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 Cornell University Library 
 PE 1137.LS8 
 
 Standard of pronunciation in English/ 
 
 3 1924 027 389 612 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027389612 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 PRONUNCIATION IN ENGLISH 
 
 .-^<^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 THOMAS RFXOUNSBURY 
 
 Professor of English in Yale University 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 
 1904 
 
Copyright, 1904, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Published March, 1904. 
 
TO 
 
 FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND 
 OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY IN LAFAYETTE 
 COLLEGE, THIS TREATISE IS DEDICATED AS 
 A SLIGHT TOKEN OF RESPECT FOR HIS CHAR- 
 ACTER AND OF ESTEEM FOR HIS SCHOLARSHIP 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The idea which underlies the present 
 essay originally constituted the subject 
 of an address delivered at Easton in 
 1895. The occasion was the celebra- 
 tion held then and there in honor of the 
 distinguished scholar to .whom this little 
 work is dedicated. At that time only 
 a portion was given of the illustrative 
 material which had been brought to- 
 gether. At a still later period additions 
 were made to the address as originally 
 prepared. From it thus enlarged selec- 
 tions were printed in the shape of two 
 articles which appeared in Harper's 
 Magazine for September and November, 
 1903. The whole treatise is now in- 
 cluded in the present volume. 
 
 V 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A complete list of the words, the pro- 
 ntmciation of which has for any reason 
 received consideration in the body of the 
 work, can be found at the end. The 
 number of these is large; there would 
 have been no difficulty in making it very 
 much larger. In no case, however, have 
 they been introduced for any other pur- 
 pose than to illustrate a principle; and if 
 those given fail to convince the reader 
 of the truth of the views here advanced, 
 it would be useless to multiply examples. 
 Pains have further been taken to select, 
 whenever possible, words in regard to 
 which exists the interest of present con- 
 troversy. About the propriety or im- 
 propriety of the pronunciation in any 
 given case no judgment is expressed. 
 My office has been to record, to the best 
 of my knowledge, differences of opinion 
 and of practice which have prevailed in 
 the past or are prevailing now. 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 PRONUNCIATION IN ENGLISH 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 PRONUNCIATION IN ENGLISH 
 
 THE first serious attempt which his- 
 tory records to fix a standard of 
 pronunciation — the first, at least, so far 
 as I am aware — took place in Palestine 
 more than a thousand years before the 
 coming of Christ. The account of it 
 is given in the twelfth chapter of the 
 Book of Judges. The men of Gilead 
 had just overcome the children of Eph- 
 raim in a decisive battle. They had 
 furthermore anticipated their defeated 
 enemies in occupying the passages of the 
 3 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Jordan. "And it was so," continues the 
 Bible story, "that when those Eph- 
 raimites which were escaped said, Let 
 me go over; that the men of Gilead said 
 unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If 
 he said Nay; then said they unto him, 
 Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sib- 
 boleth: for he could not frame to pro- 
 nounce it right. Then they took him, 
 and slew him at the passages of Jordan : 
 and there fell at that time of the Eph- 
 raimites forty and two thousand." 
 
 It cannot be decided with absolute cer- 
 tainty whether the forty-two thousand 
 Ephraimites just mentioned included 
 the men who were slain in the preceding 
 battle or consisted exclusively of those 
 who failed to pass satisfactorily in pro- 
 nunciation at the examination then con- 
 ducted at the passages of the Jordan. 
 In the discussion of the present question 
 4 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 that point is for us really immaterial. 
 The moral the incident enforces is quite 
 independent of the number of those 
 who perished from their lack of con- 
 formity to the Gileadite view of or- 
 thoepy. It is a general principle that is 
 taught by it; and the lesson it conveys 
 is just as applicable to the present time 
 as it ever was to the past. The fate which 
 befell the Ephraimites is the kind of fate 
 which in our secret hearts we all feel to 
 be the one strictly due to those perverted 
 and perverse beings who will persist in 
 pronouncing words in a way we deem 
 improper. 
 
 Modem sentimentalism will no longer 
 allow us to resort to the drastic measures 
 for establishing what we deem correct 
 usage which were then adopted by the 
 men of Gilead. Yet unless I mistake 
 entirely the nature of the opinions con- 
 S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 stantly heard in conversation and ex- 
 pressed in print, the spirit which ani- 
 mates the latest devotees of what they 
 consider the only proper pronunciation 
 is in nowise different from that of those 
 who more than three thousand years 
 ago set up a test of their own in 
 Palestine. On this subject men con- 
 tinue to be divided now, as they were 
 then, into Gileadites and Ephraimites. 
 Even the word pronunciation itself has 
 been erected into a shibboleth. Some 
 vigorously insist that the syllable ci 
 should be sounded as "she," others just 
 as vigorously insist that it shall be 
 sounded as "se." The punishment men 
 visit upon those who fail to conform to 
 their standard is necessarily in conso- 
 nance with the spirit of the times to 
 which they belong. But while the pen- 
 alty varies, the feelings which prompt 
 6 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 its infliction remain in all ages the same. 
 If we cannot slay the Ephraimite, we 
 can vituperate him. We can point at 
 him the finger of scorn; we can uplift 
 the nose of derision; we can curl the lip 
 of contempt. We can force upon his 
 consciousness a general sense of social 
 and intellectual inferiority which wealth 
 cannot condone and station will make 
 only the more conspicuous. 
 
 Modem philanthropy, which lets noth- 
 ing escape its clutches, has accordingly 
 felt itself called upon to come, as far as 
 possible, to the rescue of these social 
 pariahs from the verbal pitfalls which 
 beset them on every side. It is not 
 enough that our great dictionaries should 
 set forth the pronunciation of the words 
 they record. A multitude of manuals 
 are constantly brought out which under- 
 take to show us not only how we ought 
 7 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 to pronounce, but also how we ought not 
 to pronounce. In fact, societies have 
 occasionally been formed for the purpose 
 of canying out this same laudable ob- 
 ject. But the question at once arises, 
 Who is it that has taught the teachers? 
 How are we to know that the guides who 
 assume to lead us are guides whom we 
 can trust ? That is to say, where is to be 
 found the standard of pronunciation to 
 which we are all bound to conform? 
 Who established it? Who maintain it? 
 Who are the persons invested with the 
 authority to decide for us in any given 
 case how it is our duty to pronounce, 
 and how did they come to be so invested ? 
 These are questions that at once present 
 themselves to him who gives serious 
 thought to the subject. Nor are they 
 so easily answered as our self-constituted 
 instructors seem to think. Limited 
 8 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 knowledge enables us to speak with 
 positiveness ; fuller knowledge invariably 
 makes us hesitate. 
 
 Every one who is familiar with the 
 periodical literature of both Great Brit- 
 ain and America has constantly forced 
 upon his attention the existence of a 
 class of persons who rejoice in the con- 
 sciousness of knowing that the pronunci- 
 ation they have is the best which exists. 
 For the orthoepic Pharisee is never con- 
 tent with thanking the Lord that he is 
 not as other men. He wants some one 
 else besides his Creator to be aware of 
 the fact; and he cannot rest easy until 
 he has communicated the information to 
 the outside world through the agency of 
 the press. The reason he gives for his 
 self-satisfaction is usually one of the fol- 
 lowing two. The first is that he belongs 
 both by birth and training to a particu- 
 9 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 lar city or to a particular district of coun- 
 try. It is there, we are told, that the 
 language is pronounced with the greatest 
 purity. The inevitable inferiority in 
 this respect of those who have been bom 
 and brought up elsewhere is impressed 
 upon them gently or harshly according 
 to the disposition of the speaker; but 
 care is always taken that it shall be 
 impressed firmly. It is sometimes deli- 
 cately hinted, more often it is stoutly 
 asserted, that for him who is brought up 
 outside of a certain region there is little 
 or no hope of attaining that exquisite 
 intonation or modulation of voice which 
 is the peculiar birthright of its inhabi- 
 tants. The more kindly disposed of the 
 children of this favored soil condescend 
 to express regret for the unhappy lot of 
 those who have been reared outside of 
 the sacred pale. It is not their fault, 
 
 10 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 to be sure — for clearly everybody cannot 
 be bom in the same place — but by an 
 inscrutable dispensation of providence, 
 it has been made their misfortune. 
 
 But much more emphatic and thor- 
 ough-going is the second reason given. 
 In it the social distinction is set up. 
 Alongside of it the barriers of birth- 
 place are hardly worthy of being taken 
 into consideration. There is a mys- 
 tic inner circle, it is intimated, into 
 which only the orthoepically pure can 
 ever penetrate. A particular pronunci- 
 ation of a particular word reveals at 
 once to its members that the unfortu- 
 nate perpetrator does not belong to the 
 company of the elect. "Thy speech 
 bewrayeth thee," said the servants to 
 Peter. The Galilean, in spite of his de- 
 nials, stood disclosed to the humblest 
 inhabitant of the holy city. The same 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 state of things continues yet. There 
 are occasionally to be found, even among 
 the fairly well educated, those who as- 
 sure us that the way certain other edu- 
 cated persons pronounce certain words 
 reveals unmistakably the hall-mark of 
 social inferiority if not that of vul- 
 garity. These latter may be conceded 
 to be respectable, but they cannot be 
 reckoned really high-bred. The con- 
 viction of orthoepic righteousness which 
 springs from the consciousness of social 
 position far surpasses in strength that 
 which arises from birth in a particular 
 place. But when the two chance to 
 meet in the same person, the authority 
 arising from the combination is felt, at 
 least by the man himself, to be abso- 
 lutely unassailable. It is sufficient to 
 establish in his own eyes the infallibility 
 of his oracular utterances, and to justify 
 
 12 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 his contempt for the presumption which 
 ventures to dispute them. 
 
 The most saddening thing for those 
 shut out of the sacred precincts just in- 
 dicated is the hopelessness of their sit- 
 uation. For them there is no relief in 
 sight. As a remedy against the conse- 
 quences of this exclusion we learn that 
 not even the highest education is of any 
 avail. From that quarter can come no 
 help; in truth, rather harm. For at 
 times we have of late been given to un- 
 derstand that the spread of education 
 is distinctly detrimental to culture. As 
 regards propriety of pronunciation, the 
 latter too often suffers from the increas- 
 ing prevalence of the former. The lam- 
 entable effects wrought by it have, to 
 some extent, been made a subject of 
 complaint in the periodical press. A 
 short quotation will furnish an illustra- 
 13 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 tion of a view which is sincerely held by- 
 some, is heard frequently in conversa- 
 tion, and is occasionally met with in 
 print. This particular passage is found 
 in a letter which appeared in the col- 
 umns of a London weekly of a date no 
 further back than 1900: "At one time 
 (some twenty years ago)," wrote the 
 correspondent, "the pronunciation of 
 interesting was a fair criterion of social 
 position, but owing to the spread of edu- 
 cation, education and culture are no 
 longer synonymous, and teaching is now 
 principally in the hands of those who 
 may be said to be highly educated with- 
 out having been surrounded by persons 
 of culture in their youth. Hence all 
 sorts of strange departures in the way 
 of pronunciation." 
 
 To culture of the sort here indicated 
 education will be more than deleterious. 
 14 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 It will be destructive; for in the long 
 run it will even reach the class who con- 
 found their own ignorance with culture. 
 Yet the illusions about this matter are 
 so agreeable, they bring with them a sat- 
 isfaction so profound, that by many it 
 may be deemed an act of almost wanton 
 maliciousness to say anything which 
 tends to ruflSe the complacency of per- 
 sons, frequently very worthy if not par- 
 ticularly well informed, who give utter- 
 ance to views such as have just been 
 expressed. But no" anxiety need be 
 felt on their account. No criticism will 
 ever disturb the serenity of their con- 
 victions about themselves or their utter- 
 ance. It will never occur to them that 
 the pronunciation they so fondly cherish 
 is right in their eyes for no other reason 
 at all than that it is the one which they 
 have been accustomed to hear in the 
 
 IS 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 little set to which they belong. The 
 humble outsider, seeking for an unas- 
 sailable standard, might accept meekly 
 their pronouncements did he not en- 
 counter differing ones coming from per- 
 sons boasting the same birthplace as 
 the preceding and belonging to the same 
 social grade. The two parties, he finds, 
 are constantly coming into collision. 
 Unseemly disputes prevail. Both sides 
 are equally opinionated, equally pugna- 
 cious, and, as he at last is forced to con- 
 clude, equally ignorant. How, then, in 
 this perpetual conflict of opinion, can 
 one expect to discover the exact truth? 
 How in any given case can we hope to 
 know whether the pronunciation indi- 
 cated is right or wrong? Some help 
 towards clearing up the obscurity which 
 surrounds the subject may be gained by 
 ascertaining, in the first place, the precise 
 16 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 nature of the difficulty attending it, and, 
 in the second place, the efforts to remove 
 it which have been resorted to in the 
 past. 
 
 Two general statements can be made 
 at the outset. One is that there is a 
 body of English words certain pronun- 
 ciations of which every cultivated man 
 the world over recognizes at once as be- 
 longing to the speech of the uneducated 
 or the imperfectly educated. We char- 
 acterize them as illiterate. The use of 
 them stamps everywhere the present 
 social condition of the speaker or pro- 
 claims the class from which he sprang. 
 Allied to this, although representative 
 of a distinctly different grade of culti- 
 vation, is what may be called the geo- 
 graphical pronunciation. There are or- 
 thoepical peculiarities which belong to 
 a certain region or to certain regions. 
 17 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 They are unconsciously adopted by him 
 who has heard them from infancy. If 
 an educated man, he may, and usually 
 does, discard them in later life. Even 
 if he chooses to cling to them, he recog- 
 nizes that they are provincial, that they 
 are not sanctioned by the best general 
 usage. Yet it is not always an easy 
 matter to shake them ofE even if he 
 desires so to do. If once fastened upon 
 him in early youth, he is liable at times 
 to revert to them in moments of care- 
 lessness or excitement. 
 
 This is the first point. But for most 
 of us there is no more difficulty in avoid- 
 ing what is clearly illiterate or provincial 
 pronunciation than there is in avoiding 
 the violation of the ordinary rules of 
 grammar. The second point is of more 
 importance in this discussion. This is 
 that another and very much larger body 
 i8 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 of words exists — embracing, in fact, the 
 immense majority of the words of the 
 language used in conversation or public 
 address — about which there is a substan- 
 tial agreement among the cultivated, 
 wherever English is spoken at all. A 
 substantial agreement, it must be kept 
 in mind, not an exact agreement. No 
 one's pronunciation ever resembles an- 
 other's precisely, any more than one 
 man's watch keeps precisely the same 
 time as another man's. Furthermore, 
 no one's pronunciation is exactly the 
 same under all circumstances. There 
 are, besides, numerous variations of 
 speech which the trained ear of the 
 phonetic scholar instantly recognizes, 
 but which entirely escape the observa- 
 tion of most of us. Much more percep- 
 tible is the variation between the speech 
 of the cultivated classes of diflEerent com- 
 19 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 munities, of different regions, of different 
 lands. It is sometimes so marked that 
 the moment we hear a man's voice we 
 recognize without difficulty the coimtry 
 or part of the country which has given 
 him birth. 
 
 In a discussion of this sort it is hardly 
 necessary to observe that it is the usage 
 of the educated body alone which is as- 
 sumed to be under consideration. The 
 pronunciation of the illiterate no one 
 thinks of referring to, save occasionally 
 for the amiable purpose of imputing it 
 to those with whom he chances to differ. 
 As has just been pointed out, the usage 
 of the men of this educated body, so 
 far as regards the immense majority of 
 words, is essentially the same where Eng- 
 lish is spoken. It is marked, indeed, by 
 variations of intonation, of modulation, 
 and, to some extent, of accentuation. 
 20 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 But, after all, these variations are not 
 only few in number, comparatively 
 speaking; they are really of slight im- 
 portance. They do not interfere with 
 mutual understanding, nor do they 
 create embarrassment. In the ordinary 
 intercourse of life they can be and they 
 are ignored. To go back to the com- 
 parison just used, our watches all pur- 
 port to keep the same time. In one 
 sense they do, in another they do not. 
 But their failure in agreement is of so 
 little moment that we feel no hesita- 
 tion in placing upon them the fullest 
 reliance in all arrangements we set out 
 to make with one another. 
 
 Accordingly, in the case just specified 
 — that of illiterate pronunciation and 
 that of cultivated pronunciation of most 
 of our speech — we find no trouble in 
 choosing the right course. It is between 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 these two extremes that the real diffi- 
 culty manifests itself. There exists a 
 goodly number of words in regard to 
 which the usage of the educated varies, 
 and often varies decidedly. This fact 
 has been brought prominently to the 
 attention of most of us in recent years 
 by the multiplication of pronouncing 
 dictionaries. As a single illustration 
 out of many that could be cited, let us 
 select the adjectives ending in -tie. By 
 some lexicographers this termination is 
 sounded il, by others il. As an example 
 of the class, take the word hostile. Gen- 
 erally in the earlier English dictiona- 
 ries which set out to give correct usage 
 — for instance, those of Sheridan and 
 Walker and of Smart's revision of 
 Walker — it was pronounced hos'til. 
 Such it continues to be at the present 
 day in American dictionaries. But in 
 
 22 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 most of the late English ones — such as 
 Stormonth's and the two which go re- 
 spectively under the names of the Im- 
 perial and the Encyclopaedic — it is 
 pronounced hos-tile'. The new Oxford 
 dictionary gives both pronunciations, 
 but puts hos-tile' first. 
 
 Take again the class of words begin- 
 ning with iCh, such as while, when, and 
 Whig. If we can trust certain authori- 
 ties, the pronunciation of the aspirate 
 in polite society in England is the ex- 
 ception and not the rule. In America 
 the condition of things is certainly the 
 reverse. Or, to come down from classes 
 to single words, the prevailing English 
 pronunciation of schedule is represented 
 as being shed'-ul; that of America is ordi- 
 narily sked'-yul. These are divergences 
 that attain almost the dignity of nation- 
 al distinctions. Yet, as a whole, they 
 23 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 are not numerous, nor do they compare 
 in importance with the differences in the 
 speech of individuals belonging to the 
 same country or even to the same com- 
 munity. It is about their varying pro- 
 nunciation of words that controversy 
 rages. What is the proper usage in any 
 particular case? Lucky is he who with 
 us is the first to secure the passages of 
 the Jordan — ^that is, in this day, the au- 
 thority of all the dictionaries. Here it 
 is that the men of Gilead now slay the 
 children of Ephraim. 
 
 The time has been purposely limited 
 to the present. It is very evident that 
 there was once a period when great lib- 
 erty was allowed in the matter of pro- 
 nunciation. The earliest dictionaries 
 made no effort to indicate it. Some 
 works, indeed, appeared in the seven- 
 teenth century and the first part of the 
 24 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 eighteenth which paid a slight attention 
 to the subject. Most of these, however, 
 dealt with the rectification of the orthog- 
 raphy. Any remarks about orthoepy 
 contained in them were incidental. 
 Certain principles were laid down, and 
 to illustrate these, the pronunciation of 
 a number of words would be given. 
 Anomalies, too, were sometimes pointed 
 out. But there was no work in which 
 orthoepy was made a regular feature, 
 still less a prominent one. Nor did 
 the dictionaries which followed after 
 the treatises just mentioned make for a 
 long time much of an advance in this 
 direction. The furthest they went was 
 to point out upon what syllable of the 
 word the accent should rest. Even so 
 much disposition as this to slake the 
 thirst for useful information was mani- 
 fested almost reluctantly. Before Dr. 
 
 25 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Johnson's dictionary appeared, in 1755, 
 Bailey's was held in the highest estima- 
 tion and had the largest circulation. It 
 was originally published in 1721; but 
 it was not until the fifth edition of 
 1733 that any attempt was made in it 
 to mark the syllable upon which the 
 stress should fall. This for many years 
 after was the ultima Thule of advent- 
 ure in the direction of indicating pro- 
 nunciation. 
 
 The pronouncing dictionary is, in 
 truth, a comparatively modeminvention. 
 A hundred and fifty years ago it did not 
 exist; even a hundred years ago it had 
 not attained to anjrthing like the re- 
 spect with which it is now regarded. No 
 extraordinary desire, indeed, could have 
 been felt at first for such a work. Had 
 there been, we may be sure it would have 
 been gratified. Every man of cultiva- 
 26 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 tion was once, within reasonable limits, 
 a law unto himself. All such persons 
 assumed, as some do still, that the pro- 
 nunciation they employed was the very 
 best possible, simply because it was their 
 own pronunciation. This priceless treas- 
 ure was theirs by the right of inheritance. 
 Naturally, one of the class would resent 
 any attempt on the part of his neighbor 
 to impose upon him a different usage. 
 Much more would he be inclined to resent 
 the impertinence which presumed to 
 stigmatize his usage as exhibiting pecu- 
 Harities and improprieties. He felt not 
 the least necessity of deferring to the 
 opinions of some one else, whose princi- 
 pal claim to authority was that he had 
 taken the trouble to get his practice into 
 print. 
 
 In the course of time, however, there 
 has ensued a complete change of front. 
 27 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 The pronouncing dictionary has not only- 
 come, but it is treated with a deference 
 to which, at the outset, it was an utter 
 stranger. It seems as if its production 
 must have been due in the first instance 
 to the desire for a work of such a nature, 
 manifested by the imperfectly educated 
 middle class, rising more and more into 
 social prominence. The members of this 
 body wanted somebody to tell them pre- 
 cisely what to say and how to say it. 
 They did not care to exercise the right 
 of private judgment, or, rather, they did 
 not have sufficient faith in their own 
 cultivation to trust it. Authority was 
 what they were after; and when men 
 are longing for authority on any subject, 
 some one will be considerate enough of 
 their welfare, and confident enough in 
 his own sufficiency, to come forward and 
 furnish it. We see the same thing con- 
 28 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 stantly exemplified to-day in the case of 
 disputed points of linguistic usage. It 
 is not necessary for the self-appointed 
 instructor to know. All that is required 
 of him is that he shall be positive: then 
 his disciples will receive with meekness 
 and gratitude the information or misin- 
 formation which he condescends to im- 
 part. 
 
 It was about the middle of the eigh- 
 teenth century that the craving for a 
 pure and perfect orthoepic guide began 
 to manifest itself in a way that reqxiired 
 relief. Dr. Johnson's dictionary had 
 been published in 1755- For general 
 purposes it became at once and long re- 
 mained the standard. It was only in a 
 few instances, however, that it made 
 any attempt to go beyond its immediate 
 predecessors in the matter of indicating 
 pronunciation. Like them, it generally 
 29 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 contented itself with marking the syl- 
 lable upon which the stress of voice 
 should fall. This was felt not to be 
 enough. Accordingly, before the end of 
 the century a number of works came out 
 to supply a want which was becoming 
 urgent. Two men there are — Thomas 
 Sheridan and John Walker — ^who emerge 
 conspicuously from the ranks of those 
 who strove to establish a standard pro- 
 nunciation. The first was well known 
 in his time as an actor, better known 
 later as a lecturer on elocution, best 
 known to most of us now as the father 
 of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The sec- 
 ond was also an actor, not so well known 
 in this capacity as the preceding, but 
 with full as great a reputation as a lect- 
 urer on elocution. But besides these 
 two, there was a large number of others 
 who made it their aim to instruct their 
 30 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 fellow - men in this matter. In truth, 
 during the eighth decade of the eigh- 
 teenth century a sort of lexical epidemic 
 broke out. Between the beginning of 
 1773 and the end of 1775, particularly, 
 appeared the dictionaries of Kenrick, 
 Barclay, Ash, and Perry, and all had a 
 good deal to say on the subject of or- 
 thoepy. 
 
 It was Sheridan, perhaps, who first 
 conceived the idea of bringing out a dic- 
 tionary in which pronunciation should 
 be a leading, if not the leading, feature. 
 But if so, he was not the first to carry 
 the project into execution. This was the 
 work of a certain James Buchanan. His 
 name indicates his nationality. Early 
 in 1757 he appeared as the author of a 
 small English dictionary in which, be- 
 sides other things, he marked the long 
 and short sounds of the vowels, distin- 
 31 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 guished the silent letters, and pointed 
 out the number of syllables of which 
 each word consisted. "Thus was I the 
 first," he said in a later work, "who en- 
 deavored to make the proper pronuncia- 
 tion of our language of easy acquisition 
 to foreigners, and to introduce an uni- 
 form one for the sake of the natives; 
 amongst whom it is still so notoriously 
 vague and unstable." An attempt of 
 an essentially similar kind was made 
 somewhat later by another Scotch- 
 man named William Johnston. His 
 work appeared in 1764. Furthermore, 
 in that year there came out anony- 
 mously a little volume of the same 
 nature, designed for the use of schools. 
 It was described by a reviewer of the 
 time as a "well-meant attempt for 
 ascertaining the pronunciation and 
 purity of the language." These things 
 32 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 are conclusive proof that the desire 
 and demand for an orthoepic guide 
 was in the air. Less than two years 
 after the appearance of the dictionaries 
 just mentioned, Buchanan followed up 
 his previous essay by bringing out a 
 much more ambitious work devoted to 
 pronunciation and to nothing else. It 
 was dedicated with the most profound 
 reverence to the two august Houses of 
 the British Parliament. Its title-page 
 explained its object. It was there called 
 "an essay towards estabUshing a stand- 
 ard for an elegant and uniform pronun- 
 ciation of the English language through- 
 out the British dominions, as practised 
 by the most learned and polite speak- 
 ers." It was, as its title-page further 
 declared, "a work entirely new." Noth- 
 ing like it had appeared before ; perhaps 
 nothing like it has appeared since. It 
 3 33 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 was a pronouncing dictionary pure and 
 simple. It contained no definitions. It 
 was a list of over twenty-seven thousand 
 words arranged in double columns, in 
 one column spelled as written, in the 
 other spelled as pronounced. 
 
 But in those early days there was no 
 disposition to pay respect to the man 
 who set himself up as an authority. The 
 author of this essay towards establishing 
 an elegant and uniform pronunciation 
 was speedily made to know the opinion 
 entertained of his qualifications for act- 
 ing as a guide to his fellow-men. "Mr. 
 Buchanan," said the most influential re- 
 view of the time, "does not appear to 
 understand how English is pronounced 
 by polite and just speakers."' This is 
 
 'Monthly Review, vol. xxxiii., p. 493, De- 
 cember, 1765. Buchanan's work, however, 
 bore the date of 1766 on its title-page. 
 
 34 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 the sort of criticism we are at heart in- 
 clined to bestow upon all those whose 
 usage differs from our own. We are now 
 somewhat timid about its utterance ; but 
 in the eighteenth century it was ex- 
 pressed openly and fearlessly. It was a 
 further objection made to the work by 
 this same critical periodical that seeing 
 the word spelled as it was pronounced 
 would insensibly lead the reader to 
 spell wrongly. Later this was much 
 insisted upon by Kenrick in his censure 
 of Buchanan. The worship of the or- 
 thographical fetich was already under 
 full headway. 
 
 Still, the most striking result of the 
 successive appearance of these diction- 
 aries was the revelation it brought of 
 the important differences both of opinion 
 and of practice that prevailed. As they 
 came out, one after another, a series of 
 35 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 controversies went on in regard to the 
 pronunciations authorized by their com- 
 pilers. These were made the subject of 
 comment, in the shape of attack or of 
 commendation, in the critical periodicals 
 of the time. Such controversies show 
 that men quarrelled then about the 
 matter just as they do now, and not un- 
 frequently over the very same words. 
 Each disputant was as positive then as 
 he is now that he was in possession of 
 the best possible pronunciation, and was 
 just as ready to charge vulgarity or 
 slovenly practice upon those whose usage 
 was different from his own. In humble 
 shall the aspirate be sounded or not? 
 Shall the ea of hearth have the sound it 
 has in heart or that in earth f Shall 
 leisure be pronounced so as to ryme 
 with pleasure or with seizure? These 
 are illustrations of scores of questions 
 36 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 which were discussed, and about which 
 contradictory views were very positive- 
 ly expressed. 
 
 Several words there were, indeed, in 
 regard to which much feeling was 
 aroused. One of these was the past par- 
 ticiple of the substantive verb. Shall 
 been be pronounced so as to rhyme with 
 seen or sin ? On this subject of never- 
 ending controversy orthoepists ranged 
 themselves in hostile camps, and the 
 members of each party felt themselves 
 at liberty to affect a lofty superiority to 
 those belonging to the other. About 
 the middle of the following century, 
 Hawthorne, in relating his consular ex- 
 periences, tells us that this word was 
 the best shibboleth he could hit upon to 
 detect the English rogue appealing to 
 him for aid from the genuine Yankee 
 article. He considered it a national dis- 
 37 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 tinction. The English, he said, invari- 
 ably made it to rjmie with green, while 
 the Americans, at least the Northern- 
 ers, universally pronounced it Mn This 
 may or may not be the case. The or- 
 thoepy of even a single community is a 
 somewhat ticklish thing to handle; but 
 when it comes to that of a whole coun- 
 try, the difficulty increases in at least an 
 arithmetical ratio. Certain it is that 
 several of the most approved English 
 authorities, both before and at the time 
 Hawthorne was writing, favored what 
 he styled the American pronunciation. 
 It was that which had been given by 
 Sheridan. His contemporary. Walker, 
 indeed, assured us that been "is scarcely 
 ever heard otherwise than as the noun 
 bin, a repository for com or wine." It 
 was the only one of the two pronuncia- 
 tions authorized by Smart, Walker's re- 
 38 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 viser. The new English dictionary of 
 the Philological Society sanctions both. 
 One of the words about the pronuncia- 
 tion of which orthoepists disputed then 
 remains full as much a subject of dis- 
 pute now. The attitude exhibited tow- 
 ards it at present is a striking illustra- 
 tion of how states of mind repeat them- 
 selves. The word in question is vase. 
 This enjoys a distinction, granted to 
 few other terms, of having four different 
 pronunciations, if, indeed, we cannot say 
 five. Of these, three at least were in 
 existence from the beginning. Two of 
 the pronunciations affected the sound 
 of s, two that of a. In the case of the 
 consonant variation, the word, accord- 
 ing to one method, rymed with case, ac- 
 cording to the other with daze. Dur- 
 ing the eighteenth century the former 
 was the pronunciation generally, though 
 39 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 far from exclusively, favored by orthoe- 
 pists. But this attitude was largely re- 
 versed when the latter method was 
 adopted and urgently insisted upon by 
 Walker. He himself had heard, he said, 
 the 5 universally sounded as z. His ad- 
 vocacy of that pronunciation, owing to 
 his wide acceptance as an authority, 
 very materially extended its use. But 
 the other held its ground. Consequent- 
 ly, through the early and the middle part 
 of the nineteenth century English or- 
 thoepists were largely divided into two 
 factions on this point, each of which was 
 hardly disposed to concede the existence 
 of the practice sanctioned by the other. 
 But there was also a difference about 
 the pronunciation of the vowel. This 
 variation must have been in existence 
 from the beginning; but it was not until 
 a period near our own time that it came 
 40 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 into much prominence. There was one 
 sound of it which eighteenth-century 
 orthoepists had heard, or at least had 
 heard of; for it was occasionally made 
 the subject of comment. It was the 
 one in which a would be represented by 
 aw. The only authority who sanctioned 
 it was Elphinston; but its actual exist- 
 ence was conceded by others. Nares, 
 indeed, declared that it was often used; 
 "but," he added, "I think, aflEectedly." 
 To the same purport spoke Walker. By 
 a few, he said, the a was pronounced like 
 aw; but "this," he continued, "being 
 too refined for the general ear, is now 
 but seldom heard." Such was the mild 
 way in which he spoke of it in one place ; 
 in another he followed Nares in terming 
 it affected. It is very clear that this 
 pronunciation of the vowel was not 
 looked upon with favor by eighteenth- 
 41 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 century orthoepists. Yet it must have 
 been long in use, however little recog- 
 nized. One of the earlier ways of spell- 
 ing the word was vause; and this could 
 only have been resorted to in order to 
 make it accord with the pronunciation 
 it received. Though frowned upon, it 
 continued to flourish and won its way 
 to more and more acceptance. But 
 there was yet another pronunciation in 
 which the vowel had the force of a in 
 father. This seems to have added a 
 further complication to usage, caused 
 by some giving to j the sound of z, and 
 by others giving it that heard in case. 
 It is not easy to say when this second 
 pronunciation of the vowel first ap- 
 peared; but it did not make itself much 
 felt until the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century. Before it the aw sound ap- 
 pears to be retiring; at least that is an 
 42 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 impression entertained by many. Still 
 the four pronunciations continue to 
 flourish to-day, one of them prevailing 
 in one quarter, and another in another. 
 In certain places they may be said to 
 be, after a manner, fighting one another. 
 This general condition of things is more 
 than likely to be perpetuated indefi- 
 nitely. 
 
 The disposition of the accent gave rise 
 to perhaps the most heated discussion. 
 About it positions, which now seem very 
 singular to us, were often taken then. 
 Kenrick was severely arraigned by one 
 of his reviewers for laying the stress upon 
 the last syllable of July. European was 
 a word about which controversy raged 
 with much violence. Should the prin- 
 cipal accent rest upon the penult or the 
 antepenult? There was a good deal to 
 be said upon both sides, and it was fre- 
 43 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 quently said with asperity. In 1782 the 
 European Magazine was started. Early 
 in its history an irate correspondent 
 wrote a letter to it, expressing his disgust 
 with the way the city beaiix, as he term- 
 ed them, pronounced its name. He rep- 
 resented them as saying, "Waiter, bring 
 me the Europe' an Magazine." All in- 
 telligent people knew, he added, that the 
 word was derived from Europe; it should, 
 therefore, be Europ'ean. The other way 
 he had never heard save from "the stu- 
 dents in monthly publications." These 
 he clearly regarded as constituting a 
 contemptible class of men.' But almost 
 as bitter as the controversy in regard to 
 the syllable upon which the accent 
 should rest was the disagreement, in the 
 case of certain words, as to the pronun- 
 
 ^ European Magazine, vol. ii., p. 263, Oc- 
 tober, 1782. 
 
 44 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ciation of the syllable itself. Of two 
 given ones, which reflected best the 
 usage of the best society? On points 
 hke these professed orthoepists fre- 
 quently took opposite sides; and the 
 contempt each had for the opinion of 
 the other could hardly be spoken of as 
 concealed. One of the matters in dis- 
 pute was the propriety of interposing a 
 sound resembling e when ife or a hard g 
 or c preceded the vowel a or *. The 
 philologist Robert Nares observed in a 
 work he produced on the ' Elements of 
 Orthoepy' that ' ' ky-ind for kind is a mon- 
 ster of pronunciation heard only on our 
 stage." ' This remark much grieved 
 Walker. He took to it the most de- 
 cided exception. Nares he conceded to 
 be a very solid and ingenious writer on 
 
 • ' Elements of Orthoepy,' p. 28. 
 45 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the subject of orthoepy; but in this par- 
 ticular he was utterly mistaken. The 
 practice condemned by him was the 
 practice of polite speakers. It was no 
 fanciful peculiarity this, but a usage 
 arising from euphony and the analogy 
 of the language. The coalescence of the 
 sound like the consonant y with the let- 
 ters between which it is interposed gave 
 a certain mellowness to the pronuncia- 
 tion. So Walker assured us. In ac- 
 cordance with this view he represented 
 a garden and a guard by the formations 
 eggyardin and eggyard. 
 
 Modem orthoepists accept usage as 
 they find it, or suppose they find it, 
 with little disposition to dispute it; the 
 earlier ones had no inclination to assume 
 a passive attitude when such usage dis- 
 agreed with their conceptions of pro- 
 priety. They looked in particular with 
 46 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 a good deal of indignation upon certain 
 pronunciations which were at marked 
 variance from the orthography. They 
 could not comprehend how these ever 
 came to exist in the first place, nor could 
 they find any justification for their con- 
 tinuing to be retained. As a general 
 rule these peculiarities were survivals. 
 They represented a spelling which had 
 once existed but had now passed away. 
 One of the terms specially objectionable 
 was China, which, as a designation of the 
 ware so called, even at the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century, continued to be 
 almost universally pronounced Chayny. 
 This usage, imder the operation of an in- 
 fluence yet to be considered, has long 
 ceased to be fashionable. Yet, without 
 doubt, traces of it are still to be found 
 in certain quarters. As late as 1855, 
 Thackeray, in his novel of 'The New- 
 47 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 comes,' when speaking in his own person, 
 mentions a "blue dragon Chayny jar"; 
 but in so doing this acute observer of 
 men and manners was unquestionably 
 repres^ting the practice of the persons 
 about whom he was discoursing. Colonel 
 was another rock of offence. It was 
 perhaps, on the whole, the most heart- 
 rending to the sticklers for what they 
 deemed correct usage. The pronuncia- 
 tion col'nel, though sanctioned by Bailey 
 and Dr. Johnson, was vulgar enough; 
 but kur'nel, the only one now authorized, 
 was atrociously vulgar. This latter pro- 
 nunciation, coming down from coronel, 
 the more ancient spelling of the word, 
 remained for a long while a source of 
 grief to many who recognized the im- 
 possibility of making a successful stand 
 against this most abominable of perver- 
 sions, as it was termed. They saw in 
 48 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 its general adoption the triumph of usage 
 over propriety. There is something al- 
 most pathetic in Walker's lamentation 
 that "this word is among those gross ir- 
 regularities which must be given up as 
 incorrigible." 
 
 Still, in all the critical comments upon 
 these tentative efforts to ascertain and 
 fix pronunciation, there was an implied 
 admission that the end aimed at was 
 desirable. This remained none the less 
 true even when lack of acquaintance 
 with the best usage had made the 
 method taken to arrive at it, in the par- 
 ticular case considered, more or less a 
 failure. The demand, in truth, for the 
 pronouncing dictionary was too con- 
 tinuous and pressing to permit the field 
 to be tmoccupied for any length of time. 
 There were several who entered it besides 
 those who have already been mentioned. 
 4 49 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 The matter had from an early period 
 attracted the attention of Sheridan. 
 His original profession as an actor, his 
 subsequent occupation as a teacher of 
 elocution and lecturer upon it, had im- 
 pressed him profoundly with the de- 
 sirability of a complete work of this nat- 
 ure. The question of orthoepy was one 
 of the topics upon which he constantly 
 dilated in his treatises dealing with the 
 difficulties of the English tongue. In 
 1769 he brought out a work entitled, 'A 
 Plan of Education for the Young No- 
 bility and Gentry.' In this the consid- 
 eration of propriety of pronunciation 
 occupied a conspicuous place. One of 
 the objects he had in view was the de- 
 lightfully fascinating dream of establish- 
 ing exact uniformity of English speech 
 over all the globe, not only in the rising 
 generation, but for all future ones. 
 SO 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Sheridan was an Irishman. Except- 
 ing him, most of the men who at the out- 
 set interested themselves in establishing 
 a standard of pronunciation were Scotch- 
 men. This was a fact that did not es- 
 cape the notice of their compatriots in 
 England engaged in similar undert;ak- 
 ings. One of these new dictionaries was 
 brought out by William Kenrick in 1773. 
 In it the compiler professed to give, be- 
 sides the definitions, not merely the or- 
 thography and etymology of the words, 
 but also their pronunciation, " according 
 to the present practice of polished speak- 
 ers in the metropolis." The author of 
 this particular dictionary was a sort of 
 Ishmaelite man of letters, who dabbled 
 in everjrthing and attacked everybody 
 who was meeting with any more success 
 than himself. Still his remarks are 
 worth noticing because they embody 
 SI 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 views which were afterwards to find fre- 
 quent expression. "There seems," he 
 wrote, "a most ridiculous absurdity in 
 the pretensions of a native of Aberdeen 
 or Tipperary to teach the natives of 
 London to speak and to read. Various 
 have been, nevertheless, the modest at- 
 tempts of the Scots and Irish to establish 
 a standard of English pronunciation. 
 That they shoiild not have succeeded is 
 no wonder. Men cannot teach others 
 what they do not themselves know." It 
 may be added that Kenrick was told by 
 one of his reviewers that certain of the 
 usages he authorized were "more agree- 
 able to the pronunciation of Welchmen 
 than that of polite people in the metrop- 
 oUs." ' 
 It was asserted at the time that Ken- 
 
 ^ Critical Review, vol. xxxvi., p. 344, No- 
 vember, 1773. 
 
 52 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 rick sought to forestall the work of 
 Sheridan, which was then well known 
 to have been long in preparation. If 
 such was the design, it failed completely. 
 The first regular pronouncing dictionary 
 on a large scale was the production of 
 this same Irishman, who, because he 
 was an Irishman, had been warned from 
 undertaking the project at all. It came 
 out in two large volumes, in 1780, and 
 went through several editions before the 
 end of the century. The title-page con- 
 tained the assertion that one main ob- 
 ject in the compilation of the work was 
 to furnish a standard of pronunciation. 
 Not many years after it was followed by 
 the similar dictionary of John Walker. 
 This became at once a favorite. It 
 speedily displaced in the general popular 
 estimation the other works of a similar 
 character, though it never deprived 
 53 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 them entirely either of circulation or of 
 influence. For most Englishmen it may- 
 be considered as having been for a long 
 period the standard of authority. It 
 passed through numerous editions and 
 underwent several revisions. Of these 
 the remodelling which it received at the 
 hands of Smart in 1836 met with the 
 greatest success. This last work, and 
 that of Worcester, were, according to 
 Ellis, in his history on ' Early English 
 Pronunciation,' the ones usually followed 
 in England down to a comparatively 
 recent period, so far as dictionaries were 
 there followed at all. But shortly be- 
 fore the appearance of Smart's revision 
 of Walker, James Knowles, the nephew 
 of Sheridan, had also brought out a pro- 
 nouncing dictionary. It attained a fair 
 measure of success. In the United 
 States Webster and Worcester divided 
 54 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 honors during the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century, the former having much 
 the more extensive circulation, the latter 
 assuming a tone of loftier linguistic or 
 rather orthographical virtue. Here have 
 been specified the works, on the whole, 
 most widely in use; but besides these 
 there were numerous others. 
 
 There was one question in particular 
 which the early makers of pronouncing 
 dictionaries felt called upon to answer, 
 but which the modem ones very calmly 
 and without question very judiciously ig- 
 nore. It is that with which the present 
 discussion opened. Who gave them their ( 
 authority to establish correct usage, or, l 
 at least, how did they happen to come by I 
 it ? In every instance they put forward , | 
 directly or by implication, the claim that 
 the orthoepy which they recommend is 
 the very best. The title-pages of the 
 55 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 works of Buchanan and Kenrick, as we 
 have seen, represent the pronunciation 
 laid down by them as being that of the 
 most polished society. In a similar way 
 Perry, in his Royal Standard Dictionary, 
 which came out in 1775, informs us that 
 it exhibits the true pronunciation, "ac- 
 cording to the present practice of men 
 of letters, eminent orators, and polite 
 speakers in London." But the critics 
 of that city did not seem always to rec- 
 ognize in it their own usage. Even 
 those generally favorable insisted that 
 in several instances he had countenanced 
 vulgarisms. They took exception, for 
 example, to a royal standard dictionary 
 representing, as was done here, the pro- 
 nunciation of girl as garl or gal} There 
 
 ' This statement is made on the authority 
 of a notice of the first edition of ' Perry's Dic- 
 tionary,' contained in the Critical Review, vol. 
 
 56 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 still continued, in truth, the disposition 
 on the part of every man to consider no 
 one but himself as an authority. The 
 feeling generally prevalent was repre- 
 sented by a certain William Scott, who, 
 in 1786, felt called upon to add another 
 pronouncing dictionary to those al- 
 ready before the public. To him the 
 necessity of such action was obvious. 
 All previous works of this nature, he 
 assured us, were "extremely deficient in 
 regard to the pronunciation of words." 
 This want he felt capable of supplying. 
 As was then usual, he declared that the 
 pronunciation would be given "accord- 
 ing to the present practice of the best 
 speakers," and as was then usual, also, 
 those who deemed themselves the best 
 
 xl., p. 486. In the only edition of it to which 
 I have access — a much later one — no such 
 pronunciation of girl is given. 
 
 57 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 speakers found fault in many cases with 
 the practice he recommended. 
 
 At the same time, all who investigated 
 the subject, without any prejudice in 
 favor of their own practice, had to ad- 
 mit that there was frequently a good 
 deal of difficulty in deciding upon the 
 best accepted usage. "The literati," 
 said Perry, "who make etymology an in- 
 variable rule of pronunciation, often 
 pronounce words in such a manner as to 
 bring upon themselves the charge of af- 
 fectation or pedantry." He added that, 
 on the other hand, "mere men of the 
 world, notwithstanding all their polite- 
 ness, often retain so much of their pro- 
 vincial dialect, and commit such gross er- 
 rors in speaking and writing, as to exclude 
 them from the honor of being the stand- 
 ard of accurate pronunciation. Those who 
 unite these two characters, and with the 
 S8 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 correctness and precision of true learn- 
 ing combine the ease and elegance of 
 genteel life, may justly be styled the 
 only true standard of propriety of 
 speech." These words present the view 
 theoretically accepted . The leading lex- 
 icographers, who prided themselves upon 
 their orthoepy, did not question its jus- 
 tice. They felt bound, in consequence, 
 to show that their right to be treated as 
 authorities was due to the happy com- 
 bination which had met in them of the 
 correctness of learning and the elegance 
 of gentility. Accordingly, their utter- 
 ances on this point deserve much more 
 attention than they have ever received. 
 First in order comes Sheridan. He 
 was bom at Quilca, in Ireland. His fa- 
 ther, a teacher and a clergyman, was the 
 intimate friend and chosen companion 
 of Swift. It was to some extent upon 
 59 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the personal relations existing between 
 these two that the son based his title to 
 speak with authority. According to 
 him, in the time of Queen Anne, the 
 Augustan age of our literature, special 
 attention was paid to the English lan- 
 guage. It was then pronounced with 
 the greatest uniformity..aiid.with the ut- 
 most elegance. When the House of 
 Hanover, indifferent to learning and let- 
 ters, came to the throne, this happy con- 
 dition of things disappeared. Men be- 
 came careless both in writing and speak- 
 ing. But Sheridan had received his 
 early education from a master — by 
 whom he meant his father — ^who had 
 been trained in the traditions of the old 
 school, and who, through Swift, had 
 ample facilities for acquiring the best 
 pronunciation when pronunciation was 
 at its best. To this master he read 
 60 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 daily for hours, and received from him 
 constant correction. Subsequently he 
 had come in contact with the men of the 
 age most distinguished for rank and 
 genius, and the instruction he received 
 in early youth he had reinforced by 
 studjring the utterance of the many wise 
 and great whom he met. 
 
 We have here Sheridan's credentials 
 from his own lips. He was an educated 
 Irishman, who had been trained by an- 
 other Irishman, and from him had re- 
 ceived the pure pronunciation of the so- 
 called Augustan age of our literature. 
 This, he averred, was better than that 
 which had preceded or that which had 
 followed it. His original authority was, 
 therefore, that of his father, and, by im- 
 plication, that of Dean Swift. It was 
 largely upon the respect due to the lat- 
 ter that he based his own claims to con- 
 6i 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 sideration. In so doing, Sheridan was 
 justified to this extent, that there were 
 not many subjects about which Swift 
 was more particular than pronunciation. 
 He insisted upon it in season, and some- 
 times, as it may seem to us, when it was 
 distinctly out of season. Dr. Delany 
 relates, for instance, that when any one 
 of the clergy came to occupy his pulpit, 
 the Dean would pull out his pencil and a 
 piece of paper the moment the man be- 
 gan the delivery of his sermon.* He 
 thus got himself ready to pounce upon 
 any deviations the speaker made from 
 the orthodox orthoepy. After the ser- 
 vices were finished, he never failed to 
 admonish the culprit of his errors. De- 
 lany seemed to look upon this course as 
 
 ' ' Observations Upon Lord Orrery's Re- 
 marks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jona- 
 than Swift' (1754), p. 206. 
 
 62 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 much to Swift's credit. It evinced a 
 disinterested desire on his part to ren- 
 der his subordinates perfect in every 
 particular. He could hardly have ex- 
 pected it to contribute to the fervor 
 and effectiveness of a pulpit orator, to 
 be conscious that all the while he is de- 
 livering his discourse there sits before 
 him the sternest of judges, intent upon 
 noting the words he uses, not for their 
 fitness to impart spiritual instruction, 
 but for the way they are pronounced. 
 Here, too, comes in the ever-recurring 
 question, Who taught Swift his pro- 
 nunciation? He was bom in Ireland. 
 Nearly all his life was spent there be- 
 fore he attained his majority. It is 
 natural to assume that he was affected 
 by the peculiarities of the speech he 
 was accustomed to hear constantly dur- 
 ing the impressionable days of boy- 
 63 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 hood and youth. Assuredly, if his 
 usage was represented accurately by 
 Sheridan, he indulged in pronuncia- 
 tions which would have been charac- 
 terized in England, at least later, as 
 Irishisms. 
 
 The pronunciation originally derived 
 in the manner just stated, Sheridan tells 
 us, had been modified and developed by 
 him to bring it into full accord with that 
 of the age in which he lived. He had 
 studied with care the usage that pre- 
 vailed in the best society. This he had 
 been privileged to enter everywhere. 
 Accordingly, he was fitted both by early 
 training and by later investigation of 
 the subject to act as a guide to others. 
 Any one so disposed can now accept 
 Sheridan at his own valuation. But not 
 so did his contemporaries. Naturally, 
 rival lexicographers would criticise his 
 64 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 orthoepy with severity. That was both 
 a personal privilege and a professional 
 duty. But his work did not escape ridi- 
 cule from those who had no interest in 
 any of the other pronouncing diction- 
 aries issuing from the press. In particu- 
 lar his Irishisms, as they were called, 
 were made a constant subject of re- 
 proach. There are a few words, for in- 
 stance, in which s followed by u has the 
 sound ordinarily denoted by sh. Sheri- 
 dan extended this peculiarity to a num- 
 ber of others — in fact, to all beginning 
 with the prefix super. If this sotind was 
 heard in sure and sugar and isstie, he 
 seemed to see no reason why it should 
 not be found in suicide and superstition. 
 Accordingly, the first syllables of these 
 he pronotmced as if they were spelled 
 shoo^cide, shooper-stition. From this 
 and other views of his there was, natu- 
 s 6s 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 rally, dissent. Indeed, a little later a 
 pamphlet was brought out, and ran 
 through several editions, entitled 'A 
 Caution to Gentlemen Who Use Sheri- 
 dan's Dictionary.' It praised him high- 
 ly in many ways; but as regards or- 
 thoepy, no mercy was shown to his 
 imputed errors. One damning charge 
 there was, from which it was impossi- 
 ble for him to free himself. "He was," 
 said his critic, "an Irishman; and to 
 the last period of his life his origin 
 was obvious in his pronunciation." 
 
 Next came Walker. Like Sheridan, 
 no small share of his life had been spent 
 in the theatrical profession. Much of 
 the time he had been under Garrick him- 
 self, and had noted with care the pro- 
 nunciation of the greatest actor who 
 ever trod the English stage. But it was 
 the favor he met with in the lectures he 
 66 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 went about delivering on elocution that 
 led him to turn his attention to the com- 
 pilation of a pronouncing dictionary. 
 The result of his labors was not made 
 known until some years after the ap- 
 pearance of Sheridan's similar work, 
 but it had been prepared long before. 
 As early as 1774 Walker published a 
 quarto pamphlet dedicated to Garrick, 
 outlining the general idea of a pronounc- 
 ing dictionary on a plan entirely new. 
 It further contained observations on 
 several words which were pronounced 
 differently. An advertisement accom- 
 panying it informed the reader that the 
 proposed work was then ready for the 
 press, would be comprised in two vol- 
 umes, and would be delivered to sub- 
 scribers at the price of a guinea and a 
 half. But the appeal for subscriptions 
 met with no adequate response. As a 
 67 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 contemporary periodical observed, the 
 plan was above both the comprehension 
 and the pockets of the public. The two 
 volumes dwindled into a single one, 
 which came out the next year. In it 
 the words followed one another accord- 
 ing to their terminations. At a some- 
 what later period the work was entitled, 
 what it really waS, a Rhjmiing Diction- 
 ary. As such it has held its own from 
 that time to the present day. It was 
 not, however, until 1791 that the first 
 edition appeared of the regular pro- 
 nouncing dictionary, which formed the 
 great labor of Walker's life. 
 
 Of all the eighteenth-century ortho- 
 epists Walker is entitled to much the 
 most consideration. This is not due en- 
 tirely to the fact that he became gen- 
 erally accepted as an authority, and in 
 consequence of that acceptance extend - 
 68 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ed far and wide the usage he recom- 
 mended. He is now of interest and im- 
 portance because of the attitude he as- 
 sumed towards pronunciation itself, and 
 the light he threw upon the differences 
 which then prevailed. He was not con- 
 tent with recording usage as he found 
 it, or fancied that he had found it. He 
 had views of his own as to the principles 
 by which it should be governed. These 
 he constantly reinforced by pointing 
 out examples of their violation. He 
 saw clearly and admitted fully that 
 the correctest theoretical pronunciation 
 could not hold its ground against the 
 pronunciiitloir of cultivated society, 
 htrwewr^ntrafy'the latter might be 
 t o anal ogy. But while he recognized 
 the binding power of the usage of the 
 superior class, he reserved the right to 
 protest against the rightfulness of the 
 69 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 authority which he felt compelled to 
 obey. When this polite usage varied, 
 he pointed out which he deemed the 
 better way, and strove to induce men 
 to follow it. He entreated, he inveighed. 
 His work is so full of comments upon 
 different existing pronunciations that it 
 must always be of peculiar value to any 
 one interested in the history of orthoepy; 
 and there will be constant occasion in 
 the course of these pages to note his 
 criticisms of others, to cite his state- 
 ments about the then current usage, and 
 occasionally to record his sorrows, for 
 his subject was one he took very seri- 
 ously. Walker, indeed, had but little of 
 the special knowledge which is now 
 deemed indispensable to the orthoepist. 
 That was a deficiency which he shared 
 with his contemporaries. But in his 
 way he was a hard student of his subject, 
 70 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 as well as a keen observer of the pro- 
 nunciations prevalent in his day. There 
 was ample reason, therefore, for the 
 favor his work met with; and if men 
 were disposed to submit to authority at 
 all, his was certainly as satisfactory as 
 any which presented itself. 
 
 Not that Walker's assertions and in- 
 ferences are to be always received with 
 the trusting faith we give to a divine 
 revelation. In his comments upon what 
 is and what ought to be, he was by no 
 means free from the influence of the as- 
 sociations by which he had long been 
 surrounded. He was sometimes ruled 
 by theory which was altogether too re- 
 fined for practice. He had a high philo- 
 sophical way of justifying certain pro- 
 nunciations, which is much more enter- 
 taining than it is convincing. Fierce and 
 pierce, for instance, he made in his first 
 71 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 work to ryme with verse. It was what 
 Milton and others had done long before. 
 But by the time his dictionary appeared, 
 Walker became aware that this pro- 
 nunciation, though still retained upon 
 the stage, was not the pronunciation of 
 poUte society. It was in the following 
 way he explained the discrepancy : "Act- 
 ors," he wrote, "who have such con- 
 tinual occasion to express the passions, 
 feel a propriety in giving a short vowel 
 sound to a word denoting a rapid and 
 violent emotion; and, therefore, though 
 the pronunciation may be said to be 
 grammatically improper, it is philo- 
 sophically right." Much the same sort 
 of explanation was given of cheerful and 
 fearful, where the first syllable of each 
 was permitted by him to be sounded as 
 cher and fer. The refinements in which 
 he occasionally indulged may be illus- 
 72 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 trated by his account of the circum- 
 stances under which it is proper to 
 sound the g of the ending -ing, and when 
 not. This was then a subject of dispute 
 and, as we are told, a cause of great em- 
 barrassment. Walker had his way of 
 settling the difiSculty, and he announced 
 it in 1783 in a little work of his, then 
 published, entitled ' Hints for Improve- 
 ment in the Art of Reading.' Accord- 
 ing to it, two syllables ending in the 
 same sound cannot properly follow each 
 other. The repetition had a very bad 
 effect upon the ear. Accordingly, when 
 the verb itself ends in -ing, the g of the 
 present participle must not be heard; 
 when not so ending, it must be. In 
 consequence, the present participles of 
 ring, sing, and swing must be pronounced 
 ring-in, sing-in, swing-in. On the other 
 hand, in the participles of pin, begin, 
 73 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 and sin the presence of the g should be 
 distinctly manifested. If this rule were 
 not observed, we should have in each 
 case the "same disgusting repetition" 
 of the same sound. 
 
 Walker, like his predecessor, was care- 
 ful to give us his reasons for being ac- 
 cepted as an authority. He, too, ac- 
 cording to his own account, had been 
 the chosen companion of the best and 
 the highest in the land. But he was far 
 from approving of the pronunciation 
 taught by Sheridan, also a representa- 
 tive of the most cultivated society. 
 "The numerous instances," he wrote, 
 " I have given of impropriety, incon- 
 sistency, and want of acquaintance with 
 the analysis of the language sufficiently 
 show how imperfect I think his diction- 
 ary is upon the whole." Walker, in 
 fact, felt free to criticise any or all of 
 74 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 his predecessors. Nares, already men- 
 tioned, had, in 1784, brought out a work 
 on English orthoepy, though he is now 
 known mainly by his glossary of Eliza- 
 bethan words and phrases. Of him 
 Walker declared that he "had on many 
 occasions mistaken the best usage." 
 With his own possession of that some- 
 what vague article he was supremely 
 satisfied, and he was good enough to let 
 us know how he came to secure it. In 
 the advertisement to the later editions of 
 his dictionary he informed us that he 
 was bom within a few miles of London, 
 had lived there almost all his life, and 
 had there also exercised himself in pub- 
 lic speaking for many years. He was, 
 in truth, profoimdly impressed with his 
 own opportunities and qualifications. 
 "To such a person," he proudly re- 
 marked of himself, "if to any one, the 
 7S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 true pronunciation of the language must 
 be very familiar." The vernacular in- 
 stinct, he went on to tell us, that was 
 his own by right of birth, had been de- 
 veloped by constant study and by con- 
 stant association with the best speak- 
 ers. 
 
 Self-confidence of this sort is an ef- 
 fective auxiUary in most struggles; but 
 in matters of usage it is more than half 
 the battle. No small share of Walker's 
 success in being received as an authority 
 was due to his calm assertion that when 
 it came to pronunciation he was the 
 man, and on that subject wisdom would 
 die with him. But the weary seeker 
 after an unassailable standard was not 
 permitted to escape from the distrac- 
 tion of conflicting authorities by repos- 
 ing peacefully in Walker's arms. If 
 that lexicographer found fault with 
 76 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Sheridan, there were those who found 
 fault with him. Not to speak of others, 
 Knowles, in 1835, brought out his pro- 
 nouncing dictionary. On the title-page 
 he proclaimed himself the father of the 
 author of 'Virginius,' and also the 
 nephew of Thomas Sheridan. It was to 
 be expected that the nephew of his 
 uncle should not speak too well of that 
 uncle's depreciator. He asserted that 
 where Sheridan had committed one 
 error Walker had committed two. Cen- 
 sures from such a quarter might per- 
 haps be attributed to hereditary hos- 
 tility. That is a view, however, which 
 cannot be taken of the criticism made 
 by Smart, who, in 1836, brought out a 
 revision of Walker's dictionary, "adapt- 
 ed," says the title-page, "to the present 
 state of literature and science." In a 
 preface to a later edition of this work, 
 77 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Smart loftily declared that the authors 
 of previous dictionaries had, with few 
 exceptions, been Irishmen or Scotch- 
 men. No wonder that he felt outraged 
 at the presumption which had attempt- 
 ed to override the disabilities of birth. 
 Furthermore, he tells us, he had been in- 
 formed that Walker himself was a York- 
 shireman, and was confident that the 
 information must be correct from cer- 
 tain pronunciations which he specified. 
 "This Northern peculiarity," he added, 
 "along with others of provincial origin, 
 is unconsciously copied by provincial 
 editors of subsequent dictionaries, who 
 pay more deference to Walker's correct- 
 ness of ear than my experience warrants 
 me in conceding." 
 
 As Walker had taken particular pains 
 to state that he was bom near London, 
 and had spent most of his life there, it 
 78 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 was somewhat hard upon him to be dis- 
 dainfully termed a Yorkshireman by his 
 own reviser, and in addition to have the 
 pure London pronunciation, upon which 
 he had prided himself, stigmatized as 
 provincial by another cockney. Smart, 
 in his turn, did not neglect to disclose to 
 us the foundation of his right to be deem- 
 ed an authority. It was nothing but a 
 variation of the same old tune. He was 
 bom and bred in the West End of Lon- 
 don. From the outset of his career his 
 attention had been turned to the subject 
 of orthoepy. Early in life he had pro- 
 duced a work on that subject, entitled 
 'A Practical Grammar of English Pro- 
 nunciation.' He had been employed 
 as a teacher of elocution in the first 
 families of the kingdom, not excepting 
 the family of the highest person. He 
 had lectured frequently before literary 
 79 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 and scientific institutions in the metrop- 
 olis, and during the same period had 
 kept up a constant intercourse with men 
 of letters. What more could be asked? 
 
II 
 
 THERE are two things that strike 
 the attention of any one who 
 makes a careful examination of diction- 
 aries and of the orthoepy set forth by 
 the men who prepare them. The first is 
 that the pronunciation of a certain num- 
 ber of words is represented in them dif- 
 ferently. The second is that the com- 
 pilers of all of them assert their own in- 
 fallibility or assume it. Each one of 
 these has a serene confidence in the con- 
 clusions which he has reached. Each 
 one is thoroughly convinced of his ability 
 to act as a guide to others. The early 
 compilers, as we have seen, made the 
 mistake of giving the reasons upon which 
 6 8i 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 their faith in themselves was founded. 
 They assured us that they had spent 
 their lives wholly or in part in a region 
 where the pure article of pronunciation 
 was supposed to be held in keeping by 
 the nobility of rank and of intellect. To 
 them, accordingly, had been vouchsafed 
 the very best opportunities for securing 
 this inestimable jewel. They had been 
 in the habit of giving instruction in fam- 
 ilies that belonged to the highest circles. 
 They had associated familiarly with the 
 most distinguished men of science and 
 letters. It is, therefore, naturally an- 
 noying to the seeker after positive truth 
 to find these intimate friends of scholars 
 and statesmen disagreeing among them- 
 selves — ^in fact, manifesting at times a 
 thinly veiled contempt for the opinions 
 of their rivals, and implying that the so- 
 ciety in which these had learned their 
 82 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 way of pronouncing was no better than 
 it should be. 
 
 It is more than annoying; it is dis- 
 couraging. For their differences are 
 sometimes very marked. From the out- 
 set there has inevitably been the ever- 
 lasting contest between the sticklers for 
 abstract propriety and the advocates of 
 what has become the general practice. 
 This contention has ended sometimes in 
 the success of the one party, sometimes 
 in that of the other. In colonel we have 
 seen the triumph of the latter. We can 
 offset it, however, by the triumph of the 
 former in China. Lilac may also be 
 added. In polite society this word was 
 once frequently pronounced as if written 
 laylock, and indeed it was sometimes so 
 printed. Though common, it appears to 
 have never been the exclusive pronun- 
 ciation, and has now become dialectic or 
 83 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 provincial. But the success of abstract 
 propriety will perhaps seem most strik- 
 ing to many in the case of the words cu- 
 cumber and asparagus. In each of these 
 two it has taken practically a century 
 to establish the present usage. Sheri- 
 dan knows no such pronunciation as 
 cowcumber, and while he inserts sparrow- 
 grass, he merely says of it that it is " cor- 
 rupted from asparagus." But Walker 
 manfully recognized the actual situation. 
 He observes regretfully of cucumber that 
 "it seems too firmly fixed in the sound of 
 cowcumber to be altered." He admits, 
 as did Johnson and others, that aspara- 
 gus is the theoretically correct form; but 
 he adds that "the corruption of the word 
 into sparrow-grass is so general that 
 asparagus has an air of stiffness and 
 pedantry." 
 Walker, indeed, regarded the culinary 
 84 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 art as a prolific source of orthoepic evil. 
 He remarked of frumenty that it was al- 
 most universally corrupted into fur- 
 menty and sometimes into furmete. "1 
 believe," he added, dejectedly, "it 
 is seldom found that words employed 
 in the concerns of cookery are ever 
 recovered from irregularity." There 
 was some justification for the view, 
 though but little for the despondency 
 he manifested about it. We learn from 
 a treatise of the lexicographer Bailey, 
 published in 1726, that a then common 
 and an apparently fully authorized pro- 
 nunciation of onion was innian. This 
 has lasted down to the present day; 
 but long before Walker's time it had 
 fallen, save in Ireland, from its high 
 estate. Even he himself is found ex- 
 ulting in the prospective triumph of saw 
 over sas as the representative of the first 
 8S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 syllable of sausage. The correct, he 
 told us, pronounced the word saw'sidge; 
 the vulgar sas'sidge. Yet he had to ad- 
 mit that in the latter class were included 
 Sheridan and some other orthoepists; 
 nor in this instance did he feel so sure of 
 the prevalence or superiority of his own 
 usage as to venture to exclude abso- 
 lutely the other. 
 
 It must not be overlooked, however, 
 that for some of these apparently irreg- 
 ular pronunciations there was at one 
 time full justification in the orthog- 
 raphy. Notably was this true of cu- 
 cumber. The pronunciation cowcumber 
 was not a corruption. During a con- 
 siderable period of time that was not 
 only the prevalent but a legitimate 
 spelling of the word. When Mr. Pepys 
 tells us in his Diary ' that a certain gen- 
 ' August 22, 1663. 
 86 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 tleman was "dead of eating cowcum- 
 bers," he was conforming in his orthog- 
 raphy to the practice of his age. We 
 may pardon him even another spelHng 
 of the same sort on the ground of its 
 doubtless exact representation of his 
 pronunciation. "Thence to the Gray- 
 hound in Fleet Street," he wrote, "and 
 there drank some raspberry sack and eat 
 some sasages, and so home very merry." * 
 But the case is different with sparrow- 
 grass. The way had been made open 
 for this form by the frequent and prob- 
 ably general dropping, both in speaking 
 and writing, of the initial a of the word 
 from which it was corrupted. Sparagus 
 was common in print, and undoubtedly 
 much more so in conversation . The tran- 
 sition from it to sparrow-grass was easy. 
 The latter, accordingly, was an attempt 
 'November 12, i66i. 
 87 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 on the part of popular etymology to at- 
 tach a sort of sense to a strange word it 
 could not easily comprehend. 
 
 But neither in this case nor in that of 
 cucumber did these pronunciations die out 
 easily or early from the practice of polite 
 society. The change was gradual! No 
 well-taught person, Smart declared, in 
 1836, in the preface to his revision of 
 Walker, would any longer say cowcum- 
 ber or sparrow-grass, although any other 
 pronunciation of cucumber and aspara- 
 gus would have been pedantic thirty 
 years before. In 1835 Knowles, too, 
 had felt called on to denounce cowcum- 
 ber, which he mentions as still the vul- 
 gar pronunciation of cucumber. It is a 
 natural inference, however, from his 
 further comment, that though he said 
 vulgar, it was the word vulgar in its 
 original and not in its derived sense 
 88 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 which he had in mind. "Neither fash- 
 ion nor general custom," he added, 
 "ought to sanction the gross corruption 
 of this word." In fact, any pronuncia- 
 tion once widely prevalent gives up the 
 ghost reluctantly. In some quarters 
 cowcumber can doubtless still be heard. 
 Sparrow-grass has gone, it is true, from 
 the speech of the educated; but it is still 
 no uncommon thing to hear in grocers' 
 shops asparagus simply designated as 
 grass. 
 
 This survival of ancient usage ex- 
 plains the existence among the unedu- 
 cated of many pronunciations which, at 
 a former period, were regularly employed 
 by the educated. The language of the 
 illiterate is, to a great extent, archaic. 
 It retains words and meanings and 
 grammatical constructions which were 
 once in the best of use, but have ceased 
 89 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 to be used by the best. This is as true 
 of pronunciation as it is of vocabulary 
 and grammar. In this respect the 
 archaic nature of the speech of the un- 
 educated manifests itself in practices 
 which would be little expected to exist. 
 It sometimes affects the place of the ac- 
 cent. In our tongue it is generally pop- 
 ular usage which is disposed to lay the 
 stress upon a syllable far from the end of 
 the word. It is against this tendency 
 that sticklers for the observance of the 
 Latin or Greek quantity have fought, 
 as we shall see later, most stubbornly. 
 Yet, curiously enough, this practice, 
 based upon classical authority, lingers 
 sometimes in the mouths of the uncul- 
 tivated long after it has been abandoned 
 by the cultivated. Readers of Milton 
 are well aware that with him blasphe- 
 mous is invariably pronounced blasphe'- 
 90 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 mous. It was probably the general 
 usage of the educated men of his time. 
 No one now pronounces it so save the 
 unlettered. They remain faithful to 
 the classical quantity, and are treated 
 with contumely for it by such as deem 
 it both their right and duty to be horri- 
 fied by hearing illustrate pronounced as 
 ill'ustrate. Similar observations may be 
 made of contrary and mischievous. Char- 
 acter also had once, perhaps universally, 
 the accent on the penult. This prac- 
 tice was given up at last, but not till 
 after usage had long wavered between 
 placing the stress on the first or the 
 second syllable. Yet in Ireland the pe- 
 nultimate accent continued with the ed- 
 ucated to the middle of the eighteenth 
 century at least; and with the unedu- 
 cated it continues to the present day. 
 ' The History of Sir Charles Grandison ' 
 91 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 appeared in 1754- In it Richardson 
 introduces a certain Captain Salmonet, 
 who, he tells us, spoke English as a 
 Frenchman, "but pronounced the word 
 character as an Irishman." 
 
 It is not, however, the accentuation 
 which best exemplifies the survival in 
 the speech of the uneducated of what 
 was once the usage of the educated. 
 That is better seen in the pronunciation 
 of the vowels. According to the few or- 
 thoepic guides which have come down 
 from the late seventeenth century and 
 the early eighteenth, the termination -ture 
 must have had then pretty generally the 
 sound now indicated by -ter. We can still 
 hear it at the present day, and, further- 
 more, see it represented in the words 
 spelled as nater and picter and critter. 
 In certain instances these usages seem 
 to have held out long in good society. 
 92 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Walker felt called upon to denounce 
 what he termed a vulgar pronunciation 
 of nature. This he gave as na-ter. 
 Such a practice, he observed, could not 
 be too carefully avoided. But, clearly, 
 no such caution against its use would 
 have been introduced into his dictionary 
 had not this so-called vulgar pronun- 
 ciation been frequently heard from the 
 lips of persons who could not be deemed 
 vulgar. Nor is there any particular 
 need of our assuming to ourselves a 
 special superiority in this matter over 
 our fathers. Of the two pronunciations 
 ot figure authorized in most dictionaries, 
 that which gives the final syllable the 
 sound indicated by ur or er is the one to 
 which, perhaps, on the whole, the weight 
 of authority inclines. But the two ways 
 have long existed, and both have had 
 their advocates. Walker noted the dif- 
 93 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 ference in his day. "There is," he said, 
 "a coarse and a delicate pronunciation 
 of this word and its compounds." The 
 coarse he represented by figgur, the deli- 
 cate by fig-yure. His adjectives show 
 clearly where his preferences lay; in- 
 deed, it was only this delicate pronun- 
 ciation, as he termed it, which he sanc- 
 tioned. Yet his authority was insuffi- 
 cient to establish the universality of the 
 practice he approved; and though the 
 fuller pronunciation is likely in time to 
 drive out the other, it will have a long 
 struggle before it succeeds. 
 
 An interesting illustration of these 
 survivals which is still retained in poUte 
 usage is seen in the word clerk. It is 
 not until very lately that an English 
 dictionary, as distinguished from an 
 American, has recognized any other pro- 
 nunciation of it than dark. Yet we are 
 94 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 told by the most recent authority on the 
 subject that clurk, as regularly heard in 
 the United States, has of late "become 
 somewhat frequent in London and its 
 neighborhood."' Such a pronunciation 
 was sure to come, whether it had previ- 
 ously existed in the United States or not. 
 Clerk is simply following the course 
 that has already been taken by no 
 small number of words which have the 
 combination of the letters e and r. 
 Down to the latter part of the eighteenth 
 century merchant was ordinarily pro- 
 nounced as if it were spelled marchant. 
 So Sheridan gave it in his dictionary. 
 For thus doing he was taken to task 
 by brother orthoepists, who denounced 
 him as having sanctioned a sound of e 
 
 ' ' New Historical Dictionary,' under clerk. 
 The representation of its pronunciation by 
 d-iirk is my own. 
 
 95 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 which had become vulgar and was heard 
 only among the lower order of people. 
 Here, as in general, the uneducated 
 clung to the usage which had died out 
 among the educated. The former, in- 
 deed, still continue to give at times to 
 certain and service and servant and ser- 
 mon and serpent the pronunciation sartin 
 and sarvice and sarvant and sarmon and 
 sarpent. Perhaps it was the analogy 
 of this last word which led them, fur- 
 ther, to add a, t to vermin and call it 
 varmint. 
 
 The custom of giving the sound of a 
 tc the e of these words did not die out 
 rapidly. As late as his own day Walker 
 had to admit that "even among the 
 better sort we sometimes hear the salu- 
 tation, Sir, your sarvant ! though this pro- 
 nunciation of the word singly would be 
 looked upon as a mark of the lowest vul- 
 96 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 garity . ' ' Clargy as the pronunciation of 
 clergy has scarcely been heard since the 
 seventeenth century, and clerk will, in 
 course of time, inevitably partake of its 
 fortunes. Serjeant and it, and a few 
 names of places, are now the only ones 
 which hold out against the general ten- 
 dency, but they are not likely to hold out 
 forever. Jersey was once pronounced 
 Jarsey occasionally, if not regularly. 
 It is doubtful if Hertford and Derby 
 can withstand permanently the ortho- 
 epic pressure which is steadily directed, 
 though without conscious intention, 
 against the sound of ar in these words. 
 At the same time, it is to be kept in mind 
 that in changing the sound we are not 
 conforming to the orthography. We 
 are simply going from one kind of mis- 
 pronunciation to another. In clerical 
 we have the genuine sound of e; but we 
 7 97 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 do not have it in clergy or clerk, whether 
 we pronounce these words according to 
 the one method or the other. 
 
 But the most widespread and still 
 the' most noticeable of these survivals is 
 that which gives to the digraph oi the 
 diphthongal sound of i. At the present 
 day, when we set out to represent illiter- 
 ate pronunciation of certain common 
 words, we write bile for hoil, brile for 
 broil, fine for join, ile for oil, pint for 
 point, pison for poison, spile for spoil. 
 There was a time when, in most and per- 
 haps in all of these words, as well as in 
 some others, the sound denoted by the 
 spelling with i indicated the usage of 
 the educated. The practice threat- 
 ened to extend itself to every word in 
 which oi appeared. In the famous 
 triplet of Pope we see it fully exem- 
 plified : 
 
 98 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 " Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to 
 join 
 The varjring verse, the full resounding line, 
 The long majestic march, and energy divine." 
 
 Here we see join ryming to line and 
 divine. That jine was Pope's regular 
 way of pronouncing the verb there can 
 be no doubt. It is further perfectly fair 
 to assume that in so doing he followed 
 the common cultivated practice of his 
 time. The concordance to his works — 
 excluding the Homeric translations — 
 shows that join occurs in them at the 
 end of a verse just fourteen times. The 
 words with which it rjrmes are design, 
 dine, divine, line, mine, nine, Proserpine, 
 shine, thine, and vine. In a similar way 
 the past tense joined rymes with find, 
 mankind, mind, and refined, and like- 
 wise joins with mines. This must be 
 deemed conclusive as to the pronuncia- 
 99 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 tion accepted generally, if not univer- 
 sally, in the circle in which moved the 
 greatest of the then living English men 
 of letters. Moreover, in the only in- 
 stance in which Pope used the past 
 tense of spoiled as the final word of a 
 line it rymed with wild. 
 
 But we need not go to the poets to 
 infer what must have been the facts. 
 Plenty of direct evidence on this point 
 is furnished by the orthoepists them- 
 selves. During the latter part of the 
 eighteenth century they were much dis- 
 turbed by the common practice of pro- 
 nouncing oi as i. Would it become 
 universal? Fears were entertained and 
 expressed that its proper sound would 
 disappear from the speech. Kenrick 
 deplored the fact that certain words had 
 lost it almost entirely. "Such," said he, 
 "are boil, join, and many others, which 
 
 I GO 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 it would now appear affected to pro- 
 nounce otherwise than bile and jine." 
 This statement was made in 1 7 7 3 . About 
 half a score of years later hope for the 
 orthoepic future of these words began 
 to revive. It still required courage, in- 
 deed, to give to oi its proper sound; but 
 courage was sometimes not lacking. 
 "The banished diphthong," wrote Nares, 
 "seems at length to be upon its return; 
 for there are many who are now hardy 
 enough to pronoimce boil exactly as 
 they do toil, join like coin, etc." ' Nares 
 seems to have been unaware that his 
 very comparisons proved the pronuncia- 
 tion he favored had been making con- 
 tinuous progress for more than a hun- 
 dred years . E arlier in the century B alley 
 represented the pronunciation of coin by 
 quine. The following couplet of Dry- 
 ' ' Elements of Orthoepy,' p. 74- 
 
 lOI 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 den shows what was his pronunciation 
 of toil: 
 
 " While he, withdrawn, at their mad labor 
 smiles, 
 And safe enjoys the Sabbath of his toils." • 
 
 There was, clearly, difference of usage, 
 however, even at this later period, about 
 this last word. But a little while before 
 Nares had cited its diphthong as one 
 correctly sounded, Kenrick had ob- 
 served that oil and toil were frequently 
 pronounced like isle and tile. The 
 former orthoepist asserted, indeed, that 
 the only real objection to giving the 
 true sound to oi in join was that "it is 
 so constantly rhymed to fine, line, and 
 the like by our best poets." * 
 
 ' 'Absalom and Achitophel,' part i., line 
 912 (1681). 
 
 '' Elements of Orthoepy,' p. 74, note. 
 102 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 There was really no ground for the 
 anxiety which orthoepists then enter- 
 tained about the possible disappearance 
 of the oi. The diphthong had been for a 
 long time steadily regaining its rights. 
 By the end of the century Walker felt 
 justified in bestowing upon the once 
 common pronunciation the epithet vid- 
 gar. This is the adjective which ortho- 
 epists most affect when they wish to de- 
 noiince any practice to which they take 
 exception. Walker resorted to it fre- 
 quently, and the revolution in usage 
 had apparently now become so rapid 
 that he could venture to do so in safety 
 in the case of this diphthong. He re- 
 ferred to the habit of sounding oi as i as 
 being still prevalent among the vulgar. 
 Whether the implied imputation was 
 true then or not, it has become so now. 
 At the present time cultivated speech 
 103 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 preserves this relic of past usage only in 
 choir. Even here the exception is due to 
 the fact that there had long existed, as 
 there still exists, another spelling, quire. 
 This is the representative of the various 
 forms which the word has had from its 
 first introduction into the language. 
 That took place near the end of the thir- 
 teenth century. These forms carried 
 with them then their own pronunciation. 
 The spelling choir is not found till the 
 latter part of the seventeenth century. 
 For a good while after it was little used 
 in Uterature as distinct from technical 
 works. Its late appearance, and its 
 comparatively infrequent employment 
 for the time immediately following its 
 appearance, prevented it from affecting 
 the sound of the diphthong. 
 
 These examples, if they teach noth- 
 ing else, suggest the possibility that pro- 
 104 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 nunciations which are now looked upon 
 by many as tests of good breeding and 
 culture may come in time to be reckoned 
 vulgar. Especially will this be the case 
 if in any way they violate the analogies 
 of the language. It is usually their 
 anomalous character which constitutes 
 their chief recommendation in the eyes 
 of those who assume for themselves 
 peculiar excellence in the purity of their 
 utterance. It is this same anomalous 
 character which threatens the perma- 
 nence of the cherished pronunciation. 
 Yet it is not the conflict which goes on 
 between what he calls the common and 
 what he considers the proper usage 
 which alone vexes the soul of the ortho- 
 epist. With variations already existing, 
 and others steadily coming to exist, he 
 finds himself in constant perplexity. 
 In a language which has more than 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 forty sounds to be represented, and with 
 but a few more than twenty charac- 
 ters to represent them, pronunciation is 
 always liable to partake of a certain de- 
 gree of lawlessness. This is true in par- 
 ticular of the vowel system. There ca- 
 price and fashion have the opportunity 
 to do their perfect work. The changes 
 which take place in consequence are 
 rarely the result of any principle, or of 
 any recognizable orthoepic influence. 
 To the ordinary observer they seem 
 nothing more than the blind results of 
 chance. Yet to struggle against them 
 is usually of little avail. Orthoepists 
 may resort to entreaty or invective, but 
 in spite of their utmost efforts they are 
 often compelled to acquiesce in pro- 
 nunciations which are abhorrent to 
 their souls. 
 As this particular field is practically 
 io6 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 limitless, all that can be done here is to 
 give a slight glimpse of its nature by 
 pointing out one or two instances of the 
 conflict which at times has gone on be- 
 tween the vowel pronunciation found in 
 literature and that adopted by polite so- 
 ciety. In such cases, literature, as a 
 general rule, gets distinctly the worst of 
 it. Two interesting examples are wound 
 and wind. From the outset lexicogra- 
 phers have protested against giving to 
 the ou of the former word the sound of 
 00, as heard, for illustration, in swoon. 
 They have pointed out that in our classic 
 poetry the word invariably rymes with 
 such words as sound, found, and ground. 
 Their protests have been of but little 
 avail. Most of them continue, indeed, to 
 authorize the old, historic pronunciation, 
 and some of them to denounce the fash- 
 ionable one ; but they have to admit that 
 107 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the spoken language has been too much 
 for the literary. Even more decided 
 has been the triumph of wind over wind. 
 The latter pronunciation is, or at least 
 was, the only one known to English 
 r3mie. Were it now heard in conver- 
 sation, the listener would be struck with 
 surprise, and, in some instances, it is to 
 be feared, would be troubled with lack of 
 comprehension. Yet against this per- 
 version of pronunciation, as they re- 
 garded it, which gives the short sound 
 to i in this word, the orthoepists of the 
 eighteenth century fought persistently 
 and sturdily. It was a corruption 
 which filled the soul of Swift with pecul- 
 iar disgust. The person employing it 
 in his presence was apt to bring down 
 upon himself the great Dean's most con- 
 temptuous sarcasm. "I have a great 
 mind to find why you pronounce it 
 1 08 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 wind," he would say to the offender. 
 Neither his ridicule nor the learned ob- 
 jections of others had the slightest eflEect 
 upon the fortunes of the word. 
 
 Full as striking an illustration of this 
 indifiEerence to orthoepic sanctions may 
 be seen going on before our own eyes. 
 It is exhibited in the case of either and 
 neither. Of both these words it is to be 
 said that, as far back as we can trace 
 the pronunciation, the weight of usage 
 as well as of authority is distinctly in 
 favor of giving to the ei the sound we 
 call long e. There is a reason for this 
 preference. Nearly all the words in our 
 language that contain this digraph have 
 either the sound heard in vein or that in 
 seize. The only two common ones in 
 our tongue, so far as I can recall, in 
 which the pronunciation represented by 
 the diphthongal i appears are height and 
 109 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 sleight; and these were sometimes written 
 also with the simple * as well as ei. 
 Early in the eighteenth century, how- 
 ever, we find the * sound recorded as 
 used by some in the first syllable of 
 either and neither. It had doubtless pre- 
 vailed to a certain extent in the seven- 
 teenth century. But it seems to have 
 existed then, and for a long time after, 
 rather on sufferance, to be treated as 
 something permissible but not com- 
 mendable. When pronouncing diction- 
 aries came into vogue in the latter half of 
 the eighteenth, century, this pronimcia- 
 tion was generally looked at askance by 
 their compilers. Buchanan and John- 
 ston were the only two, as far as I can 
 discover, who declared unreservedly in 
 its favor. Both of these men, however, 
 were Scotchmen, and their opinions car- 
 ried little weight. On the other hand, 
 no 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 the rest of the orthoepists, with Sheridan 
 and Walker at their head, either recog- 
 nized exclusively the sound of e in the 
 first syllable of these words or gave it 
 distinctly the preference. This attitude 
 may be said to have been generally con- 
 tinued by their successors down to the 
 present time. Still the hostility of the 
 most widely accepted authorities has 
 failed to retard the progress of the i pro- 
 nunciation in these words. In spite of 
 its defiance of analogy, it has steadily 
 gained ground. It is perhaps now more 
 prevalent than the other; at least it is 
 full as prevalent. Fashion has either 
 favored it or has been supposed to favor 
 it. All of us are privileged in these 
 latter days frequently to witness painful 
 struggles put forth to give to the first 
 syllable of these words the sound of i by 
 those who have been brought up to give 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 it the sound of e. There is apparently 
 an impression on the part of some that 
 such a pronunciation establishes on a 
 firm foundation an otherwise doubtful 
 social standing. 
 
 If, however, the pronunciation fa- 
 vored by literature has met with re- 
 verse in the case of wind and wound, it 
 has scored a distinct triumph in gold. 
 This in poetry always rymes with such 
 words as old, fold, behold. So it does 
 now in conversation. But in the latter 
 part of the eighteenth century and the 
 beginning of the nineteenth, the fash- 
 ionable and, withal, the more frequent 
 pronunciation was goold. It was a prac- 
 tice which brought grief to the heart of 
 Walker. He looked upon it as a disgrace 
 to the language that indolence and vul- 
 garity had thus been enabled to corrupt 
 it into the sound it then had. Still he 
 
 112 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 deemed it too firmly intrenched ever to 
 disappear. Forecasts of this sort are a 
 mere waste of breath. No one can pre- 
 dict, with any approach to certainty of 
 fulfihnent, how long a particular pro- 
 nunciation of a particular word is likely 
 to last. If from any cause it comes to 
 offend the orthoepic sense of large num- 
 bers, it is destined to go, even though 
 literature and fashion have combined to 
 uphold its authority. In the tragedy of 
 'Julius Caesar' Cassius is represented as 
 saying: 
 
 " Now is it Rome indeed and room enough, 
 When there is in it but one only man." 
 
 Shakespeare's play upon the word is 
 evidence that in his age the pronuncia- 
 tion of the city's name was, at least at 
 times, that denoted by the noun with 
 which it is here joined in the quotation, 
 8 113 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 and not as now by that of the verb 
 roam. There is testimony from other 
 quarters that such was the practice gen- 
 erally. The rjnnes of poets, the direct 
 statements found in text-books, show 
 that the pronunciation indicated in the 
 lines just given was the one prevailing 
 during the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries. At the end of the latter 
 period, Walker declared that the o 
 of Rome seemed irrecoverably fixed in 
 the sound heard in move. He did not 
 speak of it with disapproval. No special 
 clamor, indeed, seems ever to have been 
 raised against the pronunciation. Yet 
 by the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, if not earlier, it had disappeared. 
 There was nothing peculiar in the 
 state of mind exhibited by Swift about 
 wind or by Walker about gold. It is 
 what we all display, with more or less 
 114 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 reason, when we hear a pronunciation 
 which is offensive to us. To him who 
 has been brought up to sound a vowel 
 in a particular way, any other way is 
 pretty sure to seem either the mark of 
 absurd affectation or intolerable vulgar- 
 ity. These are the terms which we ap- 
 ply to pronunciations which vary from 
 those prevailing in the charmed circle to 
 which we, of course, belong. When we 
 hear men indulging in such, we are led 
 to look with suspicion upon any preten- 
 sions they make to the possession of that 
 refinement and ctdture which character- 
 ize us. Examples can be found on every 
 side; but in order not to be invidious, 
 let us go back a century or so. Lord 
 Chesterfield, in writing to his son, point- 
 ed out one of the means by which the 
 vulgarity of a man, no matter what his 
 position, could be detected. It was by 
 "5 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 his pronunciation. In that he bore upon 
 him the marks of the beast. The vulgar 
 man would say, for illustration, going 
 to-war ds such and such a place, instead 
 of towards} It is not perfectly clear 
 what pronunciation it was that Chester- 
 field approved; but it seems probable 
 that he objected to putting the stress 
 upon the final syllable. This, it may be 
 remarked in passing, was the one au- 
 thorized a few years after by Dr. John- 
 son in his dictionary. Towards, indeed, 
 during the whole of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, seems to have been the cause 
 of much orthoepic contention. Some 
 placed the accent upon the first syllable ; 
 some upon the last; some crushed the 
 two syllables into one. 
 
 Another of Chesterfield's tests of 
 vulgarity he found in the word oblige. 
 ' Letter of September 27, 1749. 
 116 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Specially objectionable was the sound 
 of its i as e, which, in the illustration 
 he gave of it, he represented by ei. 
 The vulgar man, he tells us, "is obleiged, 
 not obliged, to you." The despised 
 pronunciation was one which had once 
 been heard regularly. The stock quo- 
 tation, illustrating the practice, is con- 
 tained in the couplet forming a part of 
 Pope's famous attack upon Addison : 
 
 " Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieg'd, 
 And so obliging that he ne'er oblig'd." 
 
 But in 1749, the year in which Chester- 
 field was writing, this more ancient way 
 of pronouncing the word was beginning 
 to be looked upon by some with much 
 disfavor. Among these the noble lord 
 was manifestly included. During the 
 latter half of the eighteenth century 
 more difference prevailed, perhaps, in 
 117 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 regard to this word than about towards. 
 Some pronounced it the one way, some 
 the other; there were a few who author- 
 ized both. The original pronunciation 
 held its ground for a long while. In 
 1 784 Nares gave a list of words in which, 
 according to him, "i had the sound of 
 long e." Among them this particular 
 one was included. ' ' Oblige still, I think, 
 retains it," he said, hesitatingly, "not- 
 withstanding the proscription of that 
 pronunciation by the late Lord Chester- 
 field." Even Walker, opposed to it on 
 what he called principle, put it down in 
 his dictionary as an allowable usage. 
 But the feeling had then been for a long 
 while gradually growing, that though 
 this pronunciation might not be improp- 
 er, it was distinctly old-fashioned. As 
 soon as that attitude towards it became 
 wide-spread, its entire disappearance was 
 118 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 only a question of time. George IV., 
 when Prince of Wales, used to relate, 
 with a good deal of glee, the grave 
 rebuke administered to him by John 
 Kemble for giving to the * of this word 
 the objectionable sound. "It would be- 
 come your royal mouth much better," 
 said the stately actor, "to pronounce 
 the word oblige, and not oblFege." 
 
 The fundamental principle, indeed, 
 upon which we base our orthoepical 
 criticisms is that any pronunciation we 
 do not ourselves employ, or at least tol- 
 erate, is essentially wrong. Naturally, 
 we reprobate those coming into use to 
 which we are not accustomed, as also 
 those going out of it, which, in spite of 
 our disapproval, still show a lingering 
 life. This feeling, so generally preva- 
 lent among cultivated speakers, may 
 not indicate much knowledge of the facts 
 119 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 on their part, or much appreciation of 
 the situation; but, nevertheless, it is far 
 from being an unmixed evil. In spite 
 of the ignorant pretentiousness with 
 which it is often accompanied, it may be 
 deemed, in truth, a positive benefit. 
 Changes must inevitably take place in 
 pronunciation. In consequence, how- 
 ever, of the disfavor and opposition they 
 meet, they take place slowly. This is 
 something in itself desirable. Further- 
 more, as a result of the dislike, reason- 
 able or unreasonable, which large ntim- 
 bers are sure to manifest for a new 
 pronunciation, these changes are not 
 apt to go very far. Some of them are, 
 of course, certain to override the preju- 
 dices of the hostile and establish them- 
 selves in general usage. The caprice of 
 fashion plays, as we have seen, no small 
 part in determining the status of a lim- 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ited number. But in addition there are 
 certain influences always at work which 
 tend to produce diversity. Two of 
 them require special consideration, both 
 for what they have done and are still 
 doing in the way of bringing about 
 change. They are important because 
 they act not so much upon individual 
 words as upon whole classes. They are, 
 further, operating at all times and in all 
 places. 
 
 The first concerns the shifting of the 
 accent. With us a general disposition 
 exists — subject to numerous exceptions 
 — ^to place it as far from the end as pos- 
 sible. The practice is occasionally car- 
 ried to such an extreme that it almost re- 
 quires a training in vocal gymnastics to 
 utter the word without giving the im- 
 pression that part of it has been swal- 
 lowed by the speaker. Excesses of this 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 sort are apt, in the long run, to cure 
 themselves; for pronunciation, like ev- 
 erjrthing else, tends to follow the line of 
 least resistance. When the accent is 
 thrown back to the fourth syllable from 
 the end, with no secondary accent to aid 
 utterance — as, for instance, in the case 
 of indisputable and inexplicable — we may 
 be confident that men of independence 
 who find the word difficult to pro- 
 nounce will take it upon them to pro- 
 nounce it to suit themselves. It is then 
 merely a matter of chance whether the 
 method they have chosen to adopt has 
 the fortune to be sanctioned by some 
 one of the numerous dictionaries. In 
 the case of the two words just cited, in- 
 disputable has, if anything, the greater 
 weight of published authority in favor 
 of placing the accent on the third sylla- 
 ble; while in the case of the more dif- 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ficult word, inexplicable, there is no 
 orthoepic authority at all for such a 
 course outside of the practice of indi- 
 viduals. 
 
 In words of four syllables the conflict 
 has usually been on the lines just indi- 
 cated. Shall the stress rest upon the 
 second syllable ? Or upon the first , with 
 generally, though not invariably, a sec- 
 ondary stress upon the third, or the re- 
 verse? Advertisement is a good illustra- 
 tion. The place of the accent has been 
 in the instance of this word a fruitful 
 source of controversy for a hundred and 
 fifty years at least, and is Ukely so to 
 remain. On the other hand, detestable, 
 which Shakespeare invariably stressed 
 upon the first syllable, has now the stress 
 upon the second. At the present day 
 differences upon the points just indi- 
 cated involve about fifty words. If we 
 123 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 should go back to the eighteenth century 
 the list would have to be considerably 
 enlarged. We may select two of them 
 as illustrative of the variation of view 
 which has prevailed at different times 
 and with different orthoepists. In the 
 case of one of these uniformity has now 
 come to prevail; in that of the other 
 there still remains diversity. Academy 
 had once the accent on the first syllable. 
 For a long period this usage continued 
 to exist. By the middle, at least, of the 
 eighteenth century the disposition to 
 give the word its present pronunciation 
 began to manifest itself — "Anciently 
 and properly," remarked Dr. Johnson, 
 "with the accent on the first syllable." 
 He cited as an example the line from 
 'Love's Labor's Lost,' 
 
 " Our court shall be a little academy," 
 
 124 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 where, however, the word in the original 
 is academe.^ But he added the observa- 
 tion that the accent was, in his time, fre- 
 quently heard upon the second syllable. 
 His implied condemnation of the prac- 
 tice did not arrest the progress of the 
 new pronunciation. By the end of the 
 century it had fully established itself, 
 and in the century which followed it be- 
 came, what it is now, the exclusive 
 usage. 
 
 The other word is corollary. Here 
 Johnson placed, without comment, the 
 accent on the first syllable, as if there 
 were no question whatever about the 
 practice. Yet his predecessor, Bailey, 
 had put it upon the second. Johnson 
 cited again from Shakespeare an illus- 
 tration, which exemplified one of the 
 meanings of the word and also its pro- 
 
 ' Achademe (folio of 1623), act i., scene i. 
 I2S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 nunciation. It was the passage in 'The 
 Tempest ' where Prospero gives to Ariel 
 the following command : 
 
 " Bring a corollary, 
 Rather than want a spirit." ' 
 
 From the great lexicographer's day to 
 our own orthoepists have been divided 
 in their treatment of this word. The 
 weight of numbers, both in England and 
 America, is distinctly in favor of the 
 pronunciation he sanctioned. Most of 
 the compilers of dictionaries have not 
 even recognized the existence of any ac- 
 centuation besides the one adopted by 
 him, though there could hardly have 
 been a time in which the other was not 
 somewhere in good use. The orthoe- 
 pists who have placed the accent on 
 the second syllable have been, however, 
 ' Act iv., scene i. 
 126 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 more considerate. They give Johnson's 
 pronunciation as an alternative. State- 
 ments not very different may be made 
 of a number of words in this same class. 
 If, further, we turn our attention to 
 words of more than four syllables, we 
 shall find essentially the same agencies 
 at work to produce diversity. 
 
 It is in the case of words of three syl- 
 lables, however, that the contest has as- 
 sumed special bitterness. In these the 
 question at issue is whether the accent 
 should rest upon the penultimate sylla- 
 ble or the antepenultimate. The peace 
 of families has been disturbed, and 
 neighbor has risen up against neighbor, 
 in consequence of the difference of views 
 held as to the proper pronunciation 
 of such words as aspirant, contemplate, 
 demonstrate, extirpate, inundate, plethoric, 
 and others too numerous to mention. 
 127 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Upon them the stress swings backward 
 and forward, from penult to antepenult, 
 and the reverse, according to difference 
 of time or place or person. In every 
 generation the controversy crops up. 
 Disagreement existed in the sixteenth 
 century, as it did in the nineteenth ; it is 
 likely to exist in the twenty-fifth. Men 
 will continue to show by irrefragable 
 proofs, as they have heretofore shown, 
 just where the accent ought to lie in all 
 such words. They will be duly shocked 
 in the future, as they have been in the 
 past, by the imbecility which fails to 
 recognize the justice of their contention 
 or the perversity which refuses to con- 
 form to the practice they enjoin. In the 
 Elizabethan period Shakespeare said, 
 indifferently, con'fiscate or confisc'ate, 
 dem'onstrate or demon' str ate, but con'tem- 
 plate alone. In the nineteenth century 
 128 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Rogers was made indignant by a usage j> 
 corresponding to the first of the two i 
 practices here indicated. "The now 
 fashionable pronunciation of several 
 words," the old poet complained, "is to 
 me at least offensive. Con'template is bad 
 enough, but bal'cony makes me sick." 
 At the present time it would produce a 
 similar nauseating effect upon many to 
 hear the accent fall upon the second 
 syllable of this last word, as was once 
 the usual practice. 
 
 It is only a few of these words which 
 have excited much feeling, but the small- 
 ness of the number has been compen- 
 sated by the acrimony displayed. The 
 principal reason for this condition of 
 things it is not difficult to discover. It 
 is the ever-recurring contest between 
 Teutonic accentuation and classical 
 quantity. In any given period the par- 
 9 129 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 ticular pronunciations in vogue represent 
 a compromise temporarily patched up 
 in the course of the irrepressible conflict 
 which goes on between these two. Cer- 
 tain words are unreservedly relinquished 
 for a time to one party; certain to the 
 other ; a few are left to be struggled over. 
 Those about which controversy contin- 
 ues to rage have almost invariably come 
 from the Latin or the Greek. Their intro- 
 duction into the language is due in the 
 first instance to scholars. Coming in un- 
 der such auspices, it is natural that where 
 the penult is long in the original tongue, 
 it should receive the accent in English. 
 It is safe to say that this is invariably 
 the case at the outset. If, further, the 
 emplojnnent of the word is limited main- 
 ly to the speech of the highly educated, 
 it is reasonably certain to retain the pro- 
 nunciation it had on its first entrance 
 130 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 into the tongue. But if it once come 
 into extensive use, the influences which 
 affect the general practice soon begin 
 to operate. The tendency speedily man- 
 ifests itself to disregard the classical 
 quantity. Of that the vast majority of 
 those who employ the word know noth- 
 ing ; for it many of those who know care 
 nothing. Consequently, the accent is 
 thrown back by the members of these 
 two classes from the penult to the ante- 
 penult. Between the scholarly usage 
 remaining faithful to the original quan- 
 tity and the popular usage, which aims 
 to conform the pronunciation to Eng- 
 lish analogies, a conflict inevitably 
 arises. 
 
 Furthermore, the agreement reached 
 
 in any particular case has no assurance 
 
 of permanence, for it is based upon no 
 
 principle. It is nothing more than a 
 
 131 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 convention. In one instance men pro- 
 nounce a word so as to give recognition 
 to the Latin quantity; in another in- 
 stance of a precisely similar character 
 they disregard it and follow English 
 analogy. Accordingly, no settlement is 
 lasting. It is hable at any moment to 
 be upset by innovation or caprice or the 
 authority of great example. The war 
 is then at once renewed. The contest is 
 far from being unequal. The classical 
 guild has always been, as indeed it ought 
 to be, a powerful one. However much 
 shorn of its strength in these later 
 times, it can still endure, in pugilistic 
 phrase, an immense amount of punish- 
 ment without showing any signs of giv- 
 ing in. Its members, as is natural, con- 
 tend steadily for the pronunciation 
 which pays respect to the quantity of 
 the syllables as found in the original. 
 132 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 They are very apt to impart a distinct 
 tone of earnestness to the expression of 
 their convictions by applying to those 
 following the contrary practice certain 
 opprobrious epithets of which "illiter- 
 ate" is the least offensive. By many of 
 them the classical quantity is regarded 
 as something altogether too sacred to 
 be trifled with. They write letters to 
 the press deploring the lamentable ten- 
 dency which has always existed, and 
 still exists, to throw back the accent 
 from the end of the word. They seem 
 to be unaware of the fact that this is 
 about the same as deploring that the 
 English language is the English lan- 
 guage. 
 
 But there is no doubt that their con- 
 tention always has had, and is always 
 likely to have, a good deal of influence 
 upon usage. Furthermore, they not 
 133 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 only recommend by their practice the 
 pronunciations they approve ; they have 
 to no small extent the means of having 
 their preferences respected. It is to the 
 men who have received classical train- 
 ing that the compilation of dictionaries 
 is mainly committed. Even those of 
 them who are abstractly disposed to pay 
 little heed to the original quantity are, 
 nevertheless, afiEected by the education 
 they have had. It has given them the 
 chance to acquire prejudices of the kind 
 just indicated. Those of the number 
 who have improved fully the opportuni- 
 ties thus furnished frequently manifest 
 a disposition in the orthoepy they sanc- 
 tion in these dictionaries to go back on 
 the least pretext to the pronunciations 
 which correspond to the classical quan- 
 tity. Even such of them as profess in- 
 difference in the matter are slow to rec- 
 134 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ognize changes which have taken place 
 in favor of the English accentuation. 
 Inundate is a case in point. For very 
 many years past the accent has been 
 placed by a large body of cultivated 
 men upon the first syllable. Yet the 
 majority of modem dictionaries will be 
 searched in vain for any authorization of 
 this usage, though heard constantly. In 
 two great American ones — ^the Interna- 
 tional and the Standard — not even is 
 its existence recognized. The same 
 statement can be made of two English 
 ones — the Encyclopaedic and Stor- 
 month's. The only three leading works 
 of this character which authorize it are 
 the Century, the Imperial, and the New 
 Historical English Dictionary. 
 
 This deference to classical quantity 
 makes often a singular exhibition of it- 
 self. "We are told in Mr. Trevelyan's 
 
 I3S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 fascinating biography that Macaulay, in 
 correcting errors, real or assumed, com- 
 mitted by his nephews and nieces, cen- 
 sured, above all, any disposition on their 
 part to pronounce the penult of met- 
 amorphosis short. This has more than 
 the interest of an example of the ques- 
 tion under discussion. It is like a re- 
 version to the old days, when every man 
 was his own orthoepist. It illustrates 
 peculiarly the independence often shown 
 by Englishmen of all generally recognized 
 authority in the matter of pronunciation, 
 and their confidence in the correctness of 
 their practice, for the reason, amply suffi- 
 cient to them, that it is their practice. 
 The American usually goes to his favor- 
 ite dictionary, and meekly accepts, with- 
 out even thinking of protest, what the 
 man he has adopted as his guide chooses 
 to tell him. In this particular case it is 
 136 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 first to be stated that most of the words 
 ending in -osis are purely technical. 
 Used only by special students, they nat- 
 urally retain the accentuation which is 
 based upon the quantity of the prim- 
 itive. Two of this class, however — 
 metamorphosis and apotheosis — have 
 escaped into the language of general 
 Uterature. In the instance of the for- 
 mer, the orthoepists of the eighteenth 
 century, including the principal lexicog- 
 raphers — Bailey, Dr. Johnson, Sheridan, 
 and Walker — agreed in placing the ac- 
 cent on the antepenult. So also have 
 done the orthoepists of the nineteenth 
 century. Not one of them, so far as I 
 can discover, recognizes even the ex- 
 istence of the pronunciation insisted 
 upon by Macaulay as the only one 
 which could properly be used. 
 
 Apotheosis has had a career somewhat 
 137 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 more checkered; still its history resem- 
 bles, in general, that of metamorphosis. 
 In its case also nearly all the orthoepists 
 of the eighteenth century put the accent 
 upon the antepenult. There were two 
 or three exceptions; but none of these 
 were men who had a great following. 
 The same state of things continued 
 largely during most of the nineteenth 
 century. The weight of authority still 
 remained distinctly in favor of the 
 antepenultimate accent. But as we ap- 
 proach nearer our own time the attitude 
 exhibited towards the pronunciation of 
 the word has undergone an apparent 
 change. There seems to have arisen a 
 disposition to lay the stress upon the 
 penult. "Seems to have arisen" is the 
 language used. When any one tells us 
 that most persons pronounce a word so 
 and so, it is always a pertinent inquiry 
 138 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 to make, how he came to know what 
 most persons do. Especially is the ques- 
 tion necessary when the pronunciation 
 which is represented as meeting with 
 the approbation of the great majority is 
 one not sanctioned by the majority of 
 orthoepists. How extensive, according- 
 ly, is the observation upon which the 
 assertion is based? How many persons 
 have been consulted? It will ordina- 
 rily be found that the informant has 
 endowed his own practice and that of 
 his immediate circle with the attribute 
 of generality, if not of universaHty. 
 Still, there is not much question that the 
 accentuation of the penult of apotheosis 
 has made great headway of late years. 
 It is authorized by several modem dic- 
 tionaries. It is not unlikely that it may 
 come to prevail generally; not impossi- 
 ble that it may come to prevail exclu- 
 139 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 sively. The men by whom the word is 
 almost entirely used are specially sus- 
 ceptible to classical influences. In the 
 light of the facts which have just been 
 given there is even hope that Macau- 
 lay's accentuation of metamorphosis, 
 scouted from the beginning as it has 
 been by orthoepists, may yet find favor. 
 The feeling exhibited about the pro- 
 nunciation of such words is best illus- 
 trated by Landor in one of his ' Imagi- 
 nary Conversations.' It is that which 
 is set forth as having taken place be- 
 tween Dr. Johnson and Home Tooke. 
 The latter is represented as saying that 
 in some instances we have lost the right 
 accent. "In my youth," he continues, 
 "he would have been ridiculed who 
 placed it upon the first syllable of 
 confiscated, contemplative, conventicle, at 
 which the ear revolts: in many other 
 140 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 compounds we thrust it back with equal 
 precipitancy and rudeness. We have 
 sinned, and are sinning, against our 
 fathers and mothers. We shall ' re'pent ' 
 and 're'form' and ' re'monstrate ' ; and 
 be 're'jected' at last." This extract 
 fully and fairly presents the attitude 
 taken by those who may be called the 
 classicists. Here we see the belief in 
 full flower, that there is a right accent 
 belonging to derived English words, and 
 this accent is based upon respect for the 
 Latin quantity. Such a belief implies 
 ignorance of the influences which have 
 affected and still affect pronunciation 
 in our tongue. To its supporters that 
 seems all the more reason for holding 
 it firmly and expressing it vigorously. 
 "I have lately heard ill'ustrate," Home 
 Tooke is further reported as remarking 
 in this imaginary conversation. "We 
 141 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 shall presently come to imper'cepti- 
 bk." 
 
 Landor was unaware that his antici- 
 pated imper'ceptible was opposed to the 
 analogy of the language, and that in 
 consequence it belonged to a kind of 
 pronunciation which the users of speech 
 were disposed to turn away from instead 
 of turning to. The exact reverse was 
 true in the case of the other word. Had 
 he himself lived two or three years 
 longer than Jie actually did, he could 
 have found ill'ustrate the only pronun- 
 ciation authorized by the well-known 
 philologist, Robert Gordon Latham, in 
 that volume of his revision of Dr. John- 
 son's dictionary which came out in 1866. 
 For some unexplained reason, it may 
 here be remarked, this last-mentioned 
 pronunciation has been specially provo- 
 cative of bad language on the part of 
 142 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 those objecting to its use. Against it the 
 fiercest antagonism has been displayed. 
 It has been stigmatized as abominable 
 and hideous. The only thing to draw 
 upon it these and other abusive epithets 
 appears to be its modernism. Landor 
 had doubtless heard the word so pro- 
 nounced; but it is fairly safe to say 
 that Home Tooke never had. 
 
 The all-comprehensive ignorance, in- 
 deed, which was usually exhibited by 
 Landor, of the history of the speech, 
 of which he was wont to discourse 
 dogmatically, made a notable mani- 
 festation of itself in the case of the 
 word conventicle mentioned in the quo- 
 tation cited above. The pronunciation 
 to which he objected was not an inno- 
 vation but a survival. Undoubtedly, 
 the accent once rested upon the first 
 syllable, with a secondary accent upon 
 M3 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the third. So Shakespeare gave it in 
 the single instance in which he used 
 the word.* So it is found in Dryden. 
 In his 'Hind and Panther,' that poet 
 speaks of the class of religious fanatics, 
 
 "Who, far from steeples and their sacred 
 sound, 
 In fields their sullen conventicles found." ' 
 
 This prontmciation, though unrecog- 
 nized by Dr. Johnson, lasted certainly 
 into the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century; from Landor's observation 
 it seems to have been still occasionally 
 heard in the first half of the nineteenth. 
 In the epilogue to Colman's 'Jealous 
 Wife,' which was brought out in 1761, 
 we find the r3raie still preserving the 
 older accentuation in the following lines: 
 
 • 2 Henry VT., iii., i, 166. 
 'Part I, 1. 312. 
 
 144 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 " The dame, of manner various, temper fickle. 
 Now all for pleasure, now the conventicle." 
 
 In general it may be said that in our 
 tongue victory in the case of trisylla- 
 bles is likely to rest with such as place 
 the accent upon the third syllable from 
 the end. Those who maintain the cause 
 of the penultimate have fought man- 
 fully, indignantly, reproachfully against 
 the encroachments of the antepenulti- 
 mate party. But theirs has been usual- 
 ly a losing battle. Their lack of success 
 is largely due to the fact that they are 
 themselves compelled to acquiesce in 
 many violations of the pronunciation 
 based upon derivation which, in dis- 
 puted cases, they profess to look upon 
 as essential. The men most tenacious 
 of respect for classical quantity will not 
 venture to say, for instance, audi'tor, 
 ora'tor, sena'tor, victo'ry, though logical- 
 lo I4S 
 
THE STANDARD OP 
 
 ly they are bound so to do. The argu- 
 ment from consistency carries, there- 
 fore, no weight. In our accentuation of 
 words we are not really governed by 
 that or by any other principle, save in 
 the most general way. Our ear is likely 
 to revolt at an unaccustomed pronuncia- 
 tion on no other ground than that we are 
 not accustomed to it ; just as on the same 
 ground our eye is apt to revolt at a spell- 
 ing with which we are not familiar. To 
 fancy that our reason has anything to do 
 with our feelings in either case is to be- 
 tray our lack of acquaintance with the 
 subject about which we are talking. 
 
 This, however, is a view which to 
 many seems incomprehensible. They 
 are always seeking for some infallible 
 rule to guide their practice. If you 
 say dem'onstrate, argue those who ap- 
 peal to analogy, why do you not say 
 146 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 rem'onstrate? That query seems to be 
 regarded as crushing. Well, the latter 
 word will not have its back broken if 
 people should choose so to pronounce it. 
 Even then it will continue to exist and 
 flourish. To the question itself, how- 
 ever, there is but one answer. The 
 users of speech do not say rem'onstrate, 
 for the reason, satisfactory to them, 
 that they have never had any disposi- 
 tion to do so in the past, nor have they 
 so far developed any such desire in the 
 present. Analogy affects them but 
 slightly. Our whole orthoepic system 
 is full of inconsistencies of the kind sug- 
 gested. I once heard an educated man, 
 a scholar, too, on certain lines, inveigh- 
 ing with great bitterness against the 
 accentuation of sojourn on the last syl- 
 lable. He seemed to think that such a 
 pronunciation of the word was not only 
 147 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 scandalously incorrect, but that it 
 threatened somehow the purity of the 
 speech. His anxiety was so excessive 
 that it led to the natural inquiry, upon 
 what syllable he placed the accent in 
 the case of the word adjourn, corre- 
 sponding both in spelling and deriva- 
 tion to sojourn; and if he put it upon the 
 last — which he doubtless did — what de- 
 fence he could make for his conduct. 
 Pressing engagements compelled him to 
 betake himself elsewhere before he could 
 formulate the satisfactory answer he 
 possibly had in mind. 
 
 To illustrate the trials of a pronun- 
 ciation striving for recognition, let us 
 trace the fortunes of decorous. Bailey, 
 seemingly the first lexicographer to give 
 accentuation, pronounced it dec'orous. 
 But when Johnson brought out his dic- 
 tionary he placed the stress upon the 
 148 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 second syllable. His authority was so 
 great that he was generally followed by 
 those orthoepists of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury who gave the word at all. Walker 
 accepted this pronunciation under pro- 
 test. "An uneducated English speak- 
 er," he remarked, "is very apt to pro- 
 nounce the word with the accent on the 
 first syllable, according to the analogy 
 of his own language; but a learned ear 
 would be as much shocked at such a de- 
 parture from classical propriety as in 
 the words sonorous and canorous." But 
 the learned ear was somewhat distaste- 
 ful to the lexicographer. He was so 
 restive under the practice of imposing 
 the Latin quantity upon the English 
 word that when he came to the com- 
 pound indecorous he broke away to 
 some extent from most of preceding 
 authorities, and allowed speakers the 
 149 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 choice of placing the stress upon either 
 the penult or the antepenult. Nor 
 cotild he refrain from venting his wrath 
 at the ordinary accentuation. He re- 
 garded it as a satire upon the good taste 
 and sense of Englishmen. "Dr. Ash," 
 he added, "is the only one who places 
 the accent upon the antepenultimate; 
 but what is his single authority, though 
 with analogy upon his side, to a crowd 
 of coxcombs vaporing with scraps of 
 Latin?" 
 
 But Walker confined his revolt to the 
 compound; in the case of the simple 
 word he did not venture to act accord- 
 ing to his convictions. Instead he de- 
 ferred to the practice of polite society. 
 The furthest extent, therefore, to which 
 his followers could go was to assert that 
 it was indec'orous to accent deco'rous 
 upon the first syllable. It was not till 
 ISO 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 "Webster came forward that the older ac- 
 centuation was reintroduced, at least in 
 a dictionary of any pretension. In his 
 first edition of 1828 dec'orous appeared 
 as the only authorized pronunciation. 
 The later extensive circulation of his 
 work caused this usage to spread far and 
 wide in America. It must, however, 
 have been then the general practice to 
 accent it thus in this country, at least so 
 far as Webster was acquainted with it; 
 for, though a daring defier of the con- 
 ventional in orthography, he was far 
 from desiring to combat it in orthoepy. 
 In England, Knowles, in 1835, gave both 
 prontmciations of the word, but indi- 
 cated a preference for that which laid 
 the stress on the antepenult. The same 
 course was followed in 1848 by Boag, 
 who produced a dictionary in which he 
 professed to follow Walker's orthoepy 
 151 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 with improvements. Such also was the 
 pronimciation adopted by Craig, whose 
 work appeared in 1849, and by Thomas 
 Wright in his, which followed in 1855. 
 But for a long time the word received in 
 the English dictionaries most generally 
 followed the accent only on the penult. 
 Of late the antepenultimate pronuncia- 
 tion is beginning to be sanctioned by 
 some of the highest- authorities. This 
 probably means its eventual adoption 
 by everybody. 
 
 Still, though the penultimate party 
 is pretty certain to be worsted in a long- 
 continued battle, it can inscribe upon 
 its banners some notable triumphs. 
 This has been due, in part, to the ex- 
 cesses of its opponents. "Walker was so 
 much influenced by his principle of 
 analogy that he carried the accent so far 
 from the end upon a ntunber of words 
 152 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 that they became somewhat difficult to 
 pronounce. Ac'ceptable may stand as one 
 illustration out of several. Accordingly, 
 ease of utterance came to the aid of the 
 advocates of the penultimate stress, and 
 that too in cases where the classical 
 quantity was not involved. Schismatic, 
 phlegmatic, splenetic, for illustration, had 
 once the accent regularly upon the 
 first syllable. If dictionaries are to be 
 deemed authority, the prevailing usage 
 is now to place it upon the second 
 syllable, especially in the case of the 
 first two. No one apparently thinks 
 any longer of laying the stress upon the 
 first syllable of successor, a practice 
 once seemingly much more common 
 than laying it on the second. " There is 
 little doubt," said Walker, "that the 
 antepenultimate accent will prevail." 
 A statement not essentially different 
 153 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 can be made about confessor. In the 
 case of this word Bailey placed the stress 
 upon the second syllable; but in the 
 large majority of eighteenth - century 
 dictionaries it fell upon the first. If the 
 poets can be taken to represent the 
 usage accurately, this seems to have 
 been both the earlier and the regular 
 pronunciation. Walker quoted John 
 Kemble as saying that the word was im- 
 properly accented on the first syllable; 
 but he added, "This impropriety is now 
 become so universal that no one who 
 has the least pretence to politeness dares 
 to pronounce it otherwise." "With hori- 
 zon the stress once fell upon the ante- 
 penult. Johnson rebuked Shakespeare 
 for having falsely pronounced it that 
 way. Yet Walker, writing towards the 
 end of the same century, declared that 
 "this word, till of late years, was uni- 
 154 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 versally pronounced in prose with the 
 accent on the first syllable." He clearly 
 thought that this was the right course, 
 at least theoretically. He seemed to 
 attribute the disrepute into which the 
 analogical pronunciation had fallen to 
 the influence of the poets; and it is cer- 
 tain that with Milton, Cowley, and Dry- 
 den the word had the same stress which 
 it has now. 
 
 This tendency to move the accent 
 on towards the end gives more mani- 
 fest exhibition of itself in words of two 
 than of three syllables. We can see it 
 exemplified now in the case of sojourn, 
 just mentioned. The verse of poets, like 
 Milton, shows that the stress once rested 
 regularly, perhaps invariably, upon its 
 first syllable. Were the word in com- 
 mon use, such a pronimciation would by 
 this time have pretty surely come to 
 ^5S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 seem old-fashioned. So, also, if Dr. 
 Johnson's accentuation could be taken 
 as representing the universal practice of 
 his age, we should be compelled to be- 
 lieve that many words of two syllables 
 which once had the accent upon the first, 
 have now come to assume it upon the 
 second. In the former way were pro- 
 nounced by him carbine, carmine, cartel, 
 finance, gazette, levant as a noun, petard, 
 and trepan. It is evident, however, 
 from various sources that the accentua- 
 tion he authorized was not universally 
 accepted; and in these instances the 
 other method of pronunciation which 
 then existed is the one which has de- 
 scended to us. 
 
 More striking than any of these ex- 
 amples is July. Every student of our 
 early poetry, especially of our dramatic 
 poetry, becomes aware that this word 
 156 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 was usually, if not invariably, pro- 
 nounced Ju'ly. So it continued to be 
 down to the latter part of the eigh- 
 teenth century, and to some extent 
 later. Bailey and Johnson both placed 
 the accent upon the first syllable. In 
 so doing, they were in accord with the 
 general practice of the orthoepists of the 
 time. Indeed, the only early authoriza- 
 tion I have personally chanced to meet 
 of the present pronunciation is in the 
 edition of Dyche and Pardon's diction- 
 ary, which came out in 1750.* But 
 
 • The English dictionary of Thomas Dyche, 
 left unfinished by him, was revised and com- 
 pleted by William Pardon after Dyche's 
 death. The first part of it appeared in April, 
 1735. It seems to have been a successful 
 work. The only edition of it I have seen — 
 that of 1 750 — ^is the sixth. It is probable that 
 its accentuation of July on the last syllable is 
 fotmd in the original edition of 1735- 
 
 157 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 though then to some extent in use, it 
 met with little favor. "This, we con- 
 fess," said of it a reviewer in 1773, "is a 
 common way of pronouncing the word, 
 but surely improper."' 
 
 In the case of trisyllables, too, the ac- 
 cent has in several instances remained 
 faithful to the classical quantity, in 
 spite of persistent attacks upon it from 
 those who either ignorantly or advisedly 
 seek to establish their pronunciation 
 according to English analogy. All ef- 
 forts, for illustration, to have the stress 
 fall on the first syllable of inquiry, oppo- 
 nent, museum — and these efforts have 
 been frequent and long continued — 
 have so far invariably resulted in dis- 
 aster. No authority of repute recog- 
 nizes in'quiry, op'ponent, mu'seum, and 
 such pronunciations always beget a 
 ^Critical Review, vol. xxxvi., p. 344. 
 158 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 feeling of pity or pain in the hearts of 
 those who deem themselves orthoepical- 
 ly pure. Furthermore, in every stream 
 of tendency there are occasional eddies. 
 There is a striking example of a pronun- 
 ciation which the users of speech have 
 fixed upon in defiance of all authority. 
 Most persons in the northern United 
 States are familiar with the fragrant 
 creeper called the "trailing arbutus." 
 No one who knows the plant thinks — at 
 least no one used to think — of pronounc- 
 ing the last word of its name any other 
 way than arbu'tus. Yet in the Latin 
 substantive from which it came the 
 quantity of the penult is short. Ac- 
 cordingly, if we conform to the pronun- 
 ciation of the original, we should be 
 obliged to call it ar'butus. The word 
 itself did not appear in the earliest pro- 
 nouncing dictionaries. Its place was 
 IS9 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 taken by arbute, with the accent upon 
 the first syllable. But, for all that, it 
 had long existed in the language. What 
 few notices are taken of its pronuncia- 
 tion indicate that the practice existed 
 even in the eighteenth century of lay- 
 ing the stress upon the second syllable. 
 Nares mentioned it in 1784. In his 
 work on orthoepy, then published, he 
 pointed out that the word was com- 
 monly pronounced arbu'tus, "though," 
 he added, "ar'butus is more proper." 
 This popular accentuation has usually 
 been somewhat distressing to the mod- 
 em lexicographer. It flies in the face 
 of both English analogy and classical 
 quantity. When orthoepists adopt it, 
 they are apt to do so with apologies. 
 Some of them make a compromise be- 
 tween the respect due to popular pro- 
 nunciation and to the Latin quantity by 
 160 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 putting the accent on the first syllable 
 and making the u of the second long — a 
 pronunciation which could not well have 
 existed at first outside of dictionaries, 
 if even now it exists anywhere else. 
 
 Names of places hardly come under 
 consideration in a discussion of this nat- 
 ure. In such words the local pronun- 
 ciation generally remains constant; it is 
 regarded as authoritative, and outsiders 
 are expected to conform to it as soon as 
 they have learned what it is. For in- 
 stance, Queen Victoria's residence at 
 Balmoral brought that name prominent- 
 ly before the public. It is not surprising 
 that some who had never heard the 
 word pronounced should seek to make it 
 conform to English analogy, and place 
 the accent upon the first syllable instead 
 of the second. But from the very nat- 
 ure of things this could not prevail. The 
 II i6i 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 one instance of change in words of this 
 class, which stands out with exceptional 
 prominence, is Niagara. If the evidence 
 of poetry be regarded as conclusive, the 
 accent during the eighteenth century- 
 rested upon the penult. The quotation 
 commonly employed to illustrate the 
 practice comes from 'The Traveller.' 
 In it Goldsmith pictures the distresses 
 which await the emigrants to Ameri- 
 can shores. Among the various dreary 
 scenes in which it will be their lot to 
 find themselves, one is to be 
 
 " Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps 
 around, 
 And Niagara stuns with thundering sound." 
 
 This accentuation is occasionally found 
 much later. To The Scenic Annual for 
 1838 Campbell contributed a poem cele- 
 brating the beauties of Cora Linn. In 
 162 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 it occur the following lines about this 
 waterfall : 
 
 "Dear Linn! let loftier falling floods 
 Have prouder names than thine; 
 And king of all, enthroned in woods, 
 Let Niagara shine." 
 
 The necessities of the verse may have 
 forced Campbell into the adoption of 
 this accentuation, or the pronunciation 
 of his youth may have clung to him; but 
 he did not escape being taken severely 
 to task by the reviewers for placing the 
 stress where he did. 
 
 Still, after all that has been said, con- 
 troversy about the place of the accent is 
 limited to a comparatively small num- 
 ber of words. These produce more im- 
 pression upon our minds than they 
 ought, because of the wrath which dif- 
 ference of opinion about them excites in 
 the most amiable natures. The truth is 
 163 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 that any one who makes a study of the 
 pronunciation authorized by the various 
 orthoepists of the eighteenth century 
 will be struck by the little change which 
 has taken place, on the whole, in this 
 precise particular. If he should con- 
 sult one work only, it might, indeed, ap- 
 pear somewhat extensive ; but if he con- 
 sults them all, he is reasonably sure to 
 find the modem accentuation sanctioned 
 by some of them. Of two or more ways 
 of laying the stress which once prevail- 
 ed, the now existing one not infrequently 
 remains the sole survivor. At present 
 we all say com' promise. There was a 
 time when we could have said comprom'- 
 ise, and have cited to justify us the au- 
 thority of the dictionary most widely in 
 use. So, also, we should have found it 
 sanctioning thea'tre, and inval'id both as 
 a noun and an adjective. Compared, in- 
 164 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 deed, with the variations found in the 
 treatment of vowel sounds by the users 
 of speech, changes caused by difference 
 of accentuation are of slight account. 
 Nor is this agency of anything like the 
 importance of the second one which re- 
 mains to be considered. This is the dis- 
 position to make the pronunciation con- 
 form to the spelling. English, with its 
 lawless orthography, opens a wide field 
 for the operation of such an influence. 
 It is necessarily limited in its range, but 
 in the range it has it works unceasingly. 
 The disposition has been exhibited at 
 times from the earliest period. With 
 the spread of education it has entered 
 upon a fuller and more vigorous ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 The reason for the increase in this 
 tendency is manifest. In early times 
 knowledge of the speech was gained al- 
 i6s 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 most exclusively through the ear; at 
 present it is learned largely through the 
 eye. Men now make their first ac- 
 quaintance with many words by seeing 
 them upon the printed page. In numer- 
 ous instances, after having seen them 
 there, they rarely hear them spoken. 
 Accordingly, it is natural that they 
 should try to pronounce them as near 
 as they possibly can to the way in 
 which they are spelled. This of itself 
 has a tendency to produce variation. 
 The phonetic sense of the English-speak- 
 ing race has been rendered so defective 
 by the confused orthography of the 
 tongue that to different men the same 
 combination of letters will convey differ- 
 ent sounds. It is no uncommon thing, 
 in consequence, to find illiterate spell- 
 ing designated as phonetic spelling by 
 men who are unaware that in so do- 
 i66 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ing they are unconsciously proclaiming 
 their own ignorance of phonetics. 
 
 Yet this movement towards diversity 
 is more than counterbalanced by the 
 movement towards uniformity, which 
 the general habit of reading has cre- 
 ated. From the frequency with which 
 a word is met on the page a picture 
 of it, as spelled, is insensibly fixed in 
 the mind. It may almost be said to 
 be printed on the retina of the eye. 
 When, in consequence, the word is 
 brought directly to the attention, and 
 along with this comes the necessity of 
 using it in speech, there is more or less 
 of a disposition, conscious or uncon- 
 scious, to conform its pronunciation to 
 its ever-present mental representative. 
 Against a usage which has become 
 thoroughly established this tendency 
 makes slow headway; in the case of in- 
 167 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 dividuals it may make none at all. But 
 in process of time it is sure to work ef- 
 fectively upon a large body of users of 
 speech. If it once gains over a part, its 
 ultimate triumph is secure. We have 
 seen this illustrated in the case oi china, 
 lilac, asparagus, and other words. To 
 put the point beyond dispute, let us 
 trace the history of the pronunciation of 
 a few more. 
 
 Readers of 'Vanity Fair' may re- 
 member that the young ladies of Miss 
 Pinkerton's academy, at Chiswick Mall, 
 were presented at their departure with 
 a copy of Dr. Johnson's dictionary. 
 They may not have observed, however, 
 that the word designating the work 
 was, in the conversations given, regular- 
 ly spelled dixonary. Even so it is rep- 
 resented as having been pronounced by 
 the august female who presided over the 
 i68 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 institute, the friend of the lexicographer 
 himself, and the correspondent of Mrs. 
 Chapone. Thackeray may have erred 
 in carrying this pronimciation — at least 
 in a place so sacred — down to so late 
 a period as the year just preceding the 
 battle of Waterloo, but he certainly 
 made no mistake in giving the impres- 
 sion that it was the one once regularly 
 heard in cultivated society. It existed 
 long before the time specified. It can 
 be traced back with certainty to the 
 seventeenth century. In the latter part 
 of that and in the beginning of the 
 eighteenth the pronunciation was rep- 
 resented as diks'nari by the two author- 
 ities who chanced to mention this par- 
 ticular word. In 1726, in the little 
 book of Bailey's, already mentioned, it 
 was represented by dix'nery. Fourteen 
 years later 'Bailey's Dicksonary' is 
 169 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 mentioned by one of the characters in 
 an article contributed by Fielding to 
 The Champion} In America, Noah 
 Webster, writing in 1789, gives dicson- 
 ary as the usual pronunciation. In the 
 last decade of this same century Walker 
 informs us that the word was univer- 
 sally pronounced a few years before as 
 if written dixnary, and that a person 
 woiild have been thought a pedant who 
 pronounced it according to its orthog- 
 raphy. He felicitated himself on the 
 taste for improvement in speaking 
 which had been steadily growing. To 
 it he attributed the change which had 
 taken place. So marked was this that 
 at the time his work appeared he as- 
 serted that any one who pronounced the 
 word otherwise than as it was written 
 would have incurred the imputation of 
 ' Number for May 17, 1740. 
 170 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 vulgarity. The fact was probably as he 
 represented; not so his interpretation of 
 the fact. There is no need of resorting 
 to an explanation so vague and general 
 as the taste for improvement on the 
 part of the public. The change was but 
 an exemplification of the influence of 
 the written speech which had been be- 
 coming steadily more effective. In this 
 particular instance the multiplication 
 of dictionaries, which went on after the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, brought 
 this word constantly and prominently be- 
 fore the eyes of readers. The not unu- 
 sual result followed. The full sound fol- 
 lowed upon frequent sight. It is to be 
 added that Thackeray's spelling — with 
 an inserted o — which had previously been 
 used by Fielding and noted by Webster, 
 probably marked a pronunciation which 
 held its own in certain quarters. 
 171 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 This is an illustration belonging to the 
 consonant system rather than the vowel; 
 but the latter exhibits its full number 
 of examples of the same tendency. We 
 hear at the present day, and sometimes 
 from the lips of educated men, the verb 
 catch pronounced as ketch. No really 
 virtuous lexicographer of modem times 
 would be found countenancing any prac- 
 tice of the sort. Most orthoepists do 
 not even condescend to be awcire of its 
 existence. Yet there is every reason 
 to believe that until a comparatively 
 late period it was the common pro- 
 nunciation of the word even among the 
 educated. In the divorce which has 
 gone on so long in our language between 
 orthography and orthoepy, it is unsafe 
 to hazard positive statements of any 
 kind. But in this case there is evidence 
 pointing to the fact that while in most 
 172 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 instances a has been the vowel general- 
 ly seen in writing, e has been the one 
 generally heard in conversation. Some- 
 times, indeed, the spelling confonned to 
 this pronunciation. Examples of the 
 usage can be adduced from various 
 periods. Spenser, for instance, tells us 
 how the enchanter Archimage, in his en- 
 deavor to entrap the Red Cross Knight, 
 placed spies upon his movements, 
 
 " To ketch him at a vantage in his snares." * 
 
 From the orthoepists of the eighteenth 
 centxiry we can get occasional traces of 
 the changes coining over the sound of 
 the vowel in this word, as in several 
 others. Nares had clearly heard of no 
 other way of pronouncing it than ketch. 
 A few years later Walker censtu'ed this 
 usage, nor would he give it his sanction 
 ' 'Faerie Queene,' book ii., canto i., 4. 
 173 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 in his dictionary. Yet he admitted that 
 it was almost universally pronounced 
 in the capital like the noun ketch. 
 "This deviation," he continued, "from 
 the true sound of a is only tolerable in 
 colloquial pronunciation, and ought, by 
 correct speakers, to be avoided even 
 in that." There spoke the stem ortho- 
 epist ; yet he pusillanimously acquiesced 
 in the exactly similar pronunciation of 
 the vowel in any and many. 
 
 Not so acted, it may be remarked 
 here, the earliest compiler of a pronotmc- 
 ing dictionary. Buchanan, long before 
 Walker had contemplated, a work of 
 this character, had stoutly maintained 
 the sound of a, not only in catch, but in 
 any and many also. As regards the 
 first one of these last two he was fol- 
 lowed by Sheridan. This, however, was 
 pretty certainly a school-master pronun- 
 174 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ciation which was little, if ever, heard 
 in polite society. But Buchanan, who 
 was of the type of Holof ernes, had no 
 mind to bow the knee to any fashion- 
 able orthoepic Baal. He was always in- 
 clined to support the catise of the writ- 
 ten word against the spoken. He wotdd 
 not admit the sound of e in radish. 
 About this vegetable, it may be remark- 
 ed in passing. Walker did not have the 
 same feeling of despondency which he 
 did about the other terms for food. 
 The word, he admitted, was commonly, 
 though corruptly, pronounced as if writ- 
 ten reddish. Still the deviation was but 
 small, nor did he regard it as "so incor- 
 rigible as that of its brother esculents," 
 such as cucumber and asparagus. 
 
 These are examples of the encroach- 
 ments of the vowel e upon a; but a 
 similar fortune has fallen to the lot of e 
 I7S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 at the hands of i. The former, indeed, 
 has only gradually resumed the rights 
 of which it had been deprived by the 
 latter. Nearly all eighteenth -century 
 orthoepists pronounced yes as if it 
 were spelled yis. Indeed, Walker took 
 the pains to assure us that while it 
 was a mark of incorrectness and vulgar- 
 ity to give to yet the sound of yit, the 
 best and most established usage gave 
 to yes the sound of yis. Yit, thus rep- 
 robated, was undoubtedly a survival 
 of what was once good usage. The 
 triumph of e over i in its pronuncia- 
 tion merely preceded its later triumph 
 in yes. The same thing is going on 
 before our eyes to-day. Orthoepists 
 rarely record changes till they have es- 
 tablished themselves somewhere to an 
 extent which permits their being no 
 longer disregarded. None of them, in 
 176 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 consequence, admits any other pronun- 
 ciation of pretty than pritty; yet in 
 conversation the vowel e is beginning 
 to make itself heard in the first sylla- 
 ble of the word. Once recognized, it 
 is fairly certain to prevail in the end. 
 It is not unlikely, in consequence, that 
 pritty will come in time to seem as ob- 
 jectionable to men as does now ingine 
 for engine. 
 
 It would be easy to enlarge the list of 
 examples in which the spoken word has 
 been made to conform to the written. 
 Construe has abandoned its ancient pro- 
 nunciation of con'ster, though the schools 
 clung long to the once-prevalent prac- 
 tice. Walker resented this usage al- 
 most as if it were a personal affront ; but 
 he felt obliged to recognize it and to ac- 
 cord it second place. " It is a scandal to 
 seminaries of learning," he burst out, 
 177 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 "that the latter pronunciation of the 
 word should prevail there. Those who 
 ought to be the guardians of propriety 
 are often the perverters of it." Here, 
 however, the written word has finally 
 triumphed, as in several other instances. 
 No one now pronounces chart as if it 
 were spelled kart. Lawyers are pretty 
 generally giving up con'isance for cog'- 
 nizance, and military men en'sin for en- 
 sign. Shore is not now heard for sewer. 
 Even shire, once regularly sheer, has had 
 its ancient vowel sound replaced, save in 
 compounds, by that which the English 
 have accustomed themselves to give to 
 i. In all these instances a steady move- 
 ment has gone on towards accommo- 
 dating the spoken word to the written. 
 Colloquial or provincial speech will long 
 continue to retain the old pronuncia- 
 tions. But even in those quarters they 
 178 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 tend to die out with the increase of the 
 habit of reading and the steadily wax- 
 ing influence of the school-master. Fur- 
 thermore, in most, if not in all, of the in- 
 stances where anomalies now exist or 
 once existed, it will be found that the 
 current pronunciation represents a form 
 of the word which at some time or at 
 some place prevailed in writing as well 
 as in speaking. Illustrations of this are 
 frequent. As good a one as any is fur- 
 nished by the name itself of our lan- 
 guage. We spell it English; we pro- 
 nounce it Ing'glish; and we pronounce 
 it so because by many it was once so 
 spelled. 
 
 In thus striving to make the spoken 
 word conform to the written, we are 
 simply obeying the dictates of that 
 phonetic instinct which, stimted as it 
 has been with us by oiu: orthography, 
 179 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 still maintains a lively struggle for ex* 
 istence in us all. The growing disposi- 
 tion to respect the right of the written 
 speech is shown in the tendency mani- 
 fested to give the full pronunciation to 
 trisyllables which once appeared as dis- 
 syllables. This middle syllable consisted 
 only of a vowel. It was easy to sup- 
 press, and it was suppressed. It is not 
 safe to affirm positively in any particular 
 case how far poetry represents the pro- 
 nunciation of the past. The necessities 
 of the verse frequently require elision, 
 and elision overrides the claims of or- 
 thoepy. Yet it may be regarded as of 
 some significance that Milton, for in- 
 stance, makes two syllables of such 
 words as barbarous, violent, popular, pop- 
 ulous, credulous, to mention a few out of 
 a larger number. That is to say, he 
 makes them so, if we insist upon assign- 
 i8o 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ing to the line its exact number of 
 feet. 
 
 But whatever may be the value we 
 attach to the testimony conveyed by 
 the practice of poets, there can be no 
 question about the evidence furnished 
 by pronouncing dictionaries. Words in 
 which a dissyllabic pronunciation was 
 set down frequently in the early works 
 of this character as the only one have 
 in the later ones the suppressed vowel 
 sounded. Venison, medicine, business, 
 tapestry are now no longer heard as 
 words of two syllables exclusively; in 
 some of these examples rarely so, if 
 ever. Variation must have existed on 
 this point at an early date. Sheridan, 
 for illustration, has venison as a word 
 of three syllables and tapestry as one of 
 two. On the contrary. Walker has ven- 
 ison as a word of two syllables and tap- 
 i8i 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 estry as one of three. The tendency 
 shows itself in other polysyllables. The 
 i of ordinary is now regularly heard, and 
 extraordinary is fairly certain ultimately 
 to follow in its footsteps. Nominative 
 is strictly a word of four syllables, but 
 in school pronunciation it is often re- 
 duced to three. Once this was so gen- 
 erally the case that to sound the first * 
 at all would have seemed stiff and pe- 
 dantic. This vowel, indeed, has disap- 
 peared from ordinance in one of its 
 meanings ; but thereby it has created an 
 independent word, ordnance. Damsel is 
 in something of the same situation. It 
 has lost the ability to resume its trisyl- 
 labic character by being deprived of the 
 e or iit once possessed. But, as a com- 
 pensation, modem writers, beginning 
 with Scott, have reintroduced an o from 
 a usage once existing. This is to give a 
 182 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 more stately character to the word, to 
 indicate the more stately being it is 
 supposed to denote. 
 
 But the working of this agency is 
 shown on a much more extensive scale in 
 the steady resumption in speech of con- 
 sonants which were once silent. This 
 has been going on to some extent from 
 the time that men began to become 
 familiar with the language as written. 
 Among the letters particularly affected 
 by this tendency are d and t and w. It 
 is not possible to learn accurately how 
 far the dropping of these from the pro- 
 nunciation once went. We can, however, 
 make a guess at the number of words in 
 which they must have been silent from 
 the number in which they remain silent 
 still. This last statement is particularly 
 true of the letter t. No one thinks of 
 pronouncing it in apostle, epistle, chestnut, 
 183 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Christmas, and certain verbs having the 
 ending -en, such as fasten, hasten, listen — 
 and these are merely a few of the many 
 examples which could be cited. An- 
 swer and sword will furnish similar illus- 
 trations of present usage in the case of w. 
 The same thing is true, though not so 
 true, of d. In its case it is not so much 
 the disappearance of the letter from ut- 
 terance as is the little stress it receives. 
 In ordinary speech it is often heard so 
 faintly that it can hardly be said to be 
 heard at all. Any one paying strict 
 heed to the use of certain words — say, 
 for example, landlord and thousand — ^will 
 often find it difficult to detect the sound 
 of d at the end of the first syllable of the 
 one or of the last syllable of the other. 
 Still, any incUnation to disregard the full 
 pronunciation of final letters is distinctly 
 on the wane. The omission of it, once 
 184 
 
PROr^UNCIATION 
 
 common in several words, is no longer 
 found. For instance, it was not until 
 the nineteenth century that the t of 
 currant was generally pronounced. The 
 disposition, indeed, to sound a letter 
 in speaking because it exists in writing 
 goes at times to somewhat unreasonable 
 lengths. Public speakers are occasion- 
 ally heard who strive painfully to pro- 
 nounce the n of such words as condemn 
 and contemn, feeling very miserable 
 when they fail, and making others feel 
 very miserable when they succeed. 
 
 But the two letters which have the 
 most interesting history in this respect 
 are / and h. They have been less af- 
 fected, on the whole, by the disposition 
 of the users of language to let no part 
 of the word remain unsounded that can 
 be sounded; for there are combinations 
 from ^ the pronunciation of which the 
 i8S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 vocal organs of the English retire baffled. 
 Still, / is now heard in several instances — 
 as, for example, chaldron, falter, vault — in 
 which it was once silent. It is slowly- 
 forcing its recognition in several other 
 words. Yet there remain a respectable 
 number in which it is not sounded. Es- 
 pecially is this the case when it belongs 
 to a syllable in which it follows a or o 
 and precedes /, k, or m. The words half, 
 folk, calm, and walk will serve as illus- 
 trations. In such cases it is that the 
 spoken language has resisted most suc- 
 cessfully the encroachment of the writ- 
 ten. But even here its tenure is far 
 from secure. Particularly is this so 
 when the / is preceded by o. Most or- 
 thoepists give the preference to its pro- 
 nunciation in holm, and some authorize 
 it in yolk. 
 
 In this particular, no more entertain- 
 186 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ing controversy has there been than that 
 which has gone on concerning the word 
 golf. In the Scotch pronunciation of it 
 the I is not sounded; in old days it often 
 did not appear in it when written. So 
 long as the knowledge of the game was 
 confined to the country of its origin, va- 
 riation naturally would not arise. But 
 as soon as it passed, and, furthermore, 
 passed suddenly, the narrow limits of 
 nationality, the name was certain to 
 lose its provincial pronunciation. The 
 large majority of men came to know 
 the word designating it only by seeing 
 it in print. So making its acquaint- 
 ance, they were reasonably sure to pro- 
 nounce it as spelled. This involved the 
 resumption in speech of the letter hith- 
 erto confined to the written language. 
 But Scotland insists that there is but 
 one proper way of pronouncing the 
 187 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 word; and because men everywhere 
 will not adopt that she is in mourn- 
 ing and refuses to be comforted. Let- 
 ters on the subject are written con- 
 stantly to the newspapers by indignant 
 North Britons. Their remonstrances 
 doubtless affect some weaker brethren. 
 The indifferent, however — and these 
 constitute the vast majority — go on 
 their way regardless of the Scotch or- 
 thoepy. The more hardened retort that 
 they are doubtless pronouncing the word 
 as did those who invented or developed 
 the game. These did not put in its 
 name a letter of which they made no 
 use. It was the slovenly pronunciation 
 of their descendants which had caused 
 the I to be suppressed. All that they 
 are doing now is to restore to the letter 
 the rights of which it has been deprived. 
 It is the written speech that is thus 
 i88 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 slowly bringing about changes in pro- 
 nunciation. The working of this agency 
 can be best shown by specific illustration 
 of the way in which a letter chances to 
 remain for a long while silent, and then 
 comes to be taken up in pronunciation. 
 Readers of Chaucer do not need to be 
 told that such words as assault, fault, 
 and default came into the language from 
 the Old French in the forms assaute, 
 faute, and defaute. So they were spell- 
 ed; so they were pronounced. But in 
 process of time men discovered that their 
 remote Latin originals contained an /. 
 Accordingly, it was inserted in these 
 words. But while their form was thus 
 changed, the original pronunciation con- 
 tinued. But the letter was not to en- 
 dure forever the indignity of having 
 its existence ignored. It appealed con- 
 stantly to the eye; and the eye in time 
 189 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 insisted upon the recognition of it by 
 the voice. Take the case of fault. By 
 the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury the / had been almost imiversally 
 adopted in the spelling; but it was not 
 until the latter part of the eighteenth 
 century that its claim, though some- 
 times previously admitted, was fully 
 established in the pronimciation. By 
 Pope and Swift it was regularly rymed 
 with words like ought, brought, thought, 
 and taught. The remarks upon it by 
 Dr. Johnson in his dictionary indicate 
 that the struggle for recognition was go- 
 ing on actively in his time. "The /," he 
 said, "is sometimes sounded and some- 
 times not. In conversation it is gener- 
 ally suppressed." Later orthoepists re- 
 port the existence of the same state of 
 things. It is further borne out by the 
 evidence of the literature produced at 
 190 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 the time. In 'The Deserted Village,' 
 published in 1770, we are told of the 
 school-master: 
 
 " Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught, 
 The love he bore to learning was in fatilt." 
 
 To us aught and fault make an imperfect 
 ryme; but to Goldsmith and to many, 
 if not to most, of his contemporaries no 
 better one could be asked. It was not in 
 the nature of things that this violation 
 of the rights of the letter could endure. 
 By the end of the century Walker felt 
 justified in applying to its suppression 
 the one adjective dearest to the earnest 
 orthoepist. He termed it vulgar. 
 
 Of these two letters, however, the as- 
 pirate is the more interesting and the 
 history of its pronunciation is much 
 more striking. The dropping of it 
 seems to be regarded by many Amer- 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 icans as peculiar to the London cockney 
 dialect, or at least to Englishmen of a 
 certain social grade. This is qiiite wide 
 of the truth. The omission of the soimd 
 of h may be said to belong to all times 
 and all countries. The Italian language 
 has given up its pronunciation and treats 
 it rather as a mark of distinction than 
 as a letter. In Old French also it 
 was largely unrecognized. Nor can a 
 single member of the English-speaking 
 race plead that he is free from the 
 commission of the offence, if offence it 
 be. None of us, either in writing or 
 speaking, gives to it or to able or 
 ability or arbor the h to which, etymo- 
 logically, each one is entitled. Worse 
 than that, we all add it to the origi- 
 nal forms from which come hermit and 
 hostage. Had we not succumbed to the 
 influence of what we now call cockney- 
 192 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 ism, we should never have prefixed the 
 aspirate to these words; but, on the 
 contrary, we should have been saying, 
 with great linguistic propriety, ermit (or 
 eremite) and ostage. There is, in conse- 
 quence, no reason for any of us to plume 
 ourselves upon any special orthoepic 
 virtue of our own in this matter, at least 
 no reason for those of us who believe 
 that safety lies in paying strictest heed 
 to derivation. 
 
 Still it must be deemed a somewhat 
 singular fact that this ancient and wide- 
 spread pectdiarity of pronunciation has 
 apparently at no time or place ever 
 shown itself in America. Many usages 
 of English dialects have been trans- 
 planted to this country. In some in- 
 stances they have made their way into 
 educated speech. But the one most 
 striking and the most far-reaching of all 
 '3 193 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 has never been carried over, or if carried 
 over has never maintained itself suffi- 
 ciently to gain recognition anywhere. 
 In England the omission or addition of 
 the aspirate has become a sort of social 
 shibboleth. It has never assumed and 
 could never assume that function in this 
 country. Here the pronunciation of in- 
 itial h is universal. No mistake in the 
 use of it is made by the uneducated any 
 more than by the educated. The former 
 drop it from the few words where it is 
 not sounded as correctly as do the latter. 
 The same thing may be said of it, in 
 general, as regards its combination with 
 w. It is the exception, and by no 
 means frequent exception, to find the 
 aspirate not distinctly heard in such 
 words as when and which and Whig. 
 Why this marked difference should ex- 
 ist in the usage of the two countries it is 
 194 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 not easy to understand. It is fully as 
 hard to explain as why the inhabitants 
 of the United Kingdom turn universally 
 to the left in riding or driving and the 
 inhabitants of the United States turn as 
 universally to the right. 
 
 There are now in English but four 
 words beginning with h in which the 
 initial letter is not pronounced by edu- 
 cated men anywhere. These are heir, 
 honest, honor, and hour. This usage ex- 
 tends, of course, to their derivatives. 
 Whether they will continue to hold out 
 forever against the stream of tendency 
 which is bringing about the resumption 
 in speech of letters once silent must be 
 left to the prophets to announce. In 
 this particular instance their predictions 
 can be uttered with perfect safety. 
 None of those now living will survive to 
 witness their fulfilment or non-fulfil- 
 I9S 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 ment. So far no one has ever advo- 
 cated the pronunciation in them of the 
 initial letter save Walter Savage Lan- 
 dor. He may have been led to take this 
 course by the irritation he felt at having 
 his own usage criticised; for when it came 
 to the employment of the h, he is report- 
 ed to have frequently exhibited distinct 
 orthoepic frailty. "We laugh," said he, 
 "at those who pronounce an aspirate 
 where there shoiild be none; but are not 
 we oturselves more ridiculous when we 
 deliberately write it before words in 
 which it is never pronounced?" 
 
 So he argued earnestly, but nattu-ally 
 to no effect. Still, while there is now 
 not the remotest sign of the abandon- 
 ment of the existing tisage, it must 
 be kept in mind that the influence of 
 the written language is ceaselessly op- 
 erative. To some the tiltimate fate of 
 196 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 these four words will seem to be fore- 
 shadowed by the wavering attitude of 
 the present users of speech towards four 
 others — herb, hostler, humble, and humor. 
 Until a period comparatively recent all 
 of these generally dropped the h. Dis- 
 cussion about doing this was going on, 
 as we have seen, during the latter part 
 of the eighteenth century. Then, as 
 now, there was difference of opinion, 
 both among orthoepists and the edu- 
 cated users of speech, as to the proper 
 course to be pursued. Sheridan sup- 
 ported the pronunciation of h in herb. 
 Walker its suppression. Nor has the 
 controversy about these words yet been 
 settled. Many still continue to omit 
 the aspirate in some or all of them, 
 though the number so doing is perhaps 
 becoming proportionately smaller. The 
 practice of not pronotmcing the h of 
 197 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 humble can hardly recover, it would 
 seem, from the staggering blow given it 
 by Dickens. Yet it still has its sup- 
 porters and defenders. The suppres- 
 sion in speech of the same letter in 
 hostler has developed the form ostler in 
 writing. This adds the strength of the 
 visible word to the indisposition to pro- 
 nounce the aspirate. 
 
 This omission of the pronunciation of 
 the initial h is now true of only a few 
 words; it must once have been true of a 
 large number. But if so, no record of 
 the fact has in many cases come down 
 to our time. In a few instances we are 
 in a position to make positive state- 
 ments. We know from Palsgrave that 
 in the sixteenth century the h of habit 
 and habitation was not sounded;* from 
 
 ' Palsgrave's ' Lesclarcissement de la Langue 
 Francoyse' was published in 1330. 
 igS 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Ben Jonson that in the early seven- 
 teenth century the same was true of the 
 h of host. A relic of this latter usage has 
 come down to us in the expression " mine 
 host." Late in the eighteenth century 
 the h of hospital was usually dropped, 
 according to the assertions of the most 
 authoritative orthoepists. It is to be 
 observed that all these words in which 
 the aspirate is not pronounced are of 
 Romance origin. They came into our 
 language from the Old French. In that 
 tongue they appeared frequently in writ- 
 ing, as in speech, without the letter. In 
 this way, accordingly, they sometimes 
 made their appearance in English, when, 
 in the thirteenth or the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, they were introduced into the 
 tongue. Of the words which have been 
 mentioned — and many more might be 
 added to the list — the forms eir, erb, 
 199 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 onest, onur, oure, umhle, umour turn up 
 not unfrequently in ovtx early literature. 
 The story to be told about them and 
 others like them is essentially the same 
 as that already told about fault. In 
 England, as in France, the scribes fa- 
 miliar with the Latin original restored 
 the h to the written word. They could 
 not and did not restore it to the pronxm- 
 ciation. That came later; in some cases 
 it has not come at all. 
 
 Furthermore, while the total sup- 
 pression of the aspirate at the beginning 
 of certain words or certain syllables of 
 compound words is now limited to a 
 very few, there is a weakened way of 
 sounding it which leaves it in many in- 
 stances scarcely recognizable. This is 
 particularly true of polysyllables in 
 which the accent rests upon the second. 
 It may be there exist men who say "a 
 200 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 hotel," "a historical fact," but such ex- 
 pressions are certainly uncommon in 
 literature, if ever found there at all. 
 The present practice of using an instead 
 of a before such words may die out in 
 consequence of the more distinct pro- 
 nunciation of the h, but it has not died 
 out yet. Indeed, this weakened pro- 
 nunciation of the aspirate must have 
 once been true of many words of Teu- 
 tonic origin. The authorized version of 
 the Bible represents the speech of the 
 first half or middle of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury. It is a somewhat significant fact 
 that nearly all the words in it beginning 
 with h have usually the indefinite ar- 
 ticle an before them, and not a} 
 
 ' In our version of the Bible an invariably 
 precedes the following words: habitation, hair, 
 half, hand, handbreadth, handful, handmaid, 
 hanging, harlot, hart, harvest, haughty, haven, 
 head, hearth, heavy, hedge, heifer, help, herald, 
 
 20I 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Under ordinary conditions this ten- 
 dency to resume in speech the sound of 
 letters once silent would not extend to 
 names of places. There the local pro- 
 nunciation, supported as it usually is 
 by centuries of usage, would hold its 
 own against all change, as it has in the 
 case of the accent. But in this matter 
 another agency has come in which can- 
 not be disregarded. This is the extent 
 
 herb, herdsman, heritage, hiding-place, hire, 
 hireling, hollow, homer, honeycomb, honor, hon- 
 orable, hook, horn, horror, horse, horseman, 
 host, householder, howling, humble, hundred, 
 hungry, husband, husbandman, hymn, hypo- 
 crite, hypocritical. 
 
 A is used exclusively before the five words 
 hen, hind, home-born, hot, huge. 
 
 Before the following both an and a are 
 found: hairy, hammer, hard, harp, heap, heart, 
 high, highway, hill, hole, holy, house; but the 
 use of an is far more common than the use 
 of a. 
 
 202 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 to which intercommunication now goes 
 on as a result of the development of 
 the railway system. It is mixing to- 
 gether the population of different parts 
 of the same country to a degree which 
 in the past was never deemed possible. 
 Pronunciation is one of the things most 
 profoundly affected by it. Places are 
 now visited by large numbers, or at 
 least brought to their attention, which 
 were once known to but a limited few. 
 Their names appear in guide-books and 
 train schedtiles. These proper nouns, 
 like the uncommon common nouns, come 
 before the eyes of large bodies of men 
 who have never heard them uttered. 
 The usual result follows. The pronun- 
 ciation is made to conform, as far as pos- 
 sible, to the spelling. All the syllables 
 are sounded; and by the mere weight of 
 numbers following it, the practice some- 
 203 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 times comes to establish itself finally 
 over the local usage. The substitution 
 which is now going on of the full sound 
 of Cirencester for Cissiter, and of An- 
 struther for Anster — to cite two in- 
 stances — simply tjrpifies what is tak- 
 ing place elsewhere in numerous cases, 
 though perhaps on not so marked a 
 scale. Nor is the effect of this influ- 
 ence limited to towns comparatively ob- 
 scure. The d of London was probably 
 never suppressed by all classes of the 
 population, but there was certainly a 
 time when in polite circles it was not 
 the fashion to pronounce it. "In my 
 youth," said Rogers, who was bom in 
 1763, " everybody said Lonnon and not 
 London. Fox said Lonnon to the last." 
 Rogers here meant everybody who was 
 anybody in the eyes of fashionable so- 
 ciety. Before he had lived out half his 
 204 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 days he saw this pronunciation disap- 
 pear before the influence of the written 
 speech. 
 
 Such is the general trend of the lan- 
 guage. But we must guard ourselves 
 against the behef that any considerable 
 body of words will be affected by the 
 movement steadily going on to conform 
 the pronunciation to the spelling. The 
 examples are impressive when taken sep- 
 arately; their whole number is, com- 
 paratively speaking, insignificant. The 
 deep-seated defects of our orthoepic 
 system will never be cured by pallia- 
 tives of this sort. As in accentuation, 
 so there are here, too, occasional eddies 
 in the general stream of tendency. At 
 times the spoken word, so far from con- 
 forming to the written, shows a dis- 
 tinct tendency to depart from it. As 
 good an illustration as any of this sort of 
 
 205 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 reaction can be found in the present 
 English pronunciation of schedule, to 
 which reference has already been made. 
 This is one of the few words in which the 
 pronunciation of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury has been definitely recorded. In 
 the three works in which mention is then 
 made of it, its first syllable is represented 
 by either sked or sed. This continued 
 to be the case during the whole of the 
 eighteenth century. No orthoepist of 
 the time, so far as I can discover, gave 
 the syllable any other pronunciation 
 than one of the two just specified. Sked 
 conformed best to analogy. In words 
 of our tongue which have a Latin or 
 Greek- original, ch has almost invariably 
 the sound of k. In the case of sch the 
 one notable exception now existing is 
 schism, in which the ch is suppressed 
 altogether. 
 
 206 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Sked and sed were, accordingly, the 
 only two ways in which orthoepists, 
 down to the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, represented the pronunciation of 
 the first syllable of schedule. But in 
 its case there was then unmistakably 
 manifested a tendency to abandon the 
 regular sound of ch heard in scheme and 
 school, and to follow the example of 
 schism in ignoring it entirely. . If ortho- 
 epists are to be trusted, the latter was 
 much the more prevailing usage. The 
 practice may have been handed down 
 from a time when one of the forms under 
 which the word appeared was cedule. 
 At all events, the result was that schism 
 and schedule came to constitute a sort of 
 class by themselves. When, therefore, 
 the pronunciation of the first syllable of 
 the latter as shed began to be heard, it 
 must at first have made something of 
 207 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the impression of being an exception to 
 an exception. The precise time when 
 the practice of so sounding it was adopt- 
 ed generally in England it is difficult 
 to ascertain with precision. It is as- 
 suredly a singular fact that Walker, who 
 was careful to note the variations of 
 usage in his time, had apparently never 
 heard of shed. He knew it only as a 
 theoretical pronunciation which had no 
 existence in reality. It was not au- 
 thorized even in the fifth edition of his 
 dictionary, brought out in 1809, two 
 years after his death, but containing his 
 latest conclusions and corrections. He 
 pointed out that sed was then the gen- 
 eral, though not the exclusive, pronun- 
 ciation. " Entirely sinking the ch of 
 schedule," he remarked, "seems to be 
 the prevailing mode, and too firmly fixed 
 by custom to be altered in favor of either 
 208 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 of its original words." By these latter 
 he meant the Latin schedula and the 
 French schedule. 
 
 Walker's forecast, as we see, has met 
 the usual fate of orthoepic prophecies. 
 Yet the regularly accepted modern pro- 
 nunciation of the word in England seems 
 to have leaped into general recognition 
 with comparative suddenness. The first 
 instance in which I have been enabled 
 to find it authorized is in Knowles's dic- 
 tionary of 1835. The next year it ap- 
 peared in the revision of Walker made 
 by Smart. This orthoepist was clearly 
 puzzled how to account for the existence 
 of the anomaly. "An unnecessary ref- 
 erence of schedule to its French deni- 
 zenship," he wrote, "with some vague 
 notion perhaps of the alliance of our Eng- 
 lish sh to the Teutonic sch has drawn the 
 word into the very irregular pronuncia- 
 14 209 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 tion of shed-ule." This latter repre- 
 sentation of it was one of the actual 
 forms in which the word had been ear- 
 lier spelled. It may be, therefore, that 
 the corresponding pronunciation, though 
 unrecognized by orthoepists, had been 
 transmitted from father to son for gen- 
 erations. Thus continuing, it passed in 
 the first half of the nineteenth century 
 the bounds of the class to which it had 
 been confined, and became the general 
 though not the exclusive favorite among 
 the users of speech in England. This 
 seems to be the best if not the only way 
 of explaining its sudden prevalence after 
 having been previously ignored for so 
 long a time. America, as a whole, has 
 always been faithful to what is strictly 
 the regular pronunciation looked at from 
 the orthographical point of view. 
 
 The examples which have been re- 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 corded give some conception of the in- 
 fluences which have been steadily at 
 work in modifying or changing pronun- 
 ciation. With the variations already 
 existing, and those coming to exist, it is 
 not surprising to find that orthoepists 
 themselves are not tmfrequently in a 
 state of perplexity. Naturally, much 
 more so are the ordinary users of speech. 
 It is no wonder, therefore, that large 
 numbers of them shotdd be constantly 
 hesitating as to the propriety of their 
 own pronunciation. They find them- 
 selves at sea, tossed about by winds from 
 every quarter, and with little apparent 
 prospect of reaching any secure ortho- 
 epical haven. The standard of author- 
 ity is what they are clamoring for; they 
 are ready to submit to it the moment it 
 has established its right to rule. But 
 where is it to be found? It was Gold- 
 
 211 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 smith who expressed a desire to discover 
 that happiest spot on earth which all 
 pretend to know, but about the exact 
 position of which the representatives of 
 no two countries agree. It is the same 
 in pronunciation. Where exists that 
 perfect standard which all orthoepists 
 assert or imply that they have furnished, 
 but in the representation of which in 
 numerous particulars no two of them 
 concur? 
 
Ill 
 
 FROM what quarter are we to look 
 for the coming of this infallible 
 guide for whose arrival we are all long- 
 ing? It seems never to have occurred 
 to any of the compilers of dictionaries, 
 and to but few of those who consult 
 them, that the simple solution of the 
 whole difficulty is that in the matter 
 of pronunciation there is no standard 
 of authority at all. Nor, as things 
 now are, can there be. Pronunciation 
 must and will vary widely among per- 
 sons of equal intelligence and cultiva- 
 tion. A dictionary which sets out to es- 
 tablish on a solid base an authoritative 
 standard is bound to take into account 
 213 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the practice of the whole body of edu- 
 cated men the world over who are en- 
 titled to consideration. How is that to 
 be ascertained? The mere statement of 
 the fact shows its physical impossibility. 
 It is a task beyond the power of any one 
 person or any number of persons to ac- 
 complish. 
 
 Even this is not the worst. If every- 
 body worth consulting could be consult- 
 ed, we should still be left in precisely the 
 same state of uncertainty in which we 
 were before. Dr. Johnson saw at once 
 the difficulty in the way when Sheridan's 
 proposal of a pronouncing dictionary 
 was brought to his attention in 1761. 
 "Sir," said he, "what entitles Sheridan 
 to fix the pronunciation of English ? He 
 has, in the first place, the disadvantage 
 of being an Irishman; and if he says he 
 will fix it after the example of the best 
 214 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 company, why, they differ among them- 
 selves. I remember an instance: when 
 I published the Plan for my Dictionary, 
 Lord Chesterfield told me that the word 
 great should be pronounced so as to 
 rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge 
 sent me word that it should be pro- 
 nounced so as to rhjrme to seat, and that 
 none but an Irishman would pronounce 
 it grait. Now here were two men of the 
 highest rank, the one the best speaker in 
 the House of Lords, the other the best 
 speaker in the House of Commons, differ- 
 ing entirely." It is typical of the un- 
 certainty attending the whole matter — 
 by some it will be held typical of the 
 forttmes of the distressful country — that 
 in the middle of the century Sir William 
 Yonge should declare that only an Irish- 
 man would pronounce great so as to 
 ryme to state; while towards the end of 
 
 215 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the same century Walker is found de- 
 claring, with equal positiveness, that 
 practically none but Irishmen pro- 
 nounced it so as to ryme to seat. 
 
 Still this belief in the existence of a 
 standard authority is one that will die 
 hard even with the educated class. 
 With the semi - educated class it will 
 never die at all. The most venerable 
 of the myths concerning it is that it is 
 found flourishing somewhere in London 
 and its environs. This is a superstition 
 which the inhabitants of that city are 
 naturally disposed to believe in them- 
 selves and to encourage in others. They 
 are apt to reward with praise those who 
 accept and proclaim this view, and 
 to visit with censure, if not with con- 
 tumely, those who dissent from it. One 
 reason for the popularity of Worcester's 
 dictionary in England was due to the 
 216 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 fact that he loudly professed to conform 
 the pronunciation authorized in it to the 
 usage of London. No one stopped to 
 ask how he managed to acquire it. The 
 usage of London, indeed, might reason- 
 ably be taken as a guide, for lack of a 
 better, if any one would or could be 
 good enough to tell us what the usage 
 of London really is. So far this has 
 never been done. The dictionaries 
 which profess to record it record it dif- 
 ferently. They could not well do other- 
 wise. There prevails now, and always 
 has prevailed, diversity of pronuncia- 
 tion among the educated inhabitants of 
 that city as among the similar dwellers 
 of any other place. 
 
 The futility of this widely proclaimed 
 standard is fully recognized even in Lon- 
 don itself by those most competent to 
 form an opinion. In 1869 the late Alex- 
 217 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 ander John Ellis brought out the second 
 part of his great work on the pronun- 
 ciation of Chaucer and Shakespeare. In 
 the course of the discussion it came in 
 his way to consider this very question. 
 In referring to the authorities usually 
 followed by his fellow-countrymen — 
 necessarily including those of his own 
 city — he informed us that Smart's of 
 1846 and Worcester's of 1847 were the 
 pronouncing dictionaries then most in 
 vogue in England. The very mention 
 of the latter as one of the two works 
 of this character highest in favor with 
 Englishmen reduces to an absurdity the 
 usage of London as a final authority. 
 When the inhabitant of that city wished 
 to satisfy his mind about the exact qual- 
 ity of that pure and perfect pronuncia- 
 tion, to the possession of which he is sup- 
 posed to have been born, he proceeded 
 218 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 half the time to consult the pages of an 
 American lexicographer. 
 
 How, in turn, did this American lexi- 
 cographer arrive at the knowledge of 
 that usage which he was careful to pro- 
 claim as the standard? He was born in 
 New Hampshire in 1784; he was grad- 
 uated at Yale College in 1811 ; he after- 
 wards taught school in Salem, Massachu- 
 setts, and in 1819 removed to Cambridge, 
 in the same State, and there spent the 
 rest of his life. In 183 1 he went to Eu- 
 rope, and was abroad for a few months. 
 This seems the only noticeable instance 
 where he was away from New England 
 for any length of time. During his brief 
 absence from his own country he visit- 
 ed Scotland, France, Holland, and Ger- 
 many, as well as England. Accordingly, 
 his stay in London must have been very 
 short at the best. Precisely who it was 
 219 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 there who suppUed him with the unadul- 
 terated article of pronunciation in use 
 in that city, or whether he picked it up 
 by his own unaided efforts, the account 
 given of his life neglects to inform us. 
 Certainly, if he ever secured it by per- 
 sonal study on the spot — and that is 
 the only course of procedure that would 
 entitle him to be spoken of as an au- 
 thority — it must have been during the 
 few weeks that he was there. At all 
 events, however obtained, he imported 
 it. Then, after purifying it in the at- 
 mosphere of Cambridge and Boston, he 
 exported it to England. It was in this 
 way that the Londoner frequently got 
 his pure London pronunciation from a 
 citizen of this country who was never 
 outside of New England for more than a 
 few months of his life. 
 
 This account of the origin of the Lon- 
 220 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 don usage furnished by Worcester has 
 been given as if it were the result of 
 genuine investigation pursued by him 
 on the spot. As a matter of fact, noth- 
 ing of the kind took place. It was in 
 the following way he arrived at it. He 
 studied in his own library the pronounc- 
 ing dictionary of everybody who had 
 taken the pains to compile one, whether 
 he were Englishman, Irishman, Scotch- 
 man, or American. Wherever they dif- 
 fered, he recorded their variations. Out 
 of these he selected the particular pro- 
 nunciations which suited best his own 
 taste or for any reason commended 
 themselves to his judgment. To them 
 he gave his approval. Almost inevita- 
 bly they would be the ones he was in 
 the habit of using himself and of hearing 
 generally used by those with whom he 
 associated. Out of this conglomerate 
 
 221 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 the usage of London, so far as Worcester 
 can be said to represent it, was manu- 
 factured in America; and the article thus 
 manufactured, if Ellis can be trusted, 
 was largely accepted in England. 
 
 The truth is that the pronunciation of 
 every dictionary expresses the prefer- 
 ences and prejudices of the particular 
 person or persons who have been con- 
 cerned in its compilation. At best it 
 represents the taste of a select coterie to 
 whose members the accidents of birth 
 and training and circumstance have 
 made familiar certain ways of pronounc- 
 ing words. It is a question, indeed — 
 or, rather, it is not a question — how far 
 any individual, no matter how vast his 
 acquirements, how wide his acquaint- 
 ance, how extensive his opportunities 
 for observation, can be deemed compe- 
 tent, in the case of a single disputed pro- 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 nunciation, to speak for the whole of 
 the English race whose usage is entitled 
 to consideration. Under the most fa- 
 vorable conditions our means for arriv- 
 ing at a correct conclusion in any given 
 case are necessarily restricted. We can 
 talk with but a comparatively small 
 number of persons; we can hear but a 
 small number of public speakers. These 
 are the only sources of direct informa- 
 tion; and these are soon exhausted. 
 For any extension of our knowledge we 
 must rely upon the testimony of others. 
 These, in turn, are subject to the same 
 Hmitations as ourselves. At best, there- 
 fore, our mastery of the subject can be 
 but imperfect. In consequence, when 
 one says that he has never heard such 
 and such a pronunciation, it is really no 
 proof that the pronunciation does not 
 exist, and perhaps exist on a large scale. 
 223 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 No more arduous task can well be 
 conceived than that of ascertaining the 
 pronunciation of a whole people. This 
 is so, even when the attempt is confined, 
 as is implied throughout in this discus- 
 sion, to the usage of the educated class. 
 No one who properly appreciates the dif- 
 ficulty of the quest as well as its mag- 
 nitude, would undertake it light-hearted- 
 ly. No one who has studied the sub- 
 ject, even superficially, would care to 
 express himself with much positiveness 
 on many points. Yet there is nothing 
 more common than to hear some person 
 lay down dogmatically what is the uni- 
 versal practice of England or of Amer- 
 ica. In general it can be assumed with 
 absolute safety that the man so doing, 
 whether Englishman or American, is 
 peculiarly ignorant of the usage of his 
 own country. Orthoepists themselves, 
 224 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 with all their attention to the subject, 
 frequently exhibit their lack of knowl- 
 edge, and are sometimes compelled to 
 confess it. Walker tells us that until 
 he had inspected the dictionaries he had 
 not conceived that there could be two 
 pronunciations of hearth. The examina- 
 tion of these revealed to him that there 
 were authorities who gave its ea the 
 sound it had in earth — the word, indeed, 
 with which it is made to rjmie by Mil- 
 ton. Had he further read the reviews 
 of the dictionaries which came out in 
 his own time, he would have discovered 
 that there were men to stigmatize as 
 slovenly his practice of giving to the ea 
 of this word the sound it has in heart. 
 Pronunciations, too, lost to orthoepic 
 recognition in one quarter of the Eng- 
 lish-speaking world may be found em- 
 ployed and sanctioned in some other. 
 IS 225 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Take the case of lever. The pronuncia- 
 tion leu'er was the only one authorized 
 by Webster in his original edition of 
 1828. It has been retained in that work 
 ever since, though no longer made exclu- 
 sive. The extensive circulation of this 
 dictionary in America has carried to all 
 pariis of the land this particular usage. 
 On the other hand, its existence is not 
 even conceded, so far as my knowledge 
 extends, in a single modem dictionary 
 compiled in England. There it is invari- 
 ably le'ver. But this was not always the 
 case. Lev'er is the pronunciation author- 
 ized by some of the eighteenth-century 
 orthoepists. It was probably the only 
 one ever heard by Webster. And though 
 utterly unrecognized by the dictionaries 
 now brought out in the mother-country, 
 it is far from iinlikely that places can be 
 found there in which it is still employed. 
 226 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 In this matter no man, nor even 
 any body of men, can cover the whole 
 groimd. How limited is the knowledge 
 possessed by any of us, no matter who, 
 of the pronunciation employed by our 
 fellow-men of the same station in life 
 and of the same degree of education can 
 be made manifest by a notable example. 
 There has already been occasion to speak 
 of the late Mr. Ellis. He was an ortho- 
 epist of exceptional attainments. He 
 joined to amplest scholarship in his spe- 
 cialty the most extensive observation. 
 If any man could be pointed out as cer- 
 tain to be acquainted with all the varia- 
 tions of usage existing in his own land, 
 he would in aU probability have been the 
 one selected. That he failed wofully in 
 the slight attempts he made to give some 
 conception of American prontmciation 
 is not to his discredit. The data upon 
 227 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 which he based his conclusions were in- 
 adequate and sometimes incorrect. In 
 regard to his own countrymen, however, 
 he was subject to no such limitations. 
 Yet he tells us that he only knew of the 
 pronunciation of vase which rymes it 
 with case, "from Cull's marking." Here 
 [is meant Richard Cull, • who was re- 
 sponsible for the orthoepy of Ogilvie's 
 Comprehensive English Dictionary, pub- 
 lished in 1863. Yet, at the time Ellis 
 wrote, this sound of 5 had been fully 
 recognized for a good deal more than 
 a hundred years. It had long been a 
 subject of discussion among orthoepists. 
 It had been sanctioned by several of 
 them besides the one mentioned — for 
 instance, by Craig, in 1849, and by La- 
 tham, in 1870. Though Ellis had never 
 heard the pronunciation, it must, ac- 
 cordingly, have been employed by no 
 228 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 inconsiderable number of his country- 
 men. 
 
 Much more noticeable were his re- 
 marks upon trait. This French word, 
 when adopted into English, naturally 
 brought with it at first its French pro- 
 nunciation. The final t was not sound- 
 ed. This continued to be the case for an 
 exceptionally long time. The word did 
 not, indeed, come into very general use 
 till after the middle of the eighteenth 
 century. Dr. Johnson, though introduc- 
 ing it into his dictionary, spoke of it as 
 "scarce English." As regards its pro- 
 nunciation, that characterization re- 
 mained largely true for more than a cen- 
 tury. "Even now," wrote Latham, in 
 1870, "though the word is common, few 
 venture to pronounce it as an English 
 word." Mr. Ellis, in his observations 
 on American pronunciation, selected the 
 229 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 sounding of its final t as one thing sure 
 to betray the nationality of the speaker. 
 His words imply that in the United 
 States the final letter was invariably 
 heard, and that just as invariably it was 
 never heard in England. As a general 
 observation the remark was true; as a 
 specific test it was likely at any mo- 
 ment to break down. Mr. Ellis's asser- 
 tion was contained in a work published 
 in 1874. Yet the pronunciation of the 
 final t of trait had for more than a cen- 
 tury been recognized by English ortho- 
 epists as allowable. Even as early as 
 1764 it was the single one sanctioned by 
 Buchanan. A third of a century later 
 Walker had declared that the t was be- 
 ginning to be soimded. Accordingly, he 
 authorized its use. It was not, indeed, 
 admitted by Smart into his revision of 
 Walker; yet in 1848 it was the only one 
 230 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 given by Boag. In 1870 it appeared as 
 an alternate in the dictionary of Latham, 
 and similarly in 1872 in that of Cham- 
 bers. Furthermore, within a few years 
 after Ellis's observations had been pub- 
 lished the sounding of the final t was 
 not only adopted in works like the Im- 
 perial and the Encyclopaedic, but pref- 
 erence was given to it. A complete 
 change of front in matters of pronuncia- 
 tion is not the work of a few months or 
 years. Dictionaries appearing shortly 
 before and soon after 1874 did not au- 
 thorize the pronunciation of the final t 
 of trait unless Englishmen had been pre- 
 viously in the habit — to some extent at 
 least — of so pronouncing it. As a shib- 
 boleth to detect the American the word 
 in consequence was always liable to prove 
 a failure. Still, if a man like Ellis can- 
 not be relied upon to be familiar with the 
 231 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 practice of his own countrymen, what 
 confidence can we possibly have in those 
 who undertake to speak for us all? 
 
 In days of old there used to be ex- 
 hibited by many an almost touching 
 faith in the verbal omniscience of lexi- 
 cographers. If a word did not appear 
 in the dictionary, it was assumed that it 
 did not exist in the language. Probably 
 very few educated persons can now be 
 credited with this childlike trust in the 
 completeness of any vocabulary. Yet 
 it prevails with fullest force in regard 
 to the prontmciation. There is little 
 left of that old spirit which at the be- 
 ginning questioned the authority of the 
 compilers of works dealing with it, de- 
 nounced them for the practices they 
 authorized, and instructed them as to 
 the usage which prevailed in the best 
 society — which, it is needless to say, 
 232 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 was the usage of the reviewer himself. 
 Orthoepists, to be sure, have now taken 
 care to avert, in a measure, criticism 
 of this sort. They record the varying 
 views of about every one who has gone 
 to the trouble of putting his pronuncia- 
 tion into print — at least into a printed 
 volume. So in modern times, just as we 
 have variorum Shakespeares, we may be 
 said to have variorum pronouncing dic- 
 tionaries. This fact really exempts us 
 from the necessity of paying to any one 
 of these works that unquestioning defer- 
 ence which it does not venture to assume 
 as due to itself. By giving us the choice 
 of two or more pronunciations of certain 
 words it disclaims any pretension to be 
 recognized as a binding authority. The 
 moment it concedes that one way is not 
 the only way, what is to prevent him 
 who consults it from insisting that there 
 233 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 is still another and a better way which 
 it has failed to record? 
 
 It follows, therefore, that while the 
 pronouncing dictionary is an authority 
 of more or less value, it is never a final 
 authority. On this matter, having been 
 concerned to some extent in the prepara- 
 tion of works of this nature, I speak 
 from the point of view of personal ex- 
 perience. I have protested to no pur- 
 pose against the authorization of cer- 
 tain pronunciations. I have succeeded 
 in getting one or two sanctioned which 
 had not previously been recognized as 
 allowable. It is hardly necessary to 
 add that the knowledge of these I shall 
 take precious good care to keep to my- 
 self. But where did I get any authority, 
 either in the way of protest or advocacy, 
 over thousands of other English speak- 
 ers, to decide how any particular word 
 234 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 should be pronounced? From no quar- 
 ter could it come, for in none did it exist. 
 The simple explanation of the matter is 
 that it was my fortune to be in a position 
 where my personal preferences met with 
 a certain degree of consideration. 
 
 In this matter the proper attitude for 
 every educated man to take is that once 
 exemplified by Dr. Bacon, for a long 
 while the pastor of Center Church, New 
 Haven. He was assailed for his pro- 
 nunciation of a certain word. It was 
 not according to Webster, he was told. 
 The clergjrman was personally acquaint- 
 ed with the man held up to him as a 
 guide, and very evidently had an opin- 
 ion of his own as to the respect due to 
 him as an authority. That, indeed, 
 may be thought to be countenanced in 
 the excellent dictionary which bears the 
 lexicographer's name; for it has been 
 235 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 carefully weeded of a large share of the 
 results upon which its original compiler 
 particularly prided himself. At all events 
 the doctor showed no disposition to sub- 
 mit to the correction. "What right has 
 Webster," growled he, "to dictate my 
 pronunciation? He is one of my parish- 
 ioners, and he ought to get his pronun- 
 ciation from me, and not I from him." 
 
 There is nothing peculiar in this atti- 
 tude on the part of those who have paid 
 close attention to the subject. No 
 scholar, for instance, will question for a 
 moment the knowledge of this whole 
 matter possessed by the late Mr. Ellis, 
 who has already been quoted. His em- 
 inence as an orthoepist would be ad- 
 mitted by all; his superiority wotdd be 
 conceded by most. To the right he had 
 to speak with authority not a single one 
 of the lexicographers who have been 
 236 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 mentioned can make the least pretence. 
 Yet this is what he said on this very 
 point: "It has not unfrequently hap- 
 pened," he wrote, "that the present 
 writer has been appealed to respecting 
 the pronunciation of a word. He gen- 
 erally replies that he is accustomed to 
 pronounce it in such and such a way, 
 and has often to add that he has heard 
 others pronounce it differently, but he 
 has no means of deciding which pronun- 
 ciation ought to be adopted, or even of 
 saying which is the more customary." 
 Here we have put in small compass the 
 exact state of the case by the man who, 
 while he was living, was usually reck- 
 oned among the very first, if not the very 
 first, of English orthoepists. 
 
 This, however, is a doctrine not loved 
 of the multitude. Each of us is inclined 
 to cherish his Webster or his Worcester, 
 237 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 or any other lexicographer he happens 
 to select, and woe unto the person who 
 does not submit to the authority he ac- 
 knowledges. There is no objection, in- 
 deed; to any man's conforming his own 
 practice to that of some particular guide. 
 On the contrary, it is both convenient 
 and comfortable; under ordinary con- 
 ditions it may almost be called neces- 
 sary. But there is decided objection to 
 the disposition he is apt to display of in- 
 sisting that the pronunciation which his 
 authority teaches is the only one that 
 can be properly said to exist, or, to put 
 it a little differently, that can be said 
 to exist properly. In this respect the 
 modern Gileadite — ^to revert to the illus- 
 tration with which this treatise began — 
 has proved himself far inferior to his 
 prototype. The latter knew that there 
 were several passages of the Jordan, and 
 238 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 took pains to secure them all. His 
 sanguinary imitator of the present day, 
 not conscious of the number in exist- 
 ence, fancies that when he has got pos- 
 session of one, he has become master of 
 the only crossing. Supremely intoler- 
 ant and supremely self-complacent is 
 the man who has been brought up on 
 a single dictionary. Especially is this 
 the case if he has happened to teach to 
 others the pronunciation it gives, for so 
 long a time that the employment of any 
 different one seems to him of the nature 
 of a blow at the very foundations of our 
 speech. It is fair to admit, however, 
 that this class of persons, once very 
 numerous, have now come to be rele- 
 gated more and more to the remotest 
 recesses of the rural districts. The rapid 
 multiplication of guides and manuals 
 and lexicons during the last twenty 
 239 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 years enables him who provides him- 
 self with them all to secure for his own 
 private use almost any pronunciation 
 he prefers. In the multitude of dic- 
 tionaries there is safety; for it is then 
 in our power to pit one lexicographer 
 against another, and to assimie a super- 
 cilious attitude towards the one who fails 
 to authorize the pronunciation which we 
 recommend by our own practice. 
 
 Nor, indeed, can we feel a sense of 
 security in pinning our faith without re- 
 serve to the orthoepy of any single lexi- 
 cographer. The original compiler may 
 and sometimes does change his mind. 
 If his work is successful enough to justify 
 revision, he is not unlikely at a later 
 period to concede some particular pro- 
 ntmciation to be permissible which pre- 
 viously he had been disposed to reject 
 altogether. Consequently his disciple's 
 240 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 opinion of what is improper, if not of 
 what is proper, will depend in a measure 
 upon the particular edition of the same 
 dictionary which he chances to have in 
 his possession. Even if the original 
 compiler remain faithftil to the pronun- 
 ciation he first authorized, his revisers 
 are sure not to remain faithful to him. 
 They alter without scruple. There is 
 not a single dictionary, successive edi- 
 tions of which have appeared, that has 
 not undergone more or less of modifica- 
 tion of the orthoepy it recommended. 
 The practice of so doing began early. 
 In 1797, when Sheridan had been but 
 nine years in his grave, a fourth edition 
 of his work was brought out, as its title- 
 page declared, "revised, corrected, and 
 enlarged." The name signed to the 
 preface as the one responsible for the 
 changes made was T. Churchill. Who- 
 16 241 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 ever he may have been, one reason for 
 his selection as reviser must have been 
 on account of his supposed familiarity 
 with the subject of orthoepy. Indeed, 
 he tells us himself that to speak with 
 propriety was an accomplishment of 
 which he was early ambitious. At all 
 events, many of Sheridan's pronuncia- 
 tions went by the board. In some in- 
 stances the changes made will seem to 
 modem ears for the worse and not for 
 the better. For illustration, Churchill 
 altered the pronunciation of break, 
 which Sheridan rymed with sake, into 
 breek, so as to ryme with seek. This 
 may have a somewhat strange sound 
 now, but it was no uncommon usage 
 then. It may be remarked, in pass- 
 ing, that this latter pronunciation was 
 disapproved by Walker on high philo- 
 sophical grounds. The word, he as- 
 242 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 sured us, was "much more expressive 
 of the action when pronounced brake 
 than breek, as it is sometimes affectedly 
 pronounced." 
 
 But though diversity is likely to en- 
 sue to some extent from the multiplica- 
 tion of pronouncing dictionaries, it must 
 be admitted that the influence of these 
 works is, on the whole, conducive to 
 uniformity. The reasons for this result 
 are obvious. Orthoepists, as a class, 
 are a very conservative body of men. 
 They may almost be deemed timid. 
 Every new competitor for the public 
 favor is sure to consult the works on the 
 same subject already in existence. If 
 he himself has been in the habit of em- 
 ploying a particular pronunciation, and 
 has been accustomed to hear it so em- 
 ployed in the society of which he forms 
 a part, he is none the less awed when he 
 243 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 comes to find it unrecognized as existing 
 at all in good usage by the authorities 
 to whom he more or less defers. He 
 hesitates to sanction what none of his 
 predecessors have seen fit to approve. 
 He often does it, to be sure, but he does 
 it reluctantly; and he sometimes re- 
 frains from doing it even when he has 
 very positive convictions of his own. 
 The result is that the same pronuncia- 
 tions of the same words are copied from 
 one dictionary into another, and to a 
 large extent transmitted from genera- 
 tion to generation. Moreover, all or- 
 thoepists are by their nature hostile to 
 the exceptional and the anomalous. 
 The weight of their collective authority 
 is generally against deviations from the 
 analogy of the language. Even when 
 they submit, they are inclined to do it 
 under protest. As on such points they 
 244 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 all tend to agree, their agreement affects 
 the practice of those who consult them, 
 and this is a constant factor working to 
 produce uniformity. 
 
 Furthermore, the dictionary, wher- 
 ever it goes, carries with it very largely 
 its own orthoepy. The work, if suc- 
 cessful, reaches bodies of men scattered 
 far and wide. It imposes upon the timid 
 or the indifferent among them the pro- 
 nunciations it authorizes; and in these 
 two classes may be reckoned the im- 
 mense majority of those who use it as a 
 work of reference. The average man 
 has no desire to incur the opprobrium 
 which falls upon singularity. If he be 
 at all sensitive to criticism — and most 
 men are so — ^he prefers to fall in with 
 the prevailing practice. This will nat- 
 urally be the practice recommended by 
 the dictionary having the widest circu- 
 245 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 lation. The general adoption of what 
 it authorizes causes its pronunciation 
 to triumph by the mere weight of num- 
 bers. This was particularly observable 
 of Walker's in the early part of the nine- 
 teenth century. Even now, in spite of 
 numerous deviations which have come 
 to prevail, it still remains true that he 
 has continued to affect English ortho- 
 epy profoimdly. The same thing can be 
 said of Webster in America. The im- 
 mense circulation of his dictionary in the 
 United States after the middle of the 
 nineteenth century has had a distinct 
 influence in assimilating the pronuncia- 
 tion of all parts of the country. 
 
 No one, indeed, can compare the or- 
 thoepy authorized at the end of the 
 eighteenth century with that author- 
 ized at the end of the nineteenth with- 
 out becoming aware that there has been 
 246 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 a steady movement towards uniform- 
 ity. Many pronunciations then sanc- 
 tioned by orthoepists of high repute are 
 now no longer known at all; at least, 
 they will be searched for in vain in 
 modem dictionaries. Who now, for in- 
 stance, knows of such a disease as dys- 
 en'tery f Yet this is the accentuation of 
 the word given by Dr. Johnson. Who 
 would think now of pronouncing the g 
 hard in such words as gymnastic, hetero- 
 geneous, homogeneous? Yet this was not 
 unusual in the eighteenth century and in 
 the early part of the nineteenth. The 
 practice was defended on the ground 
 that they were derived from the Greek, 
 where the letter had the sound so desig- 
 nated. Such a course of action, with 
 the reason given for it, kindled Walker's 
 wrath to the highest pitch. "Both the 
 learned and the unlearned coxcombs," 
 247 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 he wrote under oxygen, "conspire to pro- 
 nounce this word as well as hydrogen and 
 nitrogen with the g hard." 
 
 The remark just quoted is significant 
 of the attitude taken frequently by or- 
 thoepists. Walker, in particular, did 
 all he could to bully men into what 
 he deemed correct pronunciation. No 
 deviation from what he considered the 
 analogies of the languag^met favor in 
 his eyes. Others might tamper with 
 the unclean thing. Not so he. By 
 joining the two words in the same sen- 
 tence, he plainly intimated his opinion 
 that any one who gave to the first syl- 
 lable of idyl the pronunciation id was 
 little other than an idiot. Nares had 
 consented to giving the hard sound of g 
 to gymnastic. But he doubted, he said, 
 a little the practice, though not the 
 propriety. Walker understood him to 
 248 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 express just the opposite opinion and 
 was disposed to rebuke him for dealing 
 with this heresy so mildly. "There can 
 be no doubt," he wrote, severely, " of the 
 absurdity of the usage and of the neces- 
 sity of curbing it as much as possible." 
 To curb it took a long time. The classi- 
 cal influence gave way slowly. As late 
 as 1826 Walker's usage was in turn 
 denounced and stigmatized. In the 
 Nodes AmbrosiancB for November of 
 that year Hogg is represented as speak- 
 ing of an article in the preceding August 
 number on the subject of what appears, 
 as written there, Jymnastics. The speak- 
 er is at once taken to task. "Jymnas- 
 tics!" says Tickler. "James — if you 
 love me — G hard. The other is the 
 Cockney pronunciation." 
 
 But though the pronouncing diction- 
 ary may do something, and even much, 
 249 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 to produce uniformity, it cannot do 
 everything. It is only occasionally con- 
 sulted, while the word itself is seen fre- 
 quently. This, in consequence, is likely 
 to be pronounced according to any one 
 of the numerous different ways which a 
 language, arbitrarily spelled, easily per- 
 mits. Hence, diversities of pronuncia- 
 tion are always cropping up ; and, as has 
 already been pointed out, it is largely a 
 matter of chance whether or no any one 
 of these shall find permanent record. It 
 depends almost entirely upon the inde- 
 pendence or the caprice of the particu- 
 lar man responsible for the orthoepy of 
 a particular work. We must bear in 
 mind that no dictionary ever recorded 
 all the pronunciations which have been 
 or are sanctioned by good usage. Some 
 one of these hitherto unrecognized is in 
 consequence Uable at any time to pre- 
 250 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 sent itself on the pages of a new compila- 
 tion. This is a disturbing element which 
 has always to be taken into account. 
 The forces which produce unifonnity 
 are, on the whole, stronger than those 
 which produce diversity; but they are 
 not a great deal stronger. There is no 
 question that a much more general 
 agreement prevails in usage now than 
 there did a century and more ago. Yet 
 how far uniformity is yet from having 
 accomplished its perfect work a brief 
 statement will show. The International 
 Dictionary gives a list of between fifteen 
 and sixteen hundred words which are 
 pronounced differently by different or- 
 thoepists. To this number the Stand- 
 ard adds several hundred. Neither of 
 these most valuable works attempts to 
 record pronunciations which once ex- 
 isted, and may still exist somewhere. 
 251 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 Not even does the one which furnishes 
 the fuller list include all that could 
 have been given, and are, indeed, to be 
 found authorized in modem diction- 
 aries of repute. These facts speak for 
 themselves. Uniformity of pronuncia- 
 tion among the men of our race is an 
 orthoepic dream which, as matters now 
 stand, has the remotest possible chance 
 of being realized. 
 
 In truth, there is within limits scarcely 
 any peculiarity, not to say atrocity, of 
 pronunciation which cannot now plead 
 justification from some authority of 
 standing. This is but another proof 
 that the orthoepy of works of this char- 
 acter represents not the ascertained 
 practice of cultivated society as a whole 
 but that of some particular region of 
 country, or of some particular set, or oc- 
 casionally of some particular individual. 
 252 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 Even the New England provincialism 
 naytional — so spelled by Lowell in the 
 ' Biglow Papers ' — can be found sanc- 
 tioned by one of our most widely circu- 
 lated dictionaries. In thus pronouncing 
 the initial syllable it has yielded to a ten- 
 dency which has at times swept along 
 in its current orthoepists when dealing 
 with certain other words. We can see 
 it strikingly exemplified in the dispute 
 which has gone on in regard to the word 
 knowledge since at least the middle of 
 the eighteenth century. To this day 
 men can be found who indignantly in- 
 sist upon pronouncing its first syllable 
 like the verb know. The objection to 
 so doing and to naytional is that such a 
 course violates one of the very few or- 
 thoepic laws which continue with much 
 tribtdation to keep up a sort of struggle 
 for existence in our tongue. This is that 
 2S3 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 a derivative from a word whose vowel is 
 long shortens the vowel of the primitive. 
 The same rule applies also to compounds. 
 Thus, for example, from beast we get 
 bestial; from cone, conical; from meter, 
 metrical; from sphere, spherical; from 
 zeal, zealous; from sheep, shepherd; from 
 vine, vineyard. Accordingly, from na- 
 tion we shotdd expect ndsh-unal, just as 
 we have natural from nature. But in 
 English orthoepy rules exist mainly for 
 the purpose of furnishing opportunities 
 for the creation of exceptions. It is 
 almost needless to add that in the ob- 
 servance of the one just specified there 
 has been no consistency. From its au- 
 thority, indeed, partisans of classical 
 quantity have always been much dis- 
 posed to dissent. We can find in sev- 
 eral works, for the orthoepy of which 
 these men are responsible, heroism pro- 
 254 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 nounced as he'roism. Even he'roine 
 occasionally obtrudes itself upon the 
 attention. It was probably under a 
 somewhat similar influence that the 
 authorizer of naytional sanctioned this 
 particular pronunciation. 
 
 I am far, however, from wishing to be 
 understood as objecting to pronouncing 
 manuals and dictionaries. So long as 
 we continue to write one language and to 
 speak another they are a necessity of the 
 situation. Nor need it be denied that 
 there is a certain degree of peril in ad- 
 vocating the doctrine here advanced, es- 
 pecially for that by no means limited 
 number of individuals who have ac- 
 quired or unconsciously adopted pro- 
 nunciations which are under the ban of 
 cultivated society. It may also be at- 
 tended with a certain degree of discour- 
 agement to such as aim to impart the 
 255 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 best usage to those for whose education 
 they feel personal responsibility. There 
 can be no question that the adoption of 
 the views here maintained would tend to 
 chill enthusiasm. One has to believe 
 firmly that social salvation or perdition 
 lies in a particular way of pronouncing 
 a word, to make him really earnest in 
 the necessary and sometimes disagree- 
 able task of correcting others. If all are 
 to be saved, no matter how they pro- 
 nounce, the missionary spirit has lost its 
 strongest impeUing motive. It is really, 
 however, against the monstrous claims 
 put forth for the sanctity of particu- 
 lar persons who set out to instruct 
 us in orthoepy that the argument in 
 this treatise has been directed. Yet 
 any such line of reasoning is always 
 liable to be wrested from its legiti- 
 mate object into a disavowal of the 
 256 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 necessity of heeding any instruction at 
 all. 
 
 As a practical question, however, the 
 acceptance of such a belief will not 
 materially affect the action of any con- 
 siderable number. In the matter of 
 pronunciation few men could be pre- 
 vailed upon to proceed independently. 
 They prefer to be relieved of the neces- 
 sity of deciding for themselves, and are 
 ready to submit to the guide or guides 
 recommended to them by those in 
 whom they have trust. But, it may be 
 asked, how can there be any instruction 
 worth heeding if the position here taken 
 is correct? We are told that no par- 
 ticular work of the many existing is to be 
 accepted as authoritative. Can, then, 
 the agreement of all be entitled to this 
 epithet? If so, what is the nature of 
 the logical process by which opinions 
 
 17 2S7 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 individually worthless become by their 
 combination an infallible guide? Ob- 
 jections of this sort have been raised 
 against the view here expressed. They 
 rest, however, upon a misconception. 
 The individual work is usually entitled 
 to high respect. So far from being 
 worthless, it represents the best results 
 reached by a certain person or by cer- 
 tain persons who have devoted time and 
 thought and special study to the sub- 
 ject. They are usually trained observ- 
 ers who have employed all the oppor- 
 tunities at their disposal to familiarize 
 themselves with the usage they deem 
 best accredited. Their work, to be sure, 
 is in a necessarily limited field ; but that 
 field they, as a rule, strive to cover care- 
 fully. The conclusions they draw and 
 promulgate carry, therefore, weight un- 
 der any circumstances. Under some 
 258 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 circumstances they carry great weight. 
 Accordingly, he who submits his own 
 practice to that announced as correct 
 by a particular guide is following a per- 
 fectly legitimate and sensible course. It 
 is equally legitimate and sensible to en- 
 force it upon those for whose education 
 he is responsible. 
 
 This is the general rule. But it must 
 be kept in mind that just here occurs an 
 important limitation which most are too 
 much inclined to disregard. The pro- 
 nouncing dictionary which a man uses 
 exists for his own guidance; it does not 
 enable him to criticise the practice of 
 those who dissent from its teachings. It 
 will furnish a standard of authority, but 
 not the standard of authority. It is 
 nothing more than one of several stand- 
 ards, and, so far as the representation 
 of the best usage is concerned, will be 
 2S9 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 surely no worse than some and prob- 
 ably no better than others. The deci- 
 sions of orthoepists are usually entitled 
 to high consideration when they tell us 
 how we have the right to pronounce. 
 When they go further, and tell us how 
 we ought not to pronounce, they are on 
 much less assured ground. If this be true 
 of them, it is much more true of those 
 who consult them. He who desires to 
 express positive opinions not merely 
 upon what can be done, but upon what 
 cannot be done, must be prepared to 
 undergo the additional burden of famil- 
 iarizing himself with the pronunciations 
 authorized by all the numerous current 
 guides which exist. Against their agree- 
 ment it is ordinarily unwise to contend. 
 It is only the man whose superiority of 
 knowledge is universally conceded that 
 can venture to challenge the correctness 
 260 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 of the verdict rendered by all orthoepists, 
 coming as they do from every region of 
 the English^peaking world, and repre- 
 senting widely scattered and essentially 
 different bodies of cultivated men. To 
 those who have not reached the position 
 of safety just indicated the advice given 
 by Dr. Parr conveys the needed warn- 
 ing. He found fault with a gentleman 
 for putting the accent on the penult of 
 Alexandria. The latter defended him- 
 self by quoting the authority of Bentley, 
 who in this particular had conformed 
 to the classical practice. "Bentley and 
 I," rejoined the old scholar, "may call 
 it Alexandri'a, but you had better pro- 
 nounce it Alexan'dria." 
 
 In the consideration of this subject I 
 have confined myself mainly to the dis- 
 cussion of changes which have taken 
 place during the last one hundred and 
 261 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 fifty years. Before that time we must 
 rely for any assertion we make upon in- 
 ferences drawn from ryme or from plays 
 upon words to be found usually in dra- 
 matic pieces, and upon observations 
 contained in works which make merely 
 incidental references to orthoepy. It is 
 hard enough, as we have seen, to tell 
 how the men of our own day pronounce. 
 From the restricted sources of informa- 
 tion at our command which have just 
 been mentioned, we can get, accordingly, 
 some faint conception of the altogether 
 harder task of discovering how men pro- 
 nounced in times past. In particular, 
 the testimony from verse is always to be 
 received with caution. The scarcity of 
 rjmie in our tongue, of which Chaucer 
 complained, has compelled poets to treat 
 as allowable for that purpose many 
 words which are not precisely alike in 
 262 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 sound. In the incidental observations, 
 too, of writers, the personal equation has 
 always to be taken into account. Rare- 
 ly can we feel full assurance that the 
 pronunciation alleged is the pronuncia- 
 tion of the community generally and 
 not that of the individual or of a very 
 few. These are the difficulties that 
 meet us in attempting to ascertain the 
 usage of the remote past. But begin- 
 ning with the latter half of the eigh- 
 teenth century we are on tolerably safe 
 ground. Numerous dictionaries then ap- 
 pearing, devoting to orthoepy amplest 
 consideration, give us a right to make 
 certain positive statements. These 
 works, it is true, are far from agreeing 
 with one another; but a comparison of 
 them all enables us to arrive at fairly 
 accurate conclusions in regard to par- 
 ticular words, and to comprehend, in a 
 263 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 way, the general trend of pronuncia- 
 tion. 
 
 The examples of divergence which 
 have been given could have been very 
 largely increased. But enough, it would 
 seem, have been recorded in this slight 
 survey of the subject to justify the con- 
 clusions which have been suggested or 
 indicated in the preceding pages. For 
 the sake of convenience it may be well 
 to sum them up in a few sentences. The 
 first is that no one pronouncing diction- 
 ary can be regarded as the final stand- 
 ard of authority. Nor, in the second 
 place, can the concurrent voice of all of 
 them put together be thus considered. 
 It may, however, be conceded that their 
 agreement approaches so near to this 
 position that it is ordinarily unsafe for 
 the individual to oppose his practice to 
 their united authority. He is not likely 
 264 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 to take, knowingly, that risk unless he 
 has something of the spirit of the martyr 
 and is fully prepared to encounter the 
 martyr's fate. The least that can be 
 expected by him who, through indiffer- 
 ence or independence, runs counter to 
 accepted orthoepic conventions, is to 
 have inquiries made or insinuated as to 
 the region of country from which he 
 came or as to the character of the so- 
 ciety in which he was brought up. Still, 
 in his time of greatest trial he can be 
 sustained by the reflection that there is 
 nothing permanent about this general 
 agreement. It is likely to be broken up 
 at any moment by the entrance of a 
 new authority with new deviations from 
 the hitherto authorized usage. A third 
 conclusion is that while uniformity is an 
 ideal ever to be striven for, it is one 
 which will never be fully reaHzed. With 
 26s 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 our present orthography it can never be 
 realized even remotely. As a practical 
 question, indeed, this inability to attain 
 it is of little moment. Educated men of 
 our race can be understood b;;^ English- 
 speaking educated men ever5nvhere. If 
 they are not, it is not the fault of their 
 pronunciation but of their enunciation. 
 Uniformity, too, would have its draw- 
 backs for some. Scores of persons 
 would be deprived of the pleasure they 
 have in feeling that their individual 
 way of pronouncing words is a mark of 
 their social superiority. ^ 
 
 But as things now are, uniformity of 
 orthoepy is with us an impossibility. 
 There can never exist that infallible 
 guide for whose appearance we are all 
 longing until the spelling of every Eng- 
 lish word carries with it its own pronun- 
 ciation. Even then variation of accent 
 266 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 must continue to show itself, though it 
 will be reduced to the lowest possible 
 limits. But how infinitely remote is 
 such a prospect no one needs to be told. 
 Even were the conditions all favorable, 
 long and rough is the road that must be 
 travelled before any such result could be 
 reached in a language like ours which 
 enjoys and rejoices in the distinction of 
 being 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. 
 Our race as a race has, in consequence, 
 lost the phonetic sense. What can we 
 hope for the orthoepy of a tongue in 
 which, for illustration, the short sound 
 of e, found in let, is represented by ea in 
 head, by eo in leopard, by ay in says, by 
 267 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 ai in said, by ei in heifer, and by a in 
 many f Or of the correspondingly long 
 sound given by us to the same vowel, 
 which is represented by e in mete (to 
 measure), by ea in meat (an article of 
 food), or by ee in the verb meet; and, 
 furthermore, by i in magazine, by ie in 
 believe, by ej in receive, by eo in people, 
 and by ae in aegis? Or take the sound 
 denoted by the digraph 5/1, seen in ship. 
 It is represented by ce in ocean, by ci 
 in suspicion, by 5^' in dimension, by <i 
 in nation, by act in anxious, by 5c* in 
 conscience, by c/s in machine, and by s 
 followed by m in swre. There is no ob- 
 ject in heaping up further harrowing de- 
 tails, which, indeed, could be multiplied 
 almost indefinitely. They have been in- 
 troduced merely to show how hopeless 
 is the prospect of attaining under such 
 conditions a uniform standard of pro- 
 268 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 nunciation which all will recognize at 
 once, and to which all will unquestion- 
 ingly bow. 
 
 The conditions, accordingly, are un- 
 favorable on the side of the language it- 
 self; they are full as unfavorable on that 
 of the users of the language. Most of 
 us love our present orthography — love 
 it for its uncouthness, its barbarousness, 
 its unfitness to do the very work for 
 which orthography is presumed to exist 
 at all. We cling with passionate devo- 
 tion to its worst anomalies. We not 
 merely shudder at the prospect of chang- 
 ing a spelling which defies all attempts 
 at proper pronunciation, but at one 
 that in addition disguises completely 
 the derivation, about which in other in- 
 stances we profess to be profoundly solic- 
 itous. Even the pettiest alterations in 
 the interest of a mere mechanical uni- 
 269 
 
THE STANDARD OF 
 
 formity meet with the sturdiest resist- 
 ance. On this whole subject, indeed, 
 there is no ignorance so profound and 
 comprehensive as that which envelops 
 the minds of many men of letters, if we 
 can judge of the degree of their knowl- 
 edge by the character of their utter- 
 ances. It requires a far more enlight- 
 ened opinion than prevails yet among 
 the large majority of these before we 
 can look for the success of any effort to 
 cause our tongue to approach even re- 
 motely to the phonetic excellence of Ital- 
 ian or Spanish or German. /Yet, until 
 that time comes, no small share of our 
 lives will be spent in the profitable and 
 exciting occupation of consulting dic- 
 tionaries, in the equally profitable and 
 exciting discussion of the pronunciation 
 of particular words, and in airing our 
 opinions and delivering our decisions 
 270 
 
PRONUNCIATION 
 
 upon points about which one thorough- 
 ly educated man is as good an authority 
 as another and nobody is an authority 
 at all. ; 
 
INDEX TO WORDS 
 
 Academy, 124. 
 Acceptable, 153. 
 Adjourn, 148. 
 Advertisement, 123. 
 Alexandria, 261. 
 Anstruther(Anster) , 
 
 204. 
 Answer, 184. 
 Any, 174. 
 Apostle, 183. 
 Apotheosis, 137-140. 
 Arbutus, 159— 161. 
 Asparagus, 84, 87-89, 
 
 168, 175. 
 Aspirant, 127. 
 Assault, 189. 
 
 Balcony, 129. 
 Balmoral, 161. 
 Barbarous, 180. 
 Been, 37-39. 
 Begin (mng), 73. 
 Bestial, 254. 
 Blasphemous, 90. 
 Boil(bile), 98, 100, 
 
 lOI. 
 
 Break, 242. 
 Broil (brile), 98. 
 Business, 181. 
 
 Calm, 186. 
 Canorous, 149. 
 Carbine, 136. 
 Carmine, 156. 
 Cartel, 156. 
 Catch, 172-174. 
 Certain (sar tin), 96. 
 Chaldron, 186. 
 Character, 91, 92. 
 Chart, 178. 
 Chayny. See China. 
 Cheerful, 72. 
 Chestnut, 183. 
 China, 47, 83, 168. 
 Choir, 104. 
 Christmas, 184. 
 Cirencester, 204. 
 Clark. See Clerk. 
 Clergy (clargy), 97, 
 
 98. 
 Clerical, 97. 
 Clerk, 94, 95, 97, 98 
 
 !73 
 
INDEX TO WORDS 
 
 Cognizance, 178. 
 Coin, loi. 
 Colonel, 48, 83. 
 Compromise, 164. 
 Condemn, 185. 
 Confessor, 154. 
 Confiscate, iz8, 140. 
 Conical, 254. 
 Construe(conster), 
 
 177. 
 Contemn, 185. 
 Contemplate, 127- 
 
 129. 
 Contemplative, 140. 
 Contrary, 91. 
 Conventicle, 140, 143- 
 
 I4S- 
 Corollary, 125. 
 Coronel, 48. 
 Cowcumber, 84, 86, 88, 
 
 89. 
 Creature (critter) , 92. 
 Credulous, 180. 
 Cucumber, 84, 86, 88, 
 
 ^ '75- 
 Currant, 185. 
 
 Damosel, 182. 
 Damsel, 182. 
 Decorous, 148-152. 
 Default, 189. 
 Demonstrate ,127,128, 
 
 146. 
 Derby, 97. 
 Detestable, 123. 
 
 Dictionary, 168-171. 
 Dysentery, 247. 
 
 Either, 109-112. 
 English, 179. 
 Ensign, 178. 
 Epistle, 183. 
 European, 43, 44. 
 Extirpate, 127. 
 Extraordinary, 182. 
 
 Falter, 186. 
 Fasten, 184. 
 Fault, 189-191, 200. 
 Fearful, 72. 
 Fierce, 71. 
 Figure, 93, 94. 
 Finance, 156. 
 Folk, 186. 
 Frumenty, 85. 
 Furmenty, 85. 
 Furmete, 85. 
 
 Garden, 46. 
 Gazette, 156. 
 Girl, 56. 
 Gold, 112, 114. 
 Golf, 187, 188. 
 Grass (asparagus), 89. 
 Great, 215. 
 Guard, 46. 
 
 Gymnastic(s) , 247, 
 248. 
 
 Habit, 198. 
 74 
 
INDEX TO WORDS 
 
 Habitation, 198. 
 Half, 186. 
 Hasten, 184. 
 Hearth, 36, 225. 
 Heir(eir), 195, 199. 
 Herb(erb), 197, 199. 
 Heroine, 255. 
 Heroism, 254. 
 Hertford, 97. 
 Heterogeneous, 247. 
 Historical, 201. 
 Holm, 186. 
 Homogeneous, 247. 
 Honest(onest), 195, 
 
 200. 
 Honor(onur), 195,200. 
 Horizon, 154. 
 Hospital, 199. 
 Host, 199. 
 Hostile, 22. 
 Hostler, 197, 198. 
 Hotel, 201. 
 Hour(oure), 195, 200. 
 Humble(umble) , 36, 
 
 197, 198, 200. 
 Humor(umour), 200. 
 Hydrogen, 248. 
 
 Idyl, 248. 
 Ile(oil), 98. 
 Illustrate, 91, 141, 
 
 142. 
 Imperceptible, 142. 
 Indecorous, 149. 
 Indisputable, 122. 
 
 27s 
 
 Inexplicable, 122. 
 Innian (onion), 85. 
 Inquiry, 158. 
 Interesting, 14. 
 Inundate, 127, 135. 
 Invalid, 164. 
 Issue, 65. 
 
 Jersey; 97. 
 Join(jine), 98-102. 
 July, 43, 156-158. 
 
 KETCH(catch), 172- 
 
 174. 
 Kind, 45. 
 Knowledge, 253. 
 
 Landlord, 184. 
 Laylock, 83. 
 Leistire, 36. 
 Levant, 156. 
 Lever, 226. 
 Lilac, 83, 168. 
 Listen, 184. 
 London, 204. 
 
 Many, 174. 
 Medicine, 181. 
 Merchant(marchant), 
 
 95- 
 Metamorphosis, 136, 
 
 140. 
 Metrical, 254. 
 Mischievous, 91. 
 Museum, 158. 
 
INDEX TO WORDS 
 
 National, 253-255. 
 Natural, 254. 
 Nature (nater), 92, 93. 
 Neither, 1 09-1 12. 
 Niagara, 162. 
 Nitrogen, 248. 
 Nominative, 182. 
 
 Oblige, 116-119. 
 Oil, 98, 102. 
 Onion, 85. 
 Opponent, 158. 
 Ordinance, 182. 
 Ordinary, 182. 
 Ordnance, 182. 
 Ostler, 198. 
 Oxygen, 248. 
 
 Petard, 156. 
 Phlegmatic, 153. 
 Picture (picter) , 92. 
 Pierce, 71. 
 Pin(ning), 73. 
 Plethoric, 127. 
 Point (pint), 98. 
 Poison (pison), 98. 
 Popular, 180. 
 Populous, 180. 
 Pretty, 177. 
 Pronimciation, 6. 
 
 euiNE(coin), loi. 
 uire, 104. 
 
 Radish, 175. 
 
 Remonstrate, 141,147. 
 Ring(ing), 73. 
 Rome, 113. 
 
 Sausage (sasage), 86, 
 
 87. 
 Schedule, 23, 206-210. 
 Schism, 206, 207. 
 Schismatic, 153. 
 Serjeant, 97. 
 Sermon (sarmon), 96. 
 Serpent (sarpent), 96. 
 Service (sarvice), 96. 
 Sewer, 178. 
 Shepherd, 254. 
 Shibboleth, 4. 
 Shire, 178. 
 Shore (sewer), 178. 
 Sing(ing), 73. 
 Sm(nmg), 74. 
 Sojourn, 147, 155. 
 Sonorous, 149. 
 S^ragus, 87. 
 Sparrow-grass, 84, 87- 
 
 89. 
 Spherical, 254. 
 Splenetic, 153. 
 Spoil(spile), 98, 100. 
 Successor, 153. 
 Sugar, 65. 
 Suicide, 65. 
 Superstition, 65. 
 Sure, 65. 
 Swing(ing), 73. 
 Sword, 184. 
 76 
 
INDEX TO WORDS 
 
 Tapestry, i8i. 
 Theatre, 164. 
 Thousand, 184. 
 Toil, loi, 102. 
 Towards, 116. 
 Trait, 229-231. 
 Trepan, 156. 
 
 Vase, 39-43. 228. 
 Vatdt, 186. 
 Venison, 181. 
 Vermin (varmint), 96. 
 Vineyard, 254. 
 Violent, 180. 
 
 Walk, 186. 
 When, 23, 194. 
 Which, 194. 
 Whig, 23, 194. 
 While, 23. 
 Wind, 107-109, 112, 
 
 114. 
 Wound, 107, 112. 
 
 Yes, 176. 
 Yet, 176. 
 Yolk, 186. 
 
 Zealous, 254. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A, pronounced as e, 
 
 172-175. 
 Accent, shifting of, 
 1 2 1 ; in words of two 
 syllables, 147, 155- 
 158; in words" of 
 three syllables, 127- 
 129, 142, 145-147. 
 148-155. 158. 164; 
 in words of four or 
 more syllables, 122- 
 127, 142-145. 
 Addison,Joseph(i672- 
 
 1719), 117. 
 Ash, John (1724?- 
 
 1779). 31. ISO- 
 Bacon, Leonard 
 
 (1802-1881), 235. 
 Bailey, Nathaniel (died 
 1742), 26, 48, 85, 
 loi, 125, 137, 148, 
 
 154. 157. (164). 
 169. 
 Barclay, James, (fl. 
 1774), 31- 
 
 279 
 
 Bentley, Richard 
 (1662— 1742), 261, 
 
 ' Biglow Papers, The ' 
 (Lowell's), 253. 
 
 Boag, John (1775- 
 1863), 151, 231. 
 
 Buchanan, James (fl. 
 1766), 31-35, 51, 
 56, no, 174, 175, 
 230. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas 
 (1777-1844), 162. 
 
 ' Caution to Gentle- 
 men Who Use Sher- 
 idan's Dictionary, 
 A,' 66. 
 
 Century Dictionary, 
 
 135- 
 
 Chambers's Diction- 
 ary, 231. 
 
 Champion, The (Field- 
 ing's), 170. 
 
 Chapone, Mrs. Hester 
 (1727-1801), 169. 
 
 Chaucer, GeofiErey 
 
INDEX 
 
 (died 1400), 189, 
 218, 262. 
 Chesterfield, Philip 
 Dormer Stanhope, 
 Earlof(i694-i773), 
 
 115-119. 215. 
 Chuichill.T. (fl. 1796), 
 
 242. 
 Classical quantity, as 
 
 affecting EngUsh 
 
 pronunciation, 90, 
 
 129-155. 
 Colman, George(i 732- 
 
 1794). 144- 
 Cowley, Abraham 
 
 (1618-1667), 155. 
 Craig, John (fl. 1850), 
 
 152, 228. 
 Critical Review, 52 «., 
 
 56 n., 158. 
 Cull,Richard(fl. 1863,) 
 
 228. 
 
 D not pronounced, 
 
 183, 184. 
 Delany, Patrick 
 
 (i685?-i768), 62. 
 ' Deserted ViUage.The ' 
 
 (Goldsmith's), 191. 
 Dickens,Charles(i8i 2- 
 
 1870), 198. 
 Dictionary: 
 
 Ash's, 31. 
 
 Bailey's, 26. 
 
 Barclay's, 31. 
 
 380 
 
 Boag's, 151. 
 
 Buchanan's, 31-34. 
 
 Century, 135. 
 
 Chambers's, 231. 
 
 Comprehensive 
 English, 228. 
 
 Craig's, 152. 
 
 Dyche's, 157. 
 
 Encyclopaedic, 135. 
 
 Historical. (A New 
 English Diction- 
 ary on Historical 
 Principles, found- 
 ed mainly on the 
 Materials Collect- 
 ed by the Philolog- 
 ical Society. Edit- 
 ed by Dr. James 
 A. H. Murray, 
 and others. Ox- 
 ford.) 23, 39, 95 
 
 »., I3S- 
 Imperial (Ogilvie's; 
 andAnnandale's) , 
 
 I3S- 
 
 IntemationaJ (Web- 
 ster's), 135. 
 
 Johnson's, 26, 29. 
 
 Johnstone's, 32. 
 
 Keniick's, 31, 51. 
 
 Knowles's, 54, 77. 
 
 Latham's, 142. 
 
 Ogilvie's, 228. 
 
 Perry's, 31, 56. 
 
 Scott's, 57. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Sheridan's, 53. 
 Smart's, 77. 
 Standard (Funk 
 and Wagnall's) , 
 
 o ^3S. 231- 
 Stormontns, 23, 
 
 135- 
 
 Walker's, 53, 68. 
 
 Webster's, 54, 151. 
 See Internation- 
 al. 
 
 Worcester's, 54. 
 
 Wright's, 152. 
 Dryden, John (1631- 
 
 1700), 99, loi, 144, 
 
 iSS- 
 Dyche, Thomas (fl. 
 
 1725). 157- 
 
 E pronounced as a, 
 
 94-98. 
 E pronounced as i, 
 
 17s. 179- 
 
 Ellis, Alexander John 
 (1814-1890), S4, 
 218, 222, 227 — 231, 
 236. 
 
 Elphinston, James 
 (1721— 1809), 41. 
 
 Encyclopaedic Dic- 
 tionary (Cassell's) , 
 23, 135, 231. 
 
 Epluraimites, 3-6, 24. 
 
 European Magazine, 
 44- 
 
 2l 
 
 'FabrieQubene.Thb' 
 
 (Spenser's), 173 «. 
 Fielding, Henry (i 707- 
 
 1754), 170. 171- 
 Fox, Charles James 
 
 (1749-1806), 204. 
 French language. Old, 
 
 189, 192, 198, 199. 
 
 Garrick, David 
 
 (1716-1779), 66, 67. 
 George IV. (1762- 
 
 1830), 119. 
 Gileadites, 3-6, 238. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver 
 
 (1728 -1774), 162, 
 
 191. 
 
 H not pronounced, 
 185, 191— 201. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 
 (1804-1864), 37. 
 
 ' Hints for Improve- 
 ment in the Art of 
 Reading' (Walker's), 
 
 73- 
 
 Historical English Dic- 
 tionary. See Dic- 
 tionary. 
 
 Hogg, James (1772- 
 183s), 249. 
 
 Illiterate pronuncia- 
 tion, 17, 18; archaic 
 character of, 89-92. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Imperial Dictionary 
 (Annandale's) , 23, 
 
 135. 231. 
 
 International Diction- 
 ary. 13s 251- 
 
 Italian language, 
 192. 
 
 •Jealous Wipe, The' 
 (Colman's), 144. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel 
 (1709 -1784), 140, 
 168, 214; his dic- 
 tionary, 26, 29; his 
 pronunciation of 
 particular words, 48, 
 84, 116, 124, 125, 
 
 137. 144. 148, IS4. 
 156, 157, 190, 229, 
 247. 
 Johnston, William (fl. 
 
 1764). 32. ii°- 
 Jonson, Ben (1573?- 
 
 1637). 199- 
 ' Julius Caesar' (Shake- 
 speare's), 113. 
 
 Kemble, John Philip 
 (1757-1823), 119, 
 
 IS4- 
 Kenrick, William 
 (i725?-i779), 31, 
 35. 43. SI. S2. 56. 
 
 100, 102. 
 
 Knowles, James(i 759- 
 28 
 
 1840), 54, 77, 88, 
 151, 209. 
 
 L not pronounced, 
 185-191. 
 
 Landor, Walter Sav- 
 age (1775 - 1864), 
 140-145, 196. 
 
 Latham, Robert Gor- 
 don (1812 - 1888), 
 142, 228, 229, 
 231. 
 
 London pronuncia- 
 tion, 216-218, 220- 
 222. 
 
 Love's Labor's Lost 
 ( Shakespeare's) , 
 124. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell 
 (1819-1891), 253. 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas 
 Babington (1800- 
 1859), 136, 137, 
 140. 
 
 Milton, John (1608- 
 1674), 72, 90, 155, 
 180, 225. 
 
 Monthly Review, The, 
 34. 
 
 Narbs,Robert(i753- 
 1829), 41, 45, 75, 
 loi, 118, 173, 160, 
 248. 
 
 2 
 
INDEX 
 
 Ogilvie, John (1797- 
 
 1867), 228. 
 Oi pronounced as «, 
 
 98-104. 
 Oxford Dictionary. 
 
 See Historical.under 
 
 Dictionary. 
 
 Palsgrave, John 
 
 (died 1554). 198. 
 Pardon, William (fl. 
 
 „ 173s). 157- , 
 Parr, Samuel (1747- 
 
 1825), 261. 
 Pepys, Samuel (1633- 
 
 1703), 86, 87. 
 Perry, William (fl. 
 
 177s). 31. §6. 58- , 
 Philological Society s 
 dictionary. See His- 
 torical, under Dic- 
 tionary. 
 Pope, Alexander 
 (1688-1744), 98- 
 100, 117, 190. 
 ' Practical Grammar of 
 English Pronuncia- 
 tion, A.' (Smart's), 
 
 79- ,. . 
 
 Pronouncing diction- 
 aries, early history 
 of, 24-35, 49-76. 
 
 Pronunciation con- 
 formed to spelling, 
 165-205; its univer 
 
 sality now impossi- 
 ble, 266-269. 
 
 Proper names, pro- 
 nunciation of, i6i- 
 163, 202-205. 
 
 Provincial pronuncia- 
 tion, 17, 18. 
 
 Rhyming Dictionary 
 (Walker's), 67-68. 
 
 Richardson Samuel, 
 (1689-1761) ; his'Sir 
 Charles Grandison,' 
 91. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel (i 763- 
 
 185s). 129. 204- 
 Ryme as indicating 
 pronunciation, 98- 
 102, 107—109, 262. 
 
 Scenic Annual, The, 
 
 162. 
 Scott, Sir Walter 
 
 (1771-1832), 182. 
 Scott, William (fl. 
 
 1786). 57- 
 
 Shakespeare, William 
 (1564-1616), 113, 
 123, 124, 125, 126, 
 J28, 144, I54> 218, 
 233. 
 
 Sheridan, Thomas 
 (1721-1788), 22, 31, 
 
 38, 51. S3. 67. 74, 
 77, 84, 86, 95, III, 
 
 83 
 
INDEX 
 
 137. 174, 197. 214, 
 241, 242; account 
 
 of, 30. 5°. 59-66- 
 Shibboleth, 4. 
 Smart, Benjamin 
 
 Humphrey (1786?- 
 
 1872), 22, 38, 54, 
 
 77, 79, 88, 209, 218, 
 
 230. 
 Spenser, Edmund 
 
 (iSS2?-iS99), 173. 
 Standard Dictionary, 
 
 The, 13s, 251. 
 Stormonth, James 
 
 (died 1882), 23, 
 
 I3S- 
 Swift, Jonathan 
 (1667-1745), 59, 
 60, 61-64, 108, 114, 
 190. 
 
 T not pronounced, 
 183, 184, 185. 
 
 ' Tempest,The' (Shake- 
 speare's), 126. 
 
 Thackeray, William 
 Makepeace (1811- 
 1863), 47, 168, 171. 
 
 Tooke, John Home 
 (1736-1812), 140, 
 
 143- 
 
 ' Traveller, The ' (Gold- 
 smith's), 162. 
 
 Trevelyan, Sir George 
 Otto (1838), 135. 
 
 Trisyllables pro- 
 nounced as dissyl- 
 lables, 180. 
 
 ' Vanity Fair' (Thack- 
 eray's), 168. 
 
 'Virginius' (James 
 Sheridan Know- 
 les's), 77. 
 
 Vowel, change in pro- 
 nunciation of, 92, 
 104, 107-114, 116- 
 119, 172. 
 
 W not pronounced, 
 183, 184. 
 
 Walker, John (1732- 
 1807), 22, 30, 38, 
 40, 41, 4S, 46, 49. 
 S4, 84, 85, 88, 93, 
 96, 103, III, 112, 
 114, 118, 137, 149- 
 151, 152-155, 170, 
 
 173, 174, 17s, 176. 
 177, 181, 191, 197, 
 208, 209, 216, 225, 
 230, 242, 246, 248, 
 249; account of, 
 30, 66-78; author- 
 ity of his dictionary, 
 
 53- 
 Webster, Noah (1758- 
 
 1843), S4, 151, 170. 
 171, 226, 235-237, 
 246. 
 
 284 
 
INDEX 
 
 Worcester Joseph Em- 
 etson (1784- 1 865), 
 54, 216, 218-222, 
 237- 
 
 Wright .Thomas ( 1 8 1 o- 
 1877). 152- 
 
 YoNGE, Sir William 
 (died 175s). 215- 
 
 THE END