English Past and Present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

At present it is the written word which is in all languages their conservative element. In it is the abiding witness against the mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which affectation, folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce. It is not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of these corrupter forms, but does not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very often a successful, resistance. With the adoption of phonetic spelling, this witness would exist no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to be written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great a departure from the true form of the word. Nor is it merely probable that such a barbarizing process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism, might take place, but among phonographers it already has taken place. We all probably are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of the word ‘Europe’, as though it were ‘Eurup’. Now it is quite possible that numerically more persons in England may pronounce the word in this manner than in the right; and therefore the phonographers are only true to their principles when they spell it in the fashion which they do, ‘Eurup’, or indeed omitting the E at the beginning, ‘Urup’[234] with thus the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of the second. What are the consequences? First its relations with the old mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, its most probable etymology from two Greek words, signifying ‘broad’ and ‘face’, Europe being so called from the Broad line or face of coast which our continent presented to the Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But so far from the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I should be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in England chose to call Europe ‘Urup’, this would be a vulgarism still, against which the written word ought to maintain its protest, not sinking down to their level, but rather seeking to elevate them to its own[235].

Changes of Pronunciation

And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much more would be unsettled then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is continually altering, their spelling would of course have continually to alter too. For the fact that pronunciation is undergoing constant changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a discussion in Boswell’s Life of Johnson[236], that in his time ‘great’ was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced ‘greet’, not ‘grate’: Pope usually rhymes it with ‘cheat’, ‘complete’, and the like; thus in the Dunciad:

“Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great,
There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines complete”.

Spenser’s constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time[237]. Again, Pope rhymes ‘obliged’ with ‘beseiged’; and it has only ceased to be ‘obleeged’ almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of ‘tay’? yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is, was still regarded as French: Locke writes it ‘thé’; and in Pope’s time, though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet of his in proof:

“Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea”.

So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among well-educated persons, I mean ‘Room’ for ‘Rome’, must have been in Shakespeare’s time the predominant one, else there would have been no point in that play on words where in Julius Cæsar Cassius, complaining that in all Rome there was not room for a single man, exclaims,

“Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough”.

Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth “everybody said ‘Lonnon’[238] not ‘London’; that Fox said ‘Lonnon’ to the last”.

The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their scheme[239]: “Another cause which has contributed not a little to the maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we should never see an end of. Not only the several towns and counties of England have a different way of pronouncing, but even here in London they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the city, and a third in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable, will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion shall direct; all which, reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography”.