A Matter of Accent, The Fluid Nature of Correct Pronunciation

“ How the organs of any man can be brought to articulate so many consonants in the weak syllables, or how the ear can relish such an unnatural pronunciation, is almost inconceiveable. In spite of the pedantry of scholars, the ease and melody of speaking, have almost wholly banished the absurd practice, by restoring the accent to the second syllable. ”

“ Where the rhythm is regular we have poetry and song, where it is irregular the language of ordinary prose. Stress is the great conservator of language; the chief counterpoise to the action of phonetic decay. The accented syllable will be preserved though all the other syllables [295] by which it is surrounded may disappear in pronunciation, just as the idea upon which emphasis is laid will hold out successfully against the attacks of age and forgetfulness. ”

“ II Where the root syllable is not known the accent falls on the first syllable, with secondary accents following at intervals to relieve the voice.
[17] This last tendency not infrequently supersedes the other, partly from the natural habit of the language, and partly because the average man is not an etymologist and knows very little about the derivation of the words he uses. ”

“ With the spread of education there go along those habits of speech which are generally recognized to be in accord with best usage and which therefore have most to commend them to popular favor. But till men cease to exercise the right of choice in the mode of utterance, till men prefer, for the sake of uniformity, to say exclusively “hóstǐle” and not “hostĩle,” “sérvǐle” and not “servle,” “rise” and not “rice,” to mention an example of variant usage, so long will there probably be a diversity of pronunciation and the consequent need for the pronouncing [Pg 55] dictionary. ”

“ And how many ways do we pronounce you? yo, yau, yeu, yiu, you, yuu, yet every dialect praise their own Speech, nay in Towns near together, nay in the same Town, nay in the same House, persons born in other places, differ in pronounciation, and many delight to hear different dialects (as the Grecians did) so they did but understand one another, though some precise Females do condemn all but their own finical pronunciation.
But why should phrase be spell’d with ph and s, and not f and z? ”

“ It is again the struggle between the principle of emphasis and the principle of laziness, between conservatism and revolution. Only when the accent is shifted to another syllable can phonetic decay gain the victory, and the shifting of the accent is itself the work of the principle of decay.
The principle of laziness has much to do with the creation of dialects. Slight variations of pronunciation and of the usage of words are as inevitable in language as variations of species in zoology, and where there is no correcting standard these variations are perpetuated and intensified. ”

“ The attempt to make American uniform with English has failed ingloriously; the neglect of its investigation is an evidence of snobbishness that is a folly of the same sort. It is useless to dismiss the growing peculiarities of the American vocabulary and of grammar and syntax in the common speech as vulgarisms beneath serious notice. Such vulgarisms have a way of intrenching themselves, and gathering dignity as they grow familiar. ”

“ In the eastern states, there is a practice prevailing among the body of the people, of prolonging the sound of i in the termination ive. In such words as motive, relative, &c. the people, excepting the more polished part, give i its first sound. This is a local practice, opposed to the general [Pg 104] pronunciation of the English on both sides of the Atlantic, sometimes to the rules of accent, and always to derivation. In dissyllables, as motive, active, the genius of our language requires that the accent should be laid on one syllable, and that the other should be short. ”

“ Our pronunciation and accent, peculiar in themselves, varying, moreover, to distraction over the English-speaking world, are just as serious stumbling-blocks to others, as, say, French and German accent and pronunciation are to us. ”

“ Even some Italian poets and comic writers have adopted a favourite dialect; but no classical English author could have immortalised any one of our own.
Ancient Greece, as Mitford describes, “though a narrow country, was very much divided by mountains and politics.” And mountains and politics, which impede the general intercourse of men, inevitably produce dialects. Each isolated state with fear or pride affected its independence, not only by its own customs, but by its accent or its phrase. In France the standard language was long but a dialect. ”

“ The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, “a pronouncing dictionary,” which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are told, even by teachers of English, that ing, in the words singing, bringing, and swinging, must be pronounced with the ringing sound, which is heard when the accent is on these letters, in king, sing, and wing, and not as if written without the g, as singin, bringin, swingin. No one can be a greater advocate than I am for the strictest adherence to orthography, as long as the public pronunciation pays the least attention to it ”

“ The accent of the ancients is the opprobrium of modern criticism. Nothing can show more evidently the fallibility of the human faculties than the total ignorance we are in at present of the nature of the Latin and Greek accent. [7] This would be still more surprising if a phenomenon of a similar kind did not daily present itself to our view. The accent of the English language, which is constantly sounding in our ears, and every moment open to investigation, seems as much a mystery as that accent which is removed almost two thousand years from our view. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, after all, efforts to bring about in this way accord between form and [Pg 265] sound can affect only a very limited class of words. The gap between orthography and orthoepy is, with us, too wide and impassable for the latter ever to close up. The most we can do is in process of time to revive the pronunciation of a few letters that are now silent, or to substitute a few forms etymologically correct for the corruptions by which they have been supplanted. ”

“ Of these reformers some have endeavoured to accommodate orthography better to the pronunciation, without considering that this is to measure by a shadow, to take that for a model or standard which is changing while they apply it. Others, less absurdly indeed, but with equal unlikelihood of success, have endeavoured to proportion the number of letters to that of sounds, that every sound may have its own character, and every character a single sound. Such would be the orthography of a new language to be formed by a synod of grammarians upon principles of science. ”

“ I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
In settling the orthography, I have not wholly neglected the pronunciation, which I have directed, by printing an accent upon the acute or elevated syllable. ”

“ Mistakes in the employment of the sounds (class B) however, are as a rule due to disagreement between the pronunciation and the orthography of each language; they are not caused by our native habits of articulation, and even those that have learned all the foreign sounds perfectly (indeed even the natives themselves) are liable to make them in every new word which they see written, but have never heard.
It is this last kind of mistake that phonetical transcription helps us to avoid, it protects us against the mistakes which the different national orthographies actually seduce us to make. ”

“ Many writers on English pronunciation are accustomed to pour undiscriminating censure on the growing practice of substituting for the traditional mode of pronouncing certain words an ‘artificial’ pronunciation which is an interpretation of the written form of the words in accordance with the general rules relating to the ‘powers’ of the letters. This practice is especially common among imperfectly educated people who are ambitious of speaking correctly, and have unfortunately no better standard of ‘correctness’ than that of conformity with the spelling. ”

“ For wellnigh two centuries a popular belief has prevailed throughout the English-speaking world that there should be a standard of pronunciation, which should be followed in all those countries where English is the native tongue. Many people, holding this view, assume that some such norm is unconsciously observed by men of education and culture, who, because of their influence and rank, are generally conceded the right to establish the customs of speech. ”

“ This diphthong, in the word knowledge, has of late years undergone a considerable revolution. Some speakers, who had the regularity of their language at heart, were grieved to see the compound depart so far from the sound of the simple, and with heroic fortitude have opposed the multitude by pronouncing the first syllable of this word as it is heard in the verb to know. The Pulpit and the Bar have for some years given a sanction to this pronunciation; but the Senate and the Stage hold out inflexibly against it; and the Nation at large seem insensible of the improvement. ”

“ An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any language to be known for an illiterate person: so also the accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of inferior standing forever. ”

“ The best English always has a bloom upon it. The danger is that, as vulgarisms increase on one side, proprieties will increase on the other, and that conversation may begin to burden itself with a sense of duty. To be correct is already to be mechanical. The defiance of correctness, even by the vulgar, has in it something of the virtue and virility, which, in the work of masters, we recognize as the genius of the language. ”

“ In Europe this is right in dress; and men who have not an opportunity of learning the just rules of our language are in some degree excusable for imitating those whom they consider as superiors. But in men of science this imitation can hardly be excused. Our language was spoken in purity about eighty years ago, since which time great numbers of faults have crept into practice about the theatre and court of London. An affected, [Pg 204] erroneous pronunciation has in many instances taken place of the true, and new words or modes of speech have succeeded the ancient correct English phrases. ”

“ Far from admitting that the American accent, as the pressure of their climate and of their average man has made it, is a thing to be striven against, they assure one another that it is the right accent, the standard English speech of the future. ”

“ The first accents of literary speech in the American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless, natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all, a race of literary snobs and imitators—writers who in their thin and timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials. ”

“ On the contrary, no difficulty about the pronunciation of the three French words, admirable, admirer, and admiration; the tonic accent falls on the last sound syllable in every case.
The less educated a man is the more stress he lays on the accented syllables; and you find the lower classes of a country lay such emphasis on these syllables that they almost pronounce nothing else. Being unable to make myself understood when pronouncing whole English words, I have often tried to use only the accented syllables when speaking to the lower class people of England ”

“ The readiness with which these words take the antepenultimate accent, the agreeable flow of sound to the ear, and the unity it preserves in the sense, are sufficient proofs of the propriety of placing the accent on this syllable, if custom were ambiguous. I do not remember to have heard the accent disputed in any word ending in ology; but orthography is not unfrequently pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, like orthodoxy. The temptation we are under to discover our knowledge of the component parts of words, is very apt to draw us into this pronunciation ”