American Language Supplement 2 (8 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The movement of stress toward the first syllable, of course, is by no means of American origin. It has been going on in English since Chaucer’s day and there has been a considerable acceleration since the Eighteenth Century. Kökeritz has shown
3
that in 1723
alcove, balcony, bombast, confiscate
and
expert
were all stressed on the second syllable, and that these pronunciations survived at least until 1791.
4
So late as
c
. 1825, in fact, Samuel Rogers the poet was saying: “
Cóntemplate
is bad enough but
bálcony
makes me sick.”
5
Kökeritz also shows that
advertise, complaisance, fornicator
and
paramount
were accented on the third syllable down to 1791. But his study offers proof of a number of forward shifts between 1723 and
1791,
e.g., arbitrator, expedite
and
reconcile
, in which the stress moved from the third syllable to the first, and
inbred, mischievous
and
theatre
, in which it moved from the second to the first. Rather curiously, he also turns up a few words in which the stress was on the first syllable in 1723, but has since moved back,
e.g., accessory, cement, construe, escheat
and
utensil
. But the prevailing movement is in the other direction, and is still in progress. “Twenty years ago,” says Ernest Weekley, “
decádent
was permissible; now
décadent
is the rule. Such accentuations as
laméntable, interésting
are not uneducated, but archaic.”
1
It is in the United States, however, that the movement seems to have most momentum. A great many examples, some from presumably educated levels, are in my collectanea,
e.g., dísplay, mágazine, dírect,
2
ínquiry,
3
állies, áddress, mústache, ádvertising, détail, cément, cígarette, épitome,
4
múseum, lócate, détour, áddict, rébate, ánnex, rébound, rómance, décoy, máma, pápa,
5
príncess,
6
quándary, ábdomen,
7
quínine,
8
éntire, fénance, tríbunal,
9
récess, ídea, déject, bóuquet, pólice,
10
éxcess, discharge
1
and
résearch
.
2
There is some exchange in fashions of pronunciation across the water. The English, after holding out a while for
armístice
, seem to have yielded to
ármistice
, but so far not many Americans have succumbed to the English
áristocrat
.
3
Running against the current,
barráge
and
gárage
survive in the United States against the English
bárrage
and
gárage
. But the American
réveille
balances the account by resisting the English
revéille
, pronounced
revélly
.
4
In this matter of pronouncing loan-words there is much confusion in both countries, for it is just here, say Kenyon and Knott, p. xlvii, that “usage is most unsettled and uncertain.” The English it seems to me, are rather more bold than we are in naturalizing foreign words, especially proper names, and the example of
Calais
, pronounced
Calis
, rhyming with
pálace
, since Shakespeare’s time, is in point. The consultors of the BBC do not hesitate to recommend essentially English pronunciations of such words as
carillon, chauffeur, conduit, cotillion, cul-de-sac, décor, liqueur, guillotin
and
harem
, and they appear to have a hearty contempt for the French
u
and the German
ö
(they convert
Röntgen
, for example, into
Runtgen
), but in many other cases they are at pains to preserve something resembling foreign pronunciations,
e.g
., in
compère
(the English equivalent of the American
master of ceremonies
or
m.c
.),
fête, enceinte, fiancée, hors-d’oeuvre, ennui, entourage, embonpoint
and
ski
. The late Lloyd James discussed the difficulties of the problem in “Broadcast English No. I.” “In early days,” he said, “such words were read as English words. French was read as though it were English, and the matter ended there. But since we have begun to learn French and to speak it with some attempt at giving our effort a French sound, it is thought desirable to give French words as near an approximation to their French pronunciation as possible.” When James said
we
he meant, of course, the English upper class; the common people of England, like those of the United States, know no French, and show no desire to learn any. The result is inevitably a series of sorry compromises. “The only French sound in the average English pronunciation of the word
restaurant
,” observed James sadly, “is the
s
, which is the same in English and French.”
1
His colleagues, on the BBC board, I gather, have often been at odds over a given word, and sometimes they have changed their decisions. At their eighth meeting, for example, holden on January 17, 1930, they ordained that
ski
should be
skee
,
2
but by the time the third edition of “Broadcast English No. I” came out in 1935 it had become the correct Dano-Norwegian
shee
.
Most American authorities seem to be willing to let nature take its course. They have learned by bitter experience that their admonitions, at best, never reach below the penthouse of the educational structure, and that the plain people go ways of their own. Because of the presence of so many foreigners in the Republic, these Americans on the lower levels have picked up many more loanwords than Englishmen of the corresponding class, and not a few
of those that have come in by word of mouth have retained more or less correct pronunciations,
e.g
., the French
rouge
, the Spanish
cañon, adobe, siesta, corral, frijole, mesa, patio, sierra
and
tortilla
,
1
and the German
sauerkraut, pumpernickel, hausfrau, katzenjammer
and
delicatessen
. In other cases loan-words have been preserved only by changes in spelling, as in
ouch
(
autsch
) and
bower
(
bauer
). In yet other cases they have succumbed to folk-etymology,
e.g
., the Dutch
koolsla
, pronounced
cole-slaw
, which has become
cold-slaw;
or suffered changes in their vowels,
e.g
., the Spanish
peon
(whose derivative,
peonage
, rhymes the first syllable with
see
),
loafer
(from the German
laufer
), and
smearcase
(from
schmierkáse
).
Hofbráu
has become
huffbrow, rathskeller
has become
ratskiller, wanderlust
has acquired a last syllable rhyming with
rust
, the
sch
of
schweizer
has become a simple
s
, and the German
u
of
bummer
has become the English
u
in
rum
. The late Brander Matthews believed in the inevitability of such changes, and refused to denounce them. “The principle which ought to govern,” he once said,
can be stated simply. English should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful, and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. No doubt this is today a counsel of perfection; but it indicates the goal which should be strived for. It is what English was capable of accomplishing prior to the middle of the Seventeenth Century.
2
It is what English may be able to accomplish … if we once awaken to the danger of contaminating our speech with unassimilated words, and to the disgrace which our stupidity or laziness must bring upon us, of addressing the world in a puddingstone and piebald language.
3
Here, I suspect, Matthews’s facile talk of a moral obligation was rather more pedagogical than wise: there is no actual offense to
God, I am advised by my chaplain, in trying to pronounce French words like a Frenchman. A more plausible objection to it was stated by Larsen and Walker in “Pronunciation: A Practical Guide to American Standards,”
1
to wit:
Setting up a foreign standard of pronunciation for isolated words and phrases in an English context … would throw them out of harmony with the passage as a whole. Especially in the case of French the foreign language is so entirely different from English in intonation, in accent, and in tenseness of utterance that a perfect rendering of isolated French words … would involve an awkward shift of the whole vocal machinery. Borrowed words and phrases are adequately pronounced with a certain amount of compromise between the foreign sounds and the corresponding native sounds.
2
They follow this with lists of French, German and Italian words in which an ingenious attempt is made to approximate the pronunciations of the original languages without setting the 100% American tasks beyond the power of his tongue, and on the whole they succeed admirably, though they encounter the usual difficulties with the German
ch
,
3
the French
l, u
and nasal
n
, and the Italian
c
. When a foreign word in wide use presents difficulties the plain people sometimes dispose of it by inventing a shortened form, as in
bra
(pronounced
brah
) for
brassière
.
4
Not infrequently a loan which has had polite treatment in the higher levels is dealt with barbarously when it becomes known lower down. This happened, for example, to
coupé
. It was commonly pronounced in an approximation of the French manner so long as it designated a four-wheeled, one-horse carriage,
5
in use only among the relatively rich, but when it was applied,
c
. 1923, to a new model of Ford car it quickly became
coop
.
6
In the same way
chauffeur
became
sho-f’r, liqueur
became
lik-kewer
,
1
chassis
became
shassis
or
tshassis
, and
chic
came close to
chick. Hors-d’oeuvre
has always been a stumbling block to Anglo-Saxons, and when, in Prohibition days, it began to be given to the embalmed fish, taxidermized eggs, salted nuts, salami, green and black olives, pretzels, pumpernickel and fragments of
Leberwurst
that were served with cocktails it was mauled very badly. In 1937 the sponsors of a Midwest Hotel Show at Chicago offered a prize for a likely substitute, and it was won by Roy L. Alciatore of New Orleans with
apiteaser
. One contestant proposed that the term be naturalized as
horse-doovers
. In 1938 the quest was resumed by a popular magazine,
2
and at about the same time the Hon. Maury Maverick of Texas, the foe of
gobbledegook
,
3
proposed
dingle-doos
.
4
Many Americans, in despair, have turned to the Italian
antipasto
, which is much less painful to the national larynx.
In 1935 Emily Post, then the unchallenged arbiter of elegance in the United States, was appealed to for advice about pronouncing the French words currently in vogue. She replied that those which had “already been Americanized” should be turned into “plain English,”
e.g., menyou
for
menu
and
valet
with a clear
t;
and that those having sounds nearly equivalent to English sounds should be given the latter,
e.g., mass-her
for
masseur
(“emphasis is the same on both syllables”),
boo-kay
for
bouquet
,
5
brass-yair
for
brassière, voad-veal
for
vaudeville
, and
showfur
, not
showfer
or
showf’r
(“accent both syllables equally or else slightly on the last”), for
chauffeur
. Such words as
garage, demi-tasse
and
fiancé
she described as “stumbling blocks,” and advised her customers, in the last two cases, to substitute
black coffee
and either
betrothed
or
man I’m going to marry
.
6
The bare sounds of spoken speech, of course, constitute only one of its characters, and that character, as the professors of phonemes
1
have taught us, is a variable quality, for a given phoneme may change its vowel, and yet remain the same phoneme, or, at all events, a pair of diaphones.
2
Even syllable stress changes more or less with the position of a word in a sentence and with the mood and intent of the speaker; hence it cannot be reduced to rigid rules. There are students of speech who hold that neither is as important, in distinguishing one dialect from another, as intonation, or, as some of them call it, pitch pattern.
3
When an American hears a strange Englishman speaking it is not the unfamiliar pronunciation that chiefly warns him to be on his guard, nor even the occasional use of unintelligible words; it is the exotic speech tune. Between the two forms of the language, says Hilaire Belloc,
