American Language Supplement 2 (9 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
there is not only a difference in rhythm and in tonal inflection – that is, in the musical notes of a sentence – but there is also a spiritual difference.… Different parts of the same phrase are emphasized. That means not only a difference in the sense of rhythm but some subtle difference in the mind of the speaker. So far as rhythm is concerned the main difference would seem to be … one
which I have discovered in many other departments of the national life beyond this medium of speech. The American rhythm is shorter. If you hear an Englishman pronounce a long sentence, such as, “I shall be very glad to see him again after such a long interval,” and then compare it with the way in which the average American would pronounce identically the same printed words, you will discover … that the number of emphatic syllables in the English intonation is less than in the American. To take a metaphor from the movement of water, the waves are shorter and steeper. Further, the phrase lifts in tone at the end in English and falls in American.
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Unhappily, there is a good deal of conflict of opinion regarding the precise nature of the difference in intonation between typically English and typically American speech. Some observers report that, to their ears, Englishmen cover a wider range of tone in speaking, and carry it higher than Americans;
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others, while agreeing that Americans pitch their voices within a very narrow range,
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hold that their gamut lies further up the scale than that of the English.
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Some think that Englishmen speak the faster, and some believe that Americans do.
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In each case this may be only fresh evidence of the
familiar fact that strange speech always sounds over-fast.
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To these witnesses, all of them born to some form of English, I add the testimony of an alert and professionally trained foreigner who acquired it as a second language. She is Dr. Aasta Stene, a Norwegian philologian who went to England during World War II, spent the better part of four years there, and then came to the United States. On May 3, 1946, at a linguistic conference at the University of Wisconsin, she read a paper entitled “Unlearning My English,” in which she discussed illuminatingly the differences noted by a foreigner trained in observing speechways between American English and the English of the English universities. She found that she needed to make only a few changes in her vocabulary in order to be understood by Americans, but that otherwise her acquired English had to be considerably modified in this country. She said:
My delivery is slower than in England, or in Norway for that matter. The average rate of speech in England seems to me to be appreciably faster than in the part of the United States I have got to know.
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Retaining the faster English tempo results in the listener not understanding.… I find myself speaking considerably more loudly than in Britain. It is not acceptable here to speak as mutedly as is common in casual conversation in England. The threshold of accepted audibility is higher in America than in England.…
During the first few days I found that although, with English intonation patterns, I would occasionally rise to (or fall from) a higher level in my voice range than Americans do, the larger proportion of my speech-continuum was below my medium pitch level, and that this fact was socially unfortunate, as in much of American speech a more considerable proportion rises above medium pitch. In order not to create the impression of being bored, uninterested or supercilious I have had to increase the proportion of syllables pitched above the medium. But at the same time I have probably reduced the number rising to really high pitch.…
A wide pitch range is sometimes called for in English, but the fact that every intonation group has to come to roost at low pitch, and that a reduced pitch range is frequently used even for emphasis, keeps a considerable proportion of speech units at a low pitch level. In American a greater proportion of syllables reach into fairly high pitch levels. Such wide intonation ranges in
British would indicate emphasis, but they are used in American in statements that cannot be considered emphatic. Consequently, American speech sounds to an ear conditioned to English patterns as if it is uniformly emphatic.
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Finally, there is the question of timbre. To most Englishmen American speech is unpleasantly harsh and unmusical, whereas to most Americans that of Englishmen is throaty and gurgling.
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These differences not only make it hard, on occasion, to take in the idea sought to be conveyed by a speaker from the wrong side of the Atlantic;
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they also produce emotional responses that are nearly always hostile, for each dialect has its characteristic speech tunes, and hearing a strange one substituted for a familiar one is always disconcerting and sometimes extremely irritating. Said A. Lloyd James:
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“It is the intonation that hurts. English spoken on Swedish intonation may sound petulant, on Russian intonation lugubrious, on German intonation offensive, on French intonation argumentative,
on many American intonations casual or cocksure.… What foreign languages sound like when spoken on British or American rhythms and intonations is best left to a lively imagination.” James then quoted I. A. Richards: “Not the strict logical sense of what is said, but the tone of voice and the occasion are the primary factors by which we interpret.”
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To which an American testimony may be added: “Many as the differences of word and usage are, the vital difference which is dividing English and American speech far more rapidly than any change of vocabulary is the divergence in enunciation, pronunciation, and quality of voice. The same words sound quite different on English and American tongues.”
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There are Englishmen who, in their more reflective moments, admit that something is to be said for the superior clarity of American pronunciation, but they seldom hold to that line long. The general tune of American speech affects them as unpleasantly as the cockney whine of the Australians, and their discomfort relights in them the old passionate conviction of their nation that everything American is not only inferior, but also villainous and ignoble. Thus their typical attitude to the gabble of Americans, says Allen Walker Read, is “one of utter loathing.”
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It should be added at once that when they give voice to that loathing they fill the Americano with sentiments which match it precisely.
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The study of pronunciation, as I have hitherto noted, is of comparatively recent growth, and it was not until a time within the
memory of persons still relatively young that anything resembling scientific method was applied to it. Even so late as 1926 Dr. Kemp Malone could say in a professional paper, and with perfect truth, that “intonation, or pitch variation in speech,” though “probably the most important constituent in the sum total of speech peculiarities that give one an accent,” was “yet but little studied.”
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To be sure, the individual constituent sounds of English had been investigated with more or less diligence, and various attempts had been made to devise an alphabet that would represent them better than the conventional alphabet, but there was but little study of the traits of the spoken language as a whole. The pioneer in this field was Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905), father of the inventor of the telephone, whose “Visible Speech” was published in 1867. But his ideas got much more attention in Europe than in the United States, and it was not until 1901, when Dr. E. W. Scripture, who was not a philologian but a medical man, brought out a volume called “Elements of Experimental Phonetics,” that the new method of approach began to attract any considerable number of Americans.
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It was given a vigorous impulse when Dr. C. E. Seashore, the Swedishborn professor of psychology at the State University of Iowa, began to apply its devices to the investigation of music, and since the time of Malone’s lament it has flourished in a way that must delight him. Its practitioners have got together a really formidable armamentarium of instruments for detecting and recording precisely what goes on during the speaking of a sentence, and some of their discoveries, though rather beyond the comprehension of the layman, are of considerable importance.
Perhaps typical of their work is an investigation of accent undertaken by Dr. Wilbur L. Schramm, of the University of Iowa in 1935 and 1936.
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He made use of “the microphone, high-quality amplification, the oscillograph, the high-speed output-level recorder and the recording phonograph,”
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and came to the conclusion that
accent is a far more complicated phenomenon than the old-time lexicographers ever suspected. “There may be,” he said, “more than one kind of emphasis in speech; a dictionary accent is one thing, an accent which beats the drum for rhythm is another, and a logical emphasis which determines the meaning of the sentence is a third.” One of his associates, Dr. Ruth Ortleb, found that stress itself is by no means an isolated phenomenon, measurable wholly in terms of intensity. It also drags out the duration of a syllable, raises its pitch, and augments its tonal range. And as with syllables, so with words. “In 98% of the cases the emphasized words were of longer duration, in 84% they moved through a wider pattern of inflection, in 75% they reached a higher pitch, and in 71% they reached a lower pitch.” “It is apparent,” concluded Dr. Schramm, “that our old explanations of accent are perhaps too simple,” and that “a complete acoustical description would probably have to take into account at least seven elements: duration of phonation (plus pause, in some cases), magnitude of inflection, highest pitch level, lowest pitch level, average pitch level, average intensity level, and type of inflection.”
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Many other American phonologists now devote themselves to the precise measurements of speech sounds and speech tunes, and the literature of the subject is growing rapidly.
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For many years past philologians have been struggling with the difficulties of representing the gradations of speech in print. No alphabet of any actual language has enough letters to achieve the business, and no artificial alphabet so far contrived has done much more than complicate and obfuscate it. It is, in fact, full of downright impossibilities, as Robert Southey was saying more than a hundred years ago. “Sounds,” he observed, “are to us infinite and variable, and we cannot transmit by one sense the ideas and objects of another. We shall be convinced of this when we recollect the innumerable qualities of tone in human voices, so as to enable us
to distinguish all our acquaintances, though the number should amount to many hundreds, or perhaps thousands. With attention we might discover a different quality of tone in every instrument; for all these there never can be a sufficient number of adequate terms in any written language; and when that variety comes to be compounded with a like variety of articulations it becomes infinite to us.”
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Nevertheless, hopeful if imprudent men began to grapple with the problem soon after Southey wrote, and during the 60s of the last century Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813–1891), a nephew of Napoleon and an amateur philologian of no mean attainments, proposed an alphabet which, at the hands of Alexander J. Ellis, an English phonetician (1814–90), eventually reached 390 characters − 77 for vowels and the rest for consonants and their combinations.
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In 1877 Henry Sweet (1845–1912), another Englishman, reduced the number to 125, but this abbreviated alphabet was quickly found to be inadequate, and improvements upon it were undertaken during the 80s by Paul Passy, a French phonetician. The result was the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) of the Association Phonétique Internationale, the latter being Passy’s artifact also.
This alphabet, which includes many new characters hitherto unknown on land or sea, has come into wide use, but its deficiencies are innumerable, and there have been constant changes in it. When, for example, the Practical Phonetics Group of the Modern Language Association adopted it in 1927, it was necessary to add a number of new symbols to indicate peculiarities of American speech,
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and other additions have been since proposed by various other authorities. In 1926 it was given a drastic overhauling by a conference of philologians at Copenhagen, chiefly with the aim of making it more useful for the transcription of non-European languages.
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In 1939 the editors of
American Speech
petitioned the council of the Association Phonétique Internationale for approval of
two new symbols for American sounds devised by John S. Kenyon,
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and at various other times, unless my eyes deceive me, they have slipped in other changes without waiting for a directive from GHQ. Very few practical phonologists have ever attempted to use the IPA without modification. It has become divided into a “broad” form and a “close” or “narrow” form, the former needing fewer symbols than the latter, but suffering a corresponding loss in precision. Daniel Jones used the “broad” form in “An English Pronouncing Dictionary,”
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but he had to borrow four extra vowel symbols from the “narrow” form in order to make his transcriptions intelligible.
In the pamphlets of the British Broadcasting Company he and his colleagues use both the IPA and what they call “modified spelling,”
e.g., ǎkwáttic
for
aquatic, fayt for fête, plaak
for
plaque
, and
túrkwoyze
for
turquoise
. No doubt this is a necessary concession to crooners to whom the Greek and Runic letters, the upside-down
e
’s,
c
’s and
v
’s, and the other strange symbols of the IPA would be impenetrable, and perhaps even maddening. Most of the other British phonologists have encountered the same difficulties. Peter A. D. MacCarthy, in his “English Pronunciation,”
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says that the symbols he uses are “in conformity with the phonetic alphabet of the International Phonetic Association,” but proceeds at once to list changes that he has made in it, some of them borrowed from Sweet. In his bibliography,
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listing fifteen works on phonetics by himself and other British authorities, he shows that two use one modification of the IPA, one uses another, six use a third, and five use a fourth. The late H. C. Wyld, in his monumental “History of Modern Colloquial English,” already mentioned, rejected the IPA altogether, and used one of his own invention. “Books about the spoken word,” said A. Lloyd James in “The Broadcast Word,” “all suffer from a serious disadvantage: it is completely and absolutely impossible to represent on paper, by means of conventional print, the simplest facts of speech.… [Its] subtleties are such that no visual symbols can cope with them. The symbol
s
has to do duty for very many different noises that pass muster, up and down the world, for what is known as ‘the sound of the letter
s
.’ The ‘sound of the letter
l
’ has many variants in the English-speaking world, and the
l
sounds to be heard where English is spoken are legion.”
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