American Language Supplement 2 (7 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
In another paper he quoted with approving gloats a piece of doggerel by an Ulster poetess named Miss Ruth Duffin, entitled “A Petition From the Letter
R
to the BBC,” in part as follows:
O culcha’d rulahs of the aia,
Listen to my humble praya!
There was a time when I knew my place,
But lately I have fallen from grace.…
I used to be alive in modern,
But now I find it rhymes with sodden.…
I cannot beah to heah of waw.
It irritates me maw and maw.
Anathemar on him who slays
His native tongue in suchlike ways!
Lawds of Culchah, lend an eah
And my sad petition heah.
Rescue me from this disgrace
And I shall be, aw neah aw fah,
Your slave the Letter
R
(or
Ah
).
Various other Britons, including not a few 100% Englishmen, have taken equally vicious hacks at the Oxford dialect. Some of them,
e.g
., Wyndham Lewis, Sir John Foster Fraser, Richard Aldington, Dr. J. Y. T. Greig and H. W. Seaman, are quoted in AL4.
1
I add a few more at random:
Gomer LI. Jones, of the National Council of Music, University of Wales:
There is absolutely no comparison, in my opinion, between the virility of American and the emasculated insipidity of “standard English.”
2
James Howard Wellard:
Genuine Oxonian simply cannot make accentual concessions. It keeps on with its impeccable bleating, whatever the company or whatever the circumstances. “But, my
deah
chap,
dewnt
you
ralize
…” It can be imitated quite well by placing a small round stone beneath the tongue, thrusting in the chin, and enunciating the words with a painful meticulousness.
3
Campbell Dixon:
Nine British films out of ten are unacceptable to America.… What maddens Americans is the thin, high-pitched bleat that a certain type of person associates with culture and a great many others with effeminacy. It would be a shock to a number of actors and actresses to know how many people in this country heartily agree with America.
4
Nathaniel Gubbins:
The American accent is … not nearly so funny as the dull buzzing that passes for conversation in rural England, the self-conscious “refinement” of Kensington Cockney, the strangled accents of English parsons, and the shrill screaming of the English upper class.
5
George Bernard Shaw:
Over large and densely populated districts of Great Britain [the Oxford accent] irritates some listeners to the point of switching off, and infuriates others so much that they smash their wireless sets because they cannot smash the Oxonian.
1
I might extend considerably the quotation of such blasts, but it would probably serve no useful purpose, for they come from Boeotia. Nearly all the accepted speech experts of England stand up bravely for Oxford English, or for something closely resembling it. Dr. Daniel Jones, professor of phonetics at University College, London, describes it complacently as the Received Pronunciation, and says that it is the form “usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English people who have been educated at the public schools,”
2
among “those who do not come from the South of England but who have been educated in these schools,” and “to an extent which is considerable though difficult to specify from natives of the South of England who have not been educated at these schools.”
3
He disclaims any intent to depict it “as intrinsically better or more beautiful than any other form of pronunciation,” but all the same he is for it.
4
So is his pupil and disciple, Peter A. D. MacCarthy, lecturer in phonetics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
5
So, too, though with certain prudent reservations, was his late colleague on the BBC board, A. Lloyd James, professor of phonetics at the same.
6
So, again, is T. Nicklin, warden of Hulme Hall, Manchester.
7
So, yet
again, is Dr. R. W. Chapman, secretary to the delegates of the Oxford University Press and an active member of the Society for Pure English.
1
So, to make an end, was the late Henry Cecil Wyld, professor of the English language and literature at Oxford, and author of many books on the history of English speech.
2
Wyld said that it might be called Good English, Well-bred English or Upper-class English, but preferred to call it simply Received Standard English.
3
He described it as “easy, unstudied and natural,” with “sonorous” vowels, each of them clearly differentiated from all the others, diphthongs of high “carry-power and dignity,” and consonants which need no bush. It is the speech, he said, of
speakers who do not need to take thought for their utterance; they have no theories as to how their native tongue should be pronounced, nor do they reflect upon the sounds they utter. They have perfect confidence in themselves, in their speech, as in their manners. For both bearing and utterance spring from a firm and gracious tradition. “Their fathers have told them” – that suffices. Nowhere does the best that is in English culture find a fairer expression than in R.S. speech.
4
Wyld, so far as I know, never ventured into the American wilderness, but Jones made the trip in 1925 and James in 1936. Jones came over to give a course in phonetics at Smith College, and seems to have made a hit with the ladies of the faculty, for one of them testified afterward that he was very polite about American English and “never antagonized the most tender-minded of us.”
5
James was imported by the Rockefeller Foundation, which was then consecrating “some of its dollars to the cause of improving English diction.”
6
He conferred with the authorities of “both major broadcasting chains,” listened to the pronunciation of Hollywood actors, and investigated the possibility that short-wave broadcasting, still a
novelty in 1936, might eventually iron out the differences between English and American pronunciation. “Everybody,” he said, “seems to be terribly afraid of standardization of the spoken language.… But modern communications demand standardization. Our railway gauges are standardized, our voltages are standardized. The motor industry could not have achieved its energy or have brought us the benefits we have enjoyed from it without standardization.” But by standardization he apparently meant a considerable degree of submission to the English standard, and there is no record that he got any encouragement for this, or that his visit had any other substantial effect. He said:
In Britain our better class schools and our universities make it one of their cardinal principles to train people for the public service. It is from their graduates that we have long been accustomed to draw our parliamentarians and to staff our Civil Service, and it is from this reservoir of talent that the BBC has selected its announcers and commentators. Such an idea does not seem to hold quite so prominent a place among the American people as with us.
1
What such trainees speak is obviously a class dialect, and the fact had been noted by nearly all the British phoneticians, including James himself. Writing a year before his American trip he had said:
Here, as in every other aspect of social behavior, although much latitude is allowed, there are some things that simply are not done. You may show a fine independence by wearing Harris tweeds on occasions that are generally regarded as unsuitable, but you dare not wear brown shoes with a morning coat. So you may scatter your intrusive
r
’s as you please, but you had better not call the brown cow a
bre-oon ce-oo
, or ask for a cup of
cowcow
. It isn’t done, and that is the end of the matter.
2
Two years later he returned to the subject, as follows:
It is easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the child who speaks broad Cockney to pass into the Higher Civil Service or to become a shop assistant in a smart West End shop, despite the fact that he may become a man for a’ that, and notwithstanding that she may become a very estimable woman for a’ that.
3
Wyld, in 1920, had described what he called Received Standard English as “the product of social conditions,” and had shown how its origins went back to the Sixteenth Century, when, for the first
time, “difference was recognized between upper-class English and the language of the humbler order of people.”
1
It was, he said, by no means a regional dialect, despite the fact that it was often called Southern English. It was actually spoken by the upper social class, with inconsiderable local modifications, all over England. “Perhaps the main factor in this singular degree of uniformity,” he went on, “is the custom of sending youths from certain social strata to the great public schools. If we were to say that Received English is Public School English we should not be far wrong.”
2
Palmer, Martin and Blandford, in 1926, described it as “a special sort of dialect that is independent of locality,”
3
and H. C. Macnamara, in 1938, as “the language necessary for all English boys who aspire to be archbishops, field-marshals, Lords of Appeal, butlers and radio announcers.”
4
Macnamara’s mention of butlers was a true hit, for the fashionable English pronunciation falls very short of being learned. Indeed, some of its characteristics suggest the paddock far more forcibly than they suggest the grove of Athene. Nor does every Englishman of high position affect it. One of those who departs from it very noticeably is the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII.
5
Even Winston Churchill, though he kept close
enough to it in his heyday to enrapture American Anglomaniacs, ameliorated its rigors sufficiently to avoid alarming the plain people.
1
Roosevelt II, whose native speech was a somewhat marked form of the Harvard-Hudson Valley dialect, toned it down with similar discretion when he spoke to his lieges, and his caressing rayon voice did the rest.
2
The nature of the differences between Wyld’s Received Standard English and the prevailing General American have been discussed at length by various authorities, but by none more comprehensively than by Palmer, Martin and Blandford in their before mentioned “Dictionary of English Pronunciation With American Variants.”
3
They distinguish twelve major variants and fourteen minor ones, and for the 20,000-odd terms (including inflections and derivatives) that they list in their vocabulary they note differences in more than 5,000. Their twelve major variants may be reduced to six classes, as follows:
1. The English
o
in such words as
hot, box
and
stop
becomes, in General American “a vowel more or less approximating” the broad English
a
of
ask
and
path
.
2. This English
a
is replaced by a flat
a
in both of these words, and also in many others,
e.g., half, brass
and
last
.
3. The
r
following vowels, whether or not it is itself followed by consonants, is pronounced more clearly than in English.
4. There is a difference between the English
u
in such words as
hurry, worry
and
thorough
and the prevailing American
u
.
4
5. The -
ary
at the end of a word has a clear
a
sound, whereas the English reduce it to the neutral vowel or omit it altogether.
6. So with -
ory
.
Palmer and his collaborators also note many minor variants,
e.g
., the English pronunciation of
clerk
as
clark
, of
ate
as
et
(a vulgarism in the United States), of
lieutenant
as
leftenant
, and of
schedule
with its first syllable showing the
sh
of she. They also note the regional differences to be found in the Boston-New York area and in the South. Finally, they show that it is sometimes difficult to find any logical pattern or general tendency in a major variation between English and American speech. Thus, if we take the sentence, “Mr. Martin of Birmingham,” and ask an Englishman and an American to speak it, the Englishman will reduce the -
ham
of
Birmingham
to a sort of ’
m
but pronounce the second syllable of
Martin
distinctly, whereas the American will reduce
Martin
to
Mart’n
but give a clear pronunciation to the -
ham
. Here Englishman and American head both ways, and without apparent rhyme or reason.
1
It would not be difficult, indeed, to make up a short list of words in which the General American pronunciation is what one might expect to find in
Standard English, and vice versa. This is true even in the matter of stress, where there are plenty of exceptions to the stronger American tendency to throw the accent forward. But in general the prevailing tendencies in the two forms of the language are pretty well maintained, both in the values given to letters and in the placing of stress. Thus when an American hears
laboratory
or
doctrinal
with the accent on the second syllable and
artisan
or
intestinal
with the accent on the third,
1
he gathers at once that he is not listening to a compatriot. In this field even the most colonial-minded Bostonian commonly speaks American. He may sometimes go beyond the English themselves in his dealing with the
a
, as for example, in
drahmatize
, which has a flat
a
in English, though
drama
has a broad one, and
gas-mask
, in which
gas
is not
gahs
in England but plain
gas
, though
mask
is
mahsk;
but he seldom ventures to the length of putting the accent on the last syllable of
etiquette
or the third syllable of
fantasia
, or the second of
rotatory
and
miscellany
.
2
