American Language Supplement 2 (5 page)

Scott was wrong here, as he was wrong in other matters, for philologians of more weight than he had were already declaring for American autonomy in pronunciation. One of them was Dr. Louise Pound, who printed a paper in 1915 which noted the plain fact that English and American had already developed too many differences
to “be treated as orally identical.” She expressed the pious hope that these differences would not lead, at least in the near future, to a complete separation of the two tongues, but she saw clearly that they were bound to “increase, not lessen.” She went on:

Other experts on the national speechways soon joined her, and in recent years nearly all the better texts on pronunciation accept American English as it is, and avoid any vain attempt to bring it into harmony with current English standards. This is true, for example, of the books of Krapp
²
and Kenyon,
³
the two most respected authorities. Even Larsen and Walker, the former an Oxford man and the latter of Harvard,
⁴
“do not advise any one who has not already acquired the speech characteristics of English Received Pronunciation in a natural way to attempt to acquire them artificially,” on the ground that “an irritating affectation will surely result from any such attempt,”
⁵
though they advocate a broad
a
in such words as
path, grass
and
past
.
⁶
Krapp, in the book lately cited, p. x, had said: “It seems scarcely credible that one who knows the facts should think it possible to impose British standards upon American speech.” To which may be added the verdict of a special committee
appointed by the Modern Language Association to draw up a report on “The English Language in American Education”:

There remain, however, belated followers of White, especially in the New York region, who hope to achieve this impossibility, and occasionally they make some pother. This was the case, for example, during the years after 1918, when an Australian-born phonologist named William Tilly was appointed to foster speech elegance at Columbia, and proceeded at once to advocate a close approximation to the English standard.
²
He acquired a number of ardent disciples, mainly female, among teachers of what used to be called elocution but is now denominated speech correction, and some of them went to the length of arguing that all Americans hoping to be really refined should imitate the imitation of English speech prevailing among the tonier sort of American actors.
³
But this folly did not
extend very far, and there is little sign that it will spread hereafter. In 1927 C. K. Thomas of Cornell printed a review of the subject
¹
in which he attempted to summarize professional opinion under five headings, to wit:

Dr. Thomas found that the answer to the first question was no. He could find no trace of a generally acknowledged world-standard. On the one hand a few phonologists of small authority favored “the worldwide acceptance of the southern English standard,” but all the rest of the faculty seemed to favor national autonomy, and to regard it as inevitable. To the second question the answer was none.
There were English authorities, to be sure, who defended Standard English as superior to any other form of the language, but there were other authorities, greater in number and fully equal in learning, who denounced it as one of the worst. The answer to the third question was likewise none. “The preponderance of authority,” concluded Thomas, “is strongly against community of standard for British and American pronunciation.” In answer to the fourth question he described the three major varieties of American, already discussed in this chapter – the Boston-New York, the Southern, and the Western or General –, and then found himself agreeing with Kenyon and Krapp that the last-named was already almost overwhelmingly dominant, and showed plain indications of increasing its area and authority in future. The answer to the last question resolved itself into a plea for letting nature take its course. “A good standard,” said Thomas, “is a natural growth, not a manufactured article; and attempts to improve on this standard are like attempts to graft wings on human shoulders.” In other words, the voice of the people, in the last analysis, must decide and determine the voice of the people. That the voting is now running heavily in favor of General American must be manifest. Kenyon, writing in 1927, rehearsed the evidence for it then visible;
¹
the evidence available today is even more impressive, and it would undoubtedly be more impressive still if General American were studied as diligently as New England English has been studied. The Eastern colleges yearly outfit a ponderable number of Indianans, Iowans and Oregonians with the broad
a
, but most of them resume the flat
a
as soon as they return home, and meanwhile the Linguistic Atlas of New England finds two flat
a
’s in
half past
within the very shadow of the Boston Statehouse.
²

The subject was revived in 1944 when the New York State Department of Education appointed a committee to draw up rules for the certification of teachers of “speech correction” in the public schools of the State. Thomas, who was one of its members,
¹
found a sharp difference of opinion among his colleagues about the standard of pronunciation that should be recommended. Some were apparently in favor of General American, but others inclined toward the standard that had been advocated by Tilly. Thomas resolved to ask the advice of a number of outside phonologists of distinction, and accordingly prepared a questionnaire. Its first question was: “In a course of phonetics for prospective teachers of speech correction what standard or standards of pronunciation would you include? ” This was sent to the following:

The replies were thus summarized by Thomas:

One of the members of the Department of Education committee, Mrs. Raubicheck, objected to this referendum on the ground that the two New Yorkers consulted were not specialists in phonetics. She accordingly sent Thomas’s questions to six others, all of them directly interested in teaching speechways. They were:

This jury was somewhat more favorable to Tilly than the fourteen philologians polled by Thomas, but only Miss McLean rejected the claims of General American. “I should include,” she said, “the pronunciation given as Eastern Standard by Kenyon and Knott
²
or that given by Daniel Jones in ‘An English Pronouncing Dictionary.’ ”
³
Miss Giles preferred “acceptable varieties of Eastern speech,” and explained that by acceptable she meant varieties showing all forms of the
a
in
half
, from that of
hat
to that of
father
, but added that she thought the course should also “touch briefly on General American and Southern standards.” Mammen was of the opinion that “both Eastern and General American should be acceptable.”
Miss Mulgrave said: “If it were apparent that teachers were trained for New York State only I should be loath to recommend them as teachers of speech correction.… There seems to be no need to act as though New York has seceded.” Spadino voted for “General American, with little importance given to geographical distinction,” and described it as “a dialect embracing both Northern and Eastern regional pronunciations as defined and recorded in Kenyon and Knott,” but did not say how these dialects were to be reconciled. Mrs. Zimmerman proposed to “make the standard of pronunciation a very flexible one” and to “include in it all commonly used variants which are consistent with good voice, clear articulation, accurate patterns of stress, phrasing and intonation, and which are acceptable to the professional or social group to which the student belongs or to which he wishes to belong.” It will thus be seen that the Raubicheck jury, like that of Thomas, favored a thoroughly American standard, with special emphasis on the prevailing usage, and had but little to say for the effort to bring American speech into harmony with British.
¹

Lay opinion runs strongly in favor of General American, as was demonstrated by tests made by Walter H. Wilke and Joseph F. Snyder, of New York University, in 1940–42. They recorded by phonograph the speech of thirty-two persons from all parts of the country, and circulated the recordings among 2470 persons in forty localities, asking for preferences. The jury consisted mainly of “college students in elementary courses,” but there were also some high-school students and miscellaneous adults. It was chosen to be representative of “that sector of the population likely to discriminate between the generally acceptable and sub-standard speech, yet typical enough of fairly well-educated persons to avoid any biases due to special study and emphasis on details of speech.” The result of the poll was overwhelmingly favorable to General American. Of the thirty-two samples the five at the top of the list all belonged to it, and it also got more votes than any other form further on. The runner-up was Southern American. The Eastern speech of the Boston area came out very badly, and that of New York City even worse. “More widely used in the United States than any other dialect,”
concluded the authors, “the General American type has the additional advantages that it is favorably regarded in all sections and that it is not identified with any single region. This experiment supports the view that General American is likely to dominate in the trend toward a more homogeneous national language.”
¹
Of considerable significance is the fact that Southern American got more votes than the speech of the Boston-New York region. To most Americans of other sections the latter shows what James M. Cain calls the “somewhat pansy cast” of Oxford English,
²
but Southern speech is everywhere regarded more tolerantly, partly, perhaps, because of what the Hartford
Courant
once described as the “honeyed languor” of the sub-Potomac voice, and partly because it is most familiar to the North and West in the talk of Negroes, and is thus associated with suggestions of the amiable and the amusing.
³
In the early days of the radio the primeval announcers sought to prove their elegance by affecting what W. Cabell Greet has described as speech of “an Eastern United States or pseudo-British type.”
⁴
chiefly marked by long
a’s
, suppressed
r’s, eye-ther
for
ee-ther
, and the use of such multilated forms as
secretry
and
ordinry
, but it did not please the customers and before long there were many protests against it in the newspapers. In 1930 Josiah Combs, of Texas Christian University, for long an astute and diligent student of American speechways, flung himself upon it in
American Speech
,
⁵
and in 1931 he returned to the attack as follows:
⁶