American Language (62 page)

“Language,” said A. H. Sayce, in 1879, “does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an exercise of memory.”
¹
The theory, at that time, was somewhat strange to English and American grammarians and etymologists; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of Continental philologians, they have turned from orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and a number of the more recent grammar-books are based upon the spoken language of educated persons — not, remember, of conscious purists, but of the general body of cultivated folk.
²
Unluckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics,
³
“pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, “even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style.” The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute shades of differences, and admit other differences according as they are conversing
naturally or endeavoring to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print. Sweet, trying to do it, found himself, in the end, with an alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L. Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and A. J. Ellis brought it to 390.
⁴
During the late 80’s of the last century the unwieldy Ellis alphabet was taken in hand by P. E. Passy, a French phonetician, and reduced to a workable compass. In its new form it was adopted by the Association Internationale Pho-netique, which Passy had founded, and today, under the name of the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, it is in general use. It suffices for recording most of the sounds commonly encountered in the Western European languages, but every time it is put to some new use defects in it are discovered, and when it was adopted by the Practical Phonetics Group of the Modern Language Association in 1927 a new character had to be added to represent the vowel in the American pronunciation of
hurt
. Unfortunately, its 50-odd characters include twenty or more that do not occur in any normal modern alphabet, and so it is readily interpreted only by phonologists, and the makers of dictionaries avoid it.
⁵
What Richard Grant White wrote in 1880, that “it is almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the sound of any word,” is still more or less true. He went on:

Some years ago certain German phonologists, despairing of the printed page, turned to the phonograph, and there is now a Deutsche
Grammophon Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers to supply records of a great many languages and dialects, including English. The phonograph has also been adopted for teaching foreign languages by some of the American correspondence schools.
⁷
In 1924, at the request of the Present Day English Group of the Modern Language Association, Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres of Columbia University began to make phonograph records of American speech at the New York studios of the Columbia Phonograph Company. In 1927 he was joined by Dr. W. Cabell Greet, now editor of
American Speech
, and since then a machine for recording on aluminum disks has been installed at Columbia University, and under Dr. Greet’s direction nearly 2500 records of about 3500 different speakers have been accumulated (1936). Approximately two thirds of them preserve recordings of a little story called “Arthur the Rat,” so that minute comparisons are easily made. All parts of the country, save the Pacific Coast, are well represented. The same method has been employed by other phonologists, and it was used in accumulating material for the Linguistic Atlas. Transcriptions of Dr. Greet’s records, in the IPA, have been printed in every issue of
American Speech
since February, 1933.
⁸
Of late efforts have been made to record speech by the oscillograph, which has already proved its usefulness in the investigation of the singing voice. It seems to be very likely that, in the near future, the study of oscillograph records on motion picture films will provide a means of distinguishing minute differences in pronunciation with great precision.
⁹
The lead in this work has been taken by Dr. E. W. Scripture, the American-born professor
of experimental phonetics at the University of Vienna; by Dr. S. N. Treviño of the University of Chicago; and by the acoustical engineers of the Bell Telephone System laboratories. The
x
-rays have also been employed, especially by Dr. G. Oscar Russell of Ohio State University.
¹⁰

In view of the foregoing it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print all the differences between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely small and subtle, and only their aggregation makes them plain. According to Dr. R. J. Menner of Yale,
¹¹
the most important of them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. It is in this direction, he says, that one must look for the true characters of “the English accent.” Virtually all other observers agree. “What does an Englishman first notice on landing in America,” asks Hilaire Belloc, “as the contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic so far as the
spoken
language is concerned?” The answer is: “The first thing which strikes him is the violent contrast in intonation.”
¹²
“Though they use the same words,” says John Erskine, “the Englishman and the American do not speak the same tune.”
¹³
In general, the speech-tunes of the Englishman show wider melodic curves than those of the American, and also more rapid changes. The late Fred Newton Scott attempted to exhibit the difference by showing how the two speak the sentence, “The weather is rather warm to-day.” The American, beginning at the tonic, “ascends gradually for about a major fourth to, and through the word
warm
, and then drops back
in the word
to-day
to the tonic.” But the Englishman follows a much more complicated pattern. His voice drops below the tonic in enunciating
weather
, then rises sharply to the beginning of
warm
, then drops again, and finally turns upward on
-day
.
¹⁴
As a result of his use of such speech-patterns his talk sounds “abrupt, explosive and manneristic,”
¹⁵
to American ears, and shows what has been called “a somewhat pansy cast”
¹⁶
and “a mauve, Episcopalian ring.”
¹⁷
His range of intonation, says Daniel Jones, “is very extensive.… It is not unusual for a man with a voice of ordinary pitch to have a range of over two octaves, rising to
or even higher, and going down so low that the voice degenerates into a kind of growl which can hardly be regarded as a musical sound at all.”
¹⁸
Such coloratura is surely not common among Americans. “Usually,” says Scott, “their words will be spoken unemotionally, perhaps in a sort of recitative, with a rather dry, sharp articulation, especially if the speaker is from the Middle West.” Erskine describes their speech as “horribly monotonous — it hasn’t tune enough,” and Krapp says that it sounds “hesitating, monotonous and indecisive” to an Englishman. Nevertheless, Krapp holds that “the American voice starts on a higher plane, is normally pitched higher than the British voice.”
¹⁹
Here I incline to agree with Richard Grant White that the contrary is normally the case.
²⁰
The nasal twang which Englishmen detect in
vox Americana
, though it has some high overtones, is itself not high pitched, but rather low pitched. The causes of that twang have long engaged phonologists, and there is respectable opinion in favor of the theory that our generally dry climate and rapid changes of temperature produce an actual change in the membranes concerned in the production of sound. Perhaps some such impediment to free and easy utterance is responsible both for the levelness of tone of American speech, and for the American tendency to pronounce
the separate syllables of a word with much more care than an Englishman bestows upon them. The American, in giving
extraordinary
six careful and distinct syllables instead of the Englishman’s grudging four, and two stresses instead of the Englishman’s one, may be seeking to cover up a natural disability. George P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,” sought two other explanations of the fact. On the one hand, he pointed out that the Americans of his day read a great deal more than the English, and were thus much more prone to spelling pronunciations, and on the other hand he argued that “our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs … to a more Southern type than that of England,” and “in Southern latitudes … articulation is generally much more distinct than in Northern regions.”
²¹
In support of the latter proposition Marsh cited the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian and Turkish, as compared with that of English, Danish and German — rather unfortunate examples, for the pronunciation of German is at least as clear as that of Spanish. Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English. Marsh believed that there was a tendency among Southern peoples to throw the accent toward the ends of words, and that this helped to bring out all the syllables. A superficial examination shows a number of examples of that movement of accent in American:
advertísement, primárily, telégrapher, temporárily
. The English accent all of these words on the first syllable except
advertisement
, which is accented on the second; Americans usually accent
primarily
and
telegrapher
on the second, and
temporarily
and
advertisement
²²
on the third. Again there are
frontier
and
harass
. The English accent
the first syllables; we commonly accent the second.
Kilómeter
seems to be gaining ground in the United States, and on the level of the vulgar speech there are
theátre, defícit, mischíevous
and
exquísite
.
²³
But when all such examples have been marshaled, the fact remains plain that there are just as many, and perhaps more, of an exactly contrary tendency. The chief movement in American, in truth, would seem to be toward throwing the accent upon the first syllable. I recall
mámma, pápa, ínquiry, céntenary, álly, récess, ídea, álloy
and
ádult
; I might add
défect, éxcess, áddress, súrvey, mágazine, mústache, résearch
and
rómance
. All these words are accented on the second syllable in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
²⁴
Perhaps the notion that American tends to throw the accent back has been propagated by the fact that it retains a secondary accent in many words that have lost it in English. Most of these end in
-ary, -ery
or
-ory, e.g., necessary, monastery
and
preparatory
. In American the secondary accent in
necessary
, falling upon
ar
, is clearly marked; in English only the primary accent on
nee
is heard, and so the word becomes
nécess’ry
. In
laboratory
, which the English accent on the second syllable, the secondary accent on the fourth, always heard in American, is likewise omitted, and the word becomes something like
labórat’ry
. The same difference in pronunciation is to be observed in certain words of the
-ative
and
-mony
classes, and in some of those of other classes. In American the secondary accent on
at
in
operative
is always heard, but seldom in English. So with the secondary accent on
mon
in
ceremony:
the third syllable is clearly enunciated in American, but in English everything after
cer
becomes a kind of
glissando
. So, finally, in
melancholy:
in English it sounds like
mélanc’ly
. Until relatively recently the English accented
adumbrate, compensate, concentrate, confiscate, demonstrate, illustrate, exculpate, objurgate
, and some of their congeners on the second syllable; indeed,
enervate
is still so accented by the Concise Oxford. But during the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century the accent
moved forward to the first syllable. This movement, I believe, began in the United States earlier than in England.
²⁵
Whether the colorless and monotonous American manner of speech promoted the survival of the secondary accent or the secondary accent helped to flatten out the American speech-tune is a problem that has not been solved. Krapp was inclined to choose the former hypothesis
²⁶
but it may be that the thing worked both ways.