American Language Supplement 2 (20 page)

2
Standard English,
Die neuren Sprache
, 1894, p. 53. I take this from Sidelights on the Pronunciation of English, by Giles Wilkeson Gray,
Quarterly Journal of Speech
, Nov., 1932, p. 556. Gray’s paper gives a sympathetic and excellent account of Lloyd (1846–1906), who was a lifelong resident of Liverpool, and thus stood outside the Oxford influence that shows in nearly all other English phoneticians.

3
Notes on American English, quoted by Gray, just cited.

1
Postvocalic
R
in New England Speech,
Acts of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists;
Copenhagen, 1936, pp. 195–99.

2
Early Loss of
R
Before Dentals,
Publications of the Modern Language Association
, June, 1940, pp. 308–59.

3
Just how
cott
was pronounced is not clear. It may have been the remote forerunner of the Southern
cote
, as in
co’t-house
.

4
A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 298.

5
I take this example from Broadcast English No. II, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1930, p. 14. James does not indicate how
door
is here pronounced, but other British authorities clip off the final
r
and make it nearly identical to the
doh
in the Southern cracker and Negro “Shet ’at
doh
.”

6
Our Spoken English; London, 1938, p. 99. James also discusses this blunder in The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 107, 108 and 183. Mr. George W. Thompson calls my attention to the fact that the Southern proletariat is lavish with redundant
r
’s, as in
holler
(noun and verb),
yeller
or
yaller, ager, marshmeller, Ednar, Emmar
, etc.

7
Some Notes on American
R, American Speech
, March, 1926, pp. 329–39.

1
AL4, p. 425, n. 1.

2
The nature of the sound in this position is discussed in New Light on the Origin of Eastern American Pronunciation of Unaccented Final
A
, by James L. Clifford,
American Speech
, Oct., 1935, pp. 173–75. Various correspondents assure me,
pace
Lardner, that they have frequently heard
feller
. It may be a spelling-pronunciation. See Notes, by Moyle Q. Rice,
American Speech
, Oct., 1937, p. 237.

3
The Stressed Vowels of American English,
Language
, June, 1935, p. 97.

4
Henry James described it, in The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905, p. 29, as resembling “a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth,” and an editorial writer for the Hartford
Courant
, on July 6, 1938, accused the speakers of General American of hanging on to it “with the painful tenacity of a clumsy dentist drilling out a cavity.” The Romans called
r
the
litera canina
, the dog’s letter.

5
Alas, even this is denied by a Southern correspondent, Lieut.-Col. F. G. Potts, U.S.A. (ret.), of Mt. Pleasant, S. C. Under date of Jan. 20, 1945 he writes: “American
r
, carefully sounded, tends to make words indistinct, especially when two or more
r
’s occur close together. Just have a Middle Westerner say
Yorkshire terrier
and see what you think of it. The rolled or trilled
r
’s of Scotland, Ireland and the Continent … are usually pleasant to listen to, and do not detract from clarity of utterance. But the American
r
is not only disagreeable in itself, but also the cause of modification in the pronunciation of nearby vowels, so that
Mary, marry, merry
and
Murray
are frequently pronounced alike, and
heart
becomes
hurt
.”

1
Interesting speculations about
r
are in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 217–31; The Dog’s Letter, by C. H. Grandgent, in Old and New, Cambridge (Mass.), 1920, pp. 31–56; Dropping of the
R
, by L. A.,
American Notes & Queries
, Sept., 1945, p. 92, and Loss of
R
in English Through Dissimilation, by George Hempl,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. I, No. VI, 1893, pp. 279–81.

2
American Pronunciation; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. 149.

3
The English Language in America, Vol. II, pp. 13–17.

4
AL4, p. 352, n. 2.

5
Private communication, Jan. 20, 1945.

1
Private communication.
Strengths
, incidentally, must be a hard dose for foreigners learning English. It not only includes the difficult sound of
th
, but is a nine-letter word with only one vowel. But when it comes to clusters of consonants English is a relatively humane language. In his Notes on Duwamish Phonology and Morphology,
International Journal of American Linguistics
, Oct., 1945, p. 204, Jay Ellis Ransom says that Duwamish, one of the Indian languages of the northwest Pacific Coast, includes
sxw, gwlts, gwlgw, bdtcd, sqwqw, txw, djdtcd
and
bdtcdz
.

2
An English Pronouncing Dictionary, p. 211.

3
Genesis IL, 13; Acts XXVII, 12.

4
I Kings I, 52.

5
II Chronicles XIV, 9; do., XXVI, 11; Psalms XXVII, 3; do., XXIII, 16; Ezekiel I, 24; Daniel VIII, 12.

6
Job I, 10; Proverbs XV, 19. But in Ecclesiastes X, 8 and Mark XII, 1
a
is used before
hedge
.

7
Isaiah LIX, 17; I Thessalonians V, 8. But in I Samuel XVII, 5
a
is used.

8
Isaiah LXVI, 14.

9
Job III, 16; Proverbs XVIII, 11; do. XXI, 4; Isaiah XXX, 13; John XIX, 31; Acts XIII, 17.

10
Psalms CI, 5; Exodus XIV, 8; Numbers XXXIII, 3; do. XV, 30.

11
Ezekiel II, 9; do. VIII, 3; Daniel X, 10. But
a
is in Exodus XIX, 13.

12
Exodus XXVIII, 32; do. XXIX, 23. But
a
is in Jeremiah XIII, 4, Ezekiel VIII, 7; II Kings XII, 9.

13
II Kings IV, 9; Ezekiel XLV, 1; Acts X, 22; I Peter II, 5; Romans XVI, 16; I Corinthians XVI, 20; II Corinthians, XIII, 12; I Thessalonians V, 26; II Timothy I, 9. But
a
is used in Exodus XIX, 6; Isaiah XXX, 29; Romans XII, 1.

1
Luke I, 69.

2
Psalms XXXIII, 17.
An horseman
is in II Kings IX, 17. But
a horse
is in I Kings X, 29 and Isaiah LXIII, 13.

3
Exodus XII, 30; Judges XVII, 5; I Kings II, 24; do. XI, 18; do. XII, 31; Psalms LXXXIV, 3; Proverbs XVII, 1; do. XXIV, 3; Matthew X, 12. But
a
is in Job XX, 19 and Psalms XXXI, 2.

4
Matthew XII, 52.

5
An hundred
occurs in the King James Bible more than seventy times.

6
Job XIII, 16; Proverbs XI, 9; Isaiah IX, 17.

1
A
and
An
Before
H
and Certain Vowels,
American Speech
, Aug., 1929, pp. 442–54. See also Is It Pedantry?, by Clifford H. Bissell,
Saturday Review of Literature
, Aug. 13, 1927;
A
or
An?
, by J. T. Hillhouse,
Modern Language Notes
, Feb., 1928, pp. 98–101;
A
and
An
Before
H
, by Steven T. Byington,
American Speech
, Oct., 1929, pp. 82–85, and Initial Long
U
, by Edwin B. Davis, the same, April, 1944, pp. 152–53.

2
Concerning the American Language, “part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad” (1880); in A Stolen White Elephant; New York, 1882, pp. 265–69.

3
Dissertations, p. 122.

4
Text, Type and Style: A Compendium of
Atlantic
Usage, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 269.

5
Seventh edition; London, 1933, p. 1.

1
The Standard of Pronunciation in English; New York, 1904, p. 195. Strictly speaking,
honorarium
is not a derivative of
honor
, for the former came into English direct from the Latin, whereas the latter came from the Anglo-French
onour
. But
onour
was itself of Latin origin, and
honorarium
is always associated with
honor
in the minds of those who use it.

2
In Talks With Ralph Waldo Emerson; New York, 1890, p. 51, Charles J. Woodberry reports that Emerson said to him of Landor: “He does not aspirate; drops his
h
’s like a cockney. I cannot understand it.” Thomas Adolphus Trollope said of him in What I Remember; New York, 1888, p. 440: “He was, I think, the only man in his position in life whom I ever heard do so. That a man who was not only by birth a gentleman, but was by genius and culture – and such culture! – very much more, should do this seemed to me an incomprehensible thing. I do not think he ever introduced the aspirate where it was not needed, but he habitually spoke of
’and, ’ead
and
’ouse
.”

3
I do not pause over the not infrequent pedantic complaint that many Americans drop it in
which, where, when
, etc. As a matter of fact, sounding it there is almost beyond human power; to get it in it must be transferred to the first place in these words, so that
which
becomes
hwich
. That is where it was a thousand years ago. But it is not there today, and the effort to pronounce it is a mere affectation. See Phonetic Illusions, by Harold E. Palmer,
John o’London’s Weekly
, Dec. 23, 1938.

4
The Sounds of Standard English, by T. Nicklin; Oxford, 1920, pp. 78 and 79.

1
Wyld says that
hit
was in general use in England in the Sixteenth Century. I seize the chance to fill a small nook with a sentence from a London letter in the Penang
Gazette
, June 10, 1938: “
An
Hollywood seeress who is now in England has cast Mr. Chamberlain’s horoscope.” Obviously, this connotes the pronunciation of
Hollywood
as
Ollywood
.

2
I am indebted here to Mr. Alexander Kadison. In Nov., 1946, the Rev. F. H. J. Newton, vicar of Blackheath, South England, advocated in his parish magazine that
h
be dropped from the alphabet. He argued that the Cockney version of “Has Herbert had his haircut?,” to wit, “Azerbert addiz aircut?,” “comes out almost as one word – and how beautiful it is, because it is effortless and not self-conscious.”

3
Perhaps oftener
yistidy. Yistidy
was approved in the late Eighteenth Century by Sheridan, Kenrick and Nares, but Walker was against it.

4
Loss of
R
in English Through Dissimilation,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. I, No. VI, 1893, pp. 279–81.

5
Two Observations on Current Colloquial Speech, by A. R. Dunlap,
American Speech
, Dec., 1939, p. 290.

6
Kiln
or
Kill
, by Joseph Jones,
American Speech
, Oct., 1931, pp. 73 and 74.

7
Bender recommends
syth
in the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, but Louise Pound reports (Some Folk-Locutions,
American Speech
, Dec., 1942, p. 247) that
sy
“is in rather common usage,” and “seems to have fairly wide currency” from South Dakota to Maine. In Maryland, in the 80s, I never heard anything else.

8
Wyld shows in A History of Modern Colloquial English, p. 175, that the English formerly omitted the
l
from
almost, almanac, falter
and various other words. It is still absent from
almond
.

9
I am indebted here to Miss Jane D. Shenton, of Temple University.

10
Bender recommends
awf’n
. So does Jones for England, but he lists
often
as an admissible variant. Miss Ward presents evidence, in The Phonetics of English, p. 27, that the
t
was omitted in England in 1701, but the frequent newspaper discussions of the pronunciation indicate that there is now a tendency to restore it. It long ago disappeared from
listen
and
castle
.

1
Popular Variants of
Yes
, by Louise Pound,
American Speech
, Dec., 1926, p. 132. This study was published before the great success of
oh yeah
. The vowel here, of course, is not that of
lay
, but a lengthened form of the
e
of
yes
itself. I am indebted for this to Mr. Edgar W. Smith, of Maplewood, N. J. See also
Yes
and Its Variants, by Albert H. Marckwardt,
Words
, Feb., 1936, pp. 7 and 18.

2
Some Recurrent Assimilations, by Louise Pound,
American Speech
, June, 1931, pp. 347–48. When
ph
appears for
f
it is often changed to
p
, as in
dip’theria, nap’tha, amp’theater
and
dip’thong
. See AL4, pp. 352 and 407.

3
The DAE gives
onery
and
ornery
, tracing the former to 1860 and the latter to 1830. It derives both from
ordinary
. I can only say that in the Baltimore of my youth
o’n’ry
was the only form in general use, and that it was understood to signify, not ordinary, but vicious. Mr. L. Clark Keating tells me that
onery
is heard in Minnesota.

4
The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 225.

5
American Pronunciation, ninth edition; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. 232.

1
Voiced
T
– a Misnomer,
American Speech
, Feb., 1943, pp. 18–25. Oswald objected to calling this sound a voiced
t
. “From the point of view of phonemics,” he said, “it is a combinatory variant of both
t
and
d
.” See also Kenyon, before cited, pp. 232–33; Notes on Voiced
T
in American English, by Einar Haugen,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Parts XVI and XVII, 1938, pp. 627–34; Language, by Leonard Bloomfield; New York, 1933, pp. 81 and 100.