XXII

THE BEST PRONUNCIATION

PRONUNCIATION is a matter of such insistent and daily concern that it calls for separate consideration. Nobody is satisfied with anything except the best pronunciation, and pronunciations are often eagerly debated by speakers who are not at all troubled over questions of grammar or vocabulary. For this there are good reasons, one being that pronunciation is much more inclusive as a debatable activity in language than grammar or vocabulary. The number of situations in which questions of grammar may arise is comparatively small, and the number of words which are distinctive for particular uses or groups is never \ large. But pronunciation is a matter which affects every word in the language and every time it is spoken. It is therefore the most revealing of all the aspects of language. In the Autocrat, Holmes asserts that the pronunciation of a single word may tell you all you want to know about the origins and possibilities of a person. Perhaps Holmes makes pronunciation bear too heavy a burden of meaning, yet it is nevertheless true that pronunciation is often more significant than any other personal habit in determining one's likes and dislikes, approvals and disapprovals.

Though everybody is eager to possess the best pronunciation, wide divergence of opinion exists as to what constitutes the best pronunciation. Some of the aspects of this question have already been discussed in the consideration of dialects and of the levels of speech. The

pronunciation of general colloquial speech is in some respects different from that of formal speech. These differences, however, are determined by the special conditions of the latter type of speech and are not really pertinent to the discussion of the general questions of pronunciation. Obviously the normal pronunciation of those interested in norms must be one that is current on the level of general cultivated society, and any variations must be estimated by looking at them from the angle of the pronunciation of cultivated conversation. The matter limits itself, therefore, to the discovery of what should be regarded as the best pronunciation for cultivated social intercourse through the forms of spoken language.

One defense of certain preferred pronunciations often made is that the sounds contained in them, regarded merely as sounds, are more pleasing, more beautiful than the sounds in the rejected pronunciations. This is equivalent to saying that some sounds of English speech are better than others because of their inherent power to please. That all sounds in nature are equally pleasing perhaps no one would maintain. The melody of a babbling brook charms the ear more than the rattling of an empty can. But neither the music of the brook nor the noise of the can are sounds of English speech, and for the moment these are the only sounds under consideration. Yet even among English sounds regarded merely as sounds, some might conceivably be defended as more agreeable to the ear, and on this ground, better as the structural material of language. In the course of its history, the English language has unquestionably got rid of certain sounds, as for example the final consonant in the Scotch pronunciation of loch, which by the standards

of present speech at least, seem harsh and unlovely sounds. So one might argue, though with difficulty prove, that the sound of z in size is less agreeable as a sound than the sound of o in rose, or the sound of th in thin than the sound of l in tall. It is extremely doubtful, however, if any such preferences exist genuinely and strongly enough to be appreciable. Only a very subtle æsthetic of sounds would be capable of discriminating among such refined choices. Association of meaning always plays such an important part in the feeling one thinks one may have for a sound that æsthetic judgments on sounds themselves must be made only with extreme caution. Would the sound of s in rose, which is the same as the sound of z in size, be as disagreeable as the same sound when it appears in toes, nose, and other unpoetic words?

Yet even if those who speak the English language felt an incontestable preference for one speech sound as against another, for o as contrasted with z, for l as against th, such a preference could have no significant bearing on the use of the language unless the two sounds were so / nearly alike that they might be employed interchangeably in the words in which they occurred. No matter how violent one's preference for o might be as contrasted with the sound of z, one could not pronounce the word rose without using the hateful sound. Of course one might altogether avoid using words containing the sound z, but only at the cost of extraordinary inconvenience. The English language contains only about forty clearly distinguishable sounds, and a speaker who tried to get along without any one of these sounds would soon discover that they are all put to very constant and inescapable uses. Sometimes poets may write a line or two in which par

ticular sounds are selected and made significant, as in Tennyson's "The murmur of bees in immemorial elms," or Swinburne's "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain" with their groupings of m, l, r, and a sounds. But such lines are sound pictures, possible for brief moments, and even in poetry very exceptional. In its general uses the language pays no heed to the different qualities of the sounds it employs from the point of view of their intrinsic values. Any sound may occur in any kind of word, in the ugliest as well as the most beautiful, in the simplest as well as the most subtle.

The question of choice between two sounds is of practical importance in language only when the possibility of employing two different sounds in the same word is present. The point now under consideration is whether this choice can be determined by the values of the sounds considered merely as sounds, whether the one pronunciation is thus inherently good or better and the other inherently bad or less good. For illustration, two sets of sounds may be chosen which are often debated and which occur in a large number of English words pronounced differently by different speakers. The sounds of the one set are the familiar vowels that occur in hat and in calm, of the other the two vowel sounds that occur in mute and in moot. All four of these sounds occur in dozens of English words concerning which no questions of pronunciation are ever raised. The possibility of choice indeed is present only in very limited groups. Thus in one of these groups one may pronounce the vowel of half, path, glass and of other words either with the sound of the vowel of hat or of calm. Or we may pronounce the vowel of duty, tube, and other similar words, either with the vowel of mute or the vowel

of moot. Can the question of choice be determined in groups of words like these on the basis of the inherent excellence of one speech sound as contrasted with another? In these two groups the question specifically is whether the pronunciation of half with the vowel of calm is inherently better than with the vowel of hat, of tube with the vowel of mute than with the vowel of moot, since in present use the first pronunciation in each instance is ordinarily preferred to the second when a choice is to be made. Now nothing is more certain than that the preferred pronunciation of words like half and tube did not originate under æsthetic impulses. Moreover, it is a matter of familiar knowledge to the historical student of language that now one and now the other of the pronunciations in the past has been exalted and cultivated. In the eighteenth century the vowel of calm in half, or for that matter in calm itself, was regarded as rustic and provincial in the judgment of most of the elegant arbiters of taste in pronunciation of the time. Our modern Italian a was not held in good repute in the eighteenth century in any words. And Noah Webster devoted page after page of argument to prove that the proper sound of the vowel in tube, duty, and other like words should not be the sound of u in use, that the words should not be pronounced teoob or deooty, as he wrote them to indicate the long u sound, but with a sound approximately that of boot, that is, with the sound which today the purist would ordinarily reprehend in these words, and one which, it need scarcely be said, no longer appears in the revisions of Webster's dictionary. It is true that Webster made some subtle refinement between the vowel of boot and the one that he recommended in duty, so subtle, how