1. The fault of incompetent enunciation.—A person who says sick for thick, or elebben for eleven, does so, not because he knows no better, but because he cannot enounce the right sounds of th and v. He is incompetent to it. His error is not one of ignorance. It is an acoustic or a phonetic defect. As such it differs from—
2. The fault of erroneous enunciation.—This is the error of a person who talks of jocholate instead of chocolate. It is not that he cannot pronounce rightly, but that he mistakes the nature of the sound required. Still more the person who calls a hedge a nedge, and an edge a hedge.
[§ 244]. Incompetent enunciation, and erroneous enunciation are, however, only the proximate and immediate causes of bad orthoepy. Amongst the remote causes (the immediate causes of erroneous enunciation) are the following.
I. Undefined notions as to the language to which a word belongs.—The flower called anemone is variously pronounced. Those who know Greek say anemōne, speaking as if the word was written anemohny. The mass say, anemŏne, speaking as if the word was written anemmony. Now, the doubt here is as to the language of the word. If it be Greek, it is anemōne.
Ἁῖμα ῥοδὸν τίκτει, τὰ δὲ δάκρυα τᾶν ἀνεμῶναν.
Bion.
And if it be English, it is (on the score of analogy) as undoubtedly anémmony. The pronunciation of the word in point is determined when we have determined the language of it.
II. Mistakes as to fact, the language of a word being determined.—To know the word anemōne to be Greek, and to use it as a Greek word, but to call it anemŏny, is not to be undecided as to a matter of language, but to be ignorant as to a matter of quantity.
III. Neglect of analogy.—Each and all of the following words, orator, theatre, senator, &c. are in the Latin language, from whence they are derived, accented on the second syllable; as orátor, theátre, senátor. In English, on the contrary, they are accented on the first; as órator, théatre,
sénator. The same is the case with many other words similarly derived. They similarly suffer a change of accent. So many words do this, that it is the rule in English for words to throw their accent from the second syllable (counting from the end of the word) to the third. It was on the strength of this rule,—in other words, on the analogies of orator, &c., that the English pronunciation of the Greek word ἀνεμώνη was stated to be anémmone. Now, to take a word derived from the Latin, and to look to its original quantity only, without consulting the analogies of other words similarly derived, is to be neglectful of the analogies of our own language, and attentive to the quantities of a foreign one.