language there is manifest a tendency for the pronunciation to conform to the orthography. Our pronunciation seems to be more a matter of the eye than of the ear. By this is meant that the spelling of an English word exerts an appreciable influence upon its pronunciation. We feel, somehow, instinctively that the spelling ought to be an index, perhaps a reasonably trustworthy guide to the pronunciation of a word. It seems not in keeping with the eternal fitness of things, certainly contrary to our linguistic instinct and opposed to the genius of our English speech, for pronunciation to be entirely dissociated from orthography. We feel that the sound should be forever and inseparably wedded to the writing, and our linguistic sense is more or less shocked when the two are divorced. Especially is this sentiment prevalent in America. What else could have prompted the slight modification in the writing of such words as favor, honor, neighbor,[5] etc., where American usage has seen fit to make a departure from the time-honored British usage in discarding the silent letter? Of course, as far as orthography is concerned, there is very little difference between American and British usage. In America we aim to pronounce more nearly as we spell. Yet even in American English the pronunciation is occasionally divorced from the spelling, particularly in proper names, but in British English this feature is still more noticeable, and, no doubt, American usage in this particular is simply to be regarded as a concession to British authority and custom.[6] For there appears to be no general principle governing the pronunciation of proper names, the same name being sometimes differently pronounced in different localities. Besides, many of our proper names are direct importations from the mother country and therefore have naturally retained their imported pronunciations. In British usage the pronunciation and spelling are not infrequently at glaring variance, as in Pall Mall and Cholmondeley, which may serve as a type of this class of proper names. We might offer Taliaferro as an American Roland for the British Oliver. But where should we find a parallel in American English to the characteristic British clerk and military, to cite only two examples of a class of words of which the distinctive usage of the United States and Great Britain is at variance?

Perhaps the true explanation of this variation between British and American usage is found in the fact that America is a new country, and hence tradition here does not carry such binding authority as in the Old World. There the pronunciation has been handed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation, among a people “to the manner born.” Here conditions are much altered. America has a large foreign-born element, and consequently many of the people cannot claim English as their native tongue and are compelled to learn it as a foreign language. Hence they rely, in a measure, upon the spelling to indicate the pronunciation of English, making it a study for the eye quite as much as for the ear. If in democratic America the habits of speech were as thoroughly established as they are in aristocratic England then we should speak the English language without any reference to its orthography. But political conditions have modified our American English somewhat, causing it to vary slightly from British usage. A rise in social rank, which is quite common in the New World though rare in the Old, is frequently marked by a revision of one’s former mode of utterance, especially if your self-made man happens to have come of an obscure and unlettered family.

Assuredly English orthography is no criterion of received pronunciation, either in America or in England. It requires only a moment’s reflection to be convinced how misleading and deceptive is our orthography as a guide to orthoëpy. Foreigners who undertake to learn our tongue are naturally more forcibly impressed with the utter untrustworthiness of this guide. The status of our orthography has been correctly described by a prominent historian of our noble speech. He says, “English is now the most barbarously spelled of any cultivated tongue in Christendom. We are weltering in an orthographic chaos in which a multitude of signs are represented by the same sound and a multitude of sounds by the same sign.”[7] There is no doubt that our spelling is exceedingly unphonetic and unscientific. In our alphabet are only twenty-six characters to represent the multiplicity of sounds which exist in the English language. The utter inadequacy of our imperfect alphabet makes its strongest appeal—albeit mute—in its vowel notation. Here the many distinct vocalic sounds with their gradations in which English abounds must all be represented by five symbols. Add to this that we employ the same orthographic device to indicate quantity. The one vowel symbol a, for example, is written to indicate the various divergent sounds heard in the words father, fate, fat, fall, ask, and fare. Likewise the single letter o is employed to represent the diverse gradations of that sound which we utter in the words floor, room, frog, off, note, and not. Again we use diagraphs, such as ea, ee, oa, ei, ie, etc., to represent a single vowel sound and diphthongs as well. As has been pointed out by Professor Lounsbury, one and the same sound is now represented by e in let, by ea in head, by ei in heifer, by eo in leopard, by ay in says, by ai in said, and by a in many.

Furthermore, as a result of the change in the values of English vowel sounds, our vowel notation is no longer accurate. We use the character a to indicate to the eye the vowel quality in mate, sate, rate, date, etc., where the sound value, far from being of an a quality, is really a long phonetic e. The truth is, all the English vowels have undergone a radical alteration from their primitive values which they had in the early history of our speech, having passed through different stages in the successive periods. It is an interesting chapter in English phonology to trace the tortuous course of a given sound, say a, through its various mutations from the Anglo-Saxon period down to the present time. Our vowels, especially, have changed and interchanged to an extent which is simply astonishing. The average scholar who has not made a special study of our English language has absolutely no conception of the radical nature and vast extent of the change and development of English sounds. Take as an illustration our vowel e. The early English phonetic e passed through several stages of development and about the seventeenth century came to have the value of a genuine long i, as in ear, hear, year, etc. Later, in the nineteenth century, this same sound developed into a diphthong which is its present phonetic value. Of course we speak now of the sound of this vowel, not of the symbol which we employ to represent it to the eye in writing. That is another story, and it illustrates the bungling work of our early English printers. In early times there were several characters in use to represent the vowel, e, to wit, e, ee, eo, ea, and ae. After the printing press was set up in England, for convenience and simplicity, eo and ae were not much employed. But e, ee, and ea came into general favor, and were established by custom to indicate the vowel e to the eye. However, these symbols were not consistently used in the beginning by the printers, and hence the present confusion in writing. Our consonantal notation shows evidence of as flagrant abuse of symbols and of glaring inaccuracy. Numerous examples might be cited to prove that errors on the part of our early scribes and printers have been stereotyped in our orthography and perpetuated to the present day.