Authors: H.L. Mencken
Another factor which may have had something to do with the retention of the secondary accent, and with the general precision of American speech, is discussed at length by H. C. Wyld.
27
It has operated in England too, but during the past century it has probably exerted greater influence in this country. It may be described briefly as the influence of a class but lately risen in the social scale and hence a bit unsure of itself — a class intensely eager to avoid giving away its vulgar origin by its speech habits. The great historical changes in Standard English, says Wyld, were synchronous with the appearance of new “classes of the population in positions of prominence and power in the state, and the consequent reduction in the influence of the older governing classes.” He lists some of the events that produced such shifts in the balance of power: “the break-up of the feudal system; the extinction of most of the ancient baronial families in the War of the Roses; the disendowment of the monasteries, and the enriching of the King’s tools and agents; the rise of the great merchants in the towns; the Parliamentary wars and the social upheaval of the Protectorate; the rise of banking during the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries.” These changes, he said, brought forward an authority which ranged itself against both “the mere frivolities of fashion, the careless and half-incoherent babble of the fop” and “the lumbering and uncouth utterance of the boor.” Precision in speech thus became the hall-mark of those who had but recently arrived. Obviously, the number of those who have but recently arrived has always been greater in the United States than in England, not only among the aristocracy of wealth and fashion but also among the
intelligentsia
. The average American schoolmarm, the chief guardian of linguistic niceness in
the Republic, does not come from the class that has a tradition of culture behind it, but from the class of small farmers and city clerks and workmen. This is true, I believe, even of the average American college teacher. Such persons do not advocate and practise precision in speech on logical grounds alone; they are also moved, plainly enough, by the fact that it tends to conceal their own cultural insecurity. From them come most of the gratuitous rules and regulations that afflict schoolboys and harass the writers of the country. They are the chief discoverers and denouncers of “bad English” in the books of such men as Whitman, Mark Twain and Howells. But it would be a mistake to think of their influence as wholly, or even as predominantly evil. They have thrown themselves valiantly against the rise of dialects among us, and with such success that nothing so grossly unpleasant to the ear as the cockney whine or so lunatic as the cockney manhandling of the
h
is now prevalent anywhere in the United States. And they have policed the general speech to such effect that even on its most pretentious levels it is virtually free from the silly affectations which still mark Standard English. There was a time when they tried to saddle the Boston
a
upon the country, but that time is past. The Standard American that seems to be gathering form today is principally Western, and Dr. J. S. Kenyon, the author of the best existing textbook of American usage, did well to base it on “the cultivated pronunciation of his own locality — the Western Reserve of Ohio.”
28
In England the standard commonly recognized is, in the words of Daniel Jones, “the pronunciation which appears to be most usually employed by Southern English persons who have been educated at the great public boarding-schools.”
29
Dr. Jones calls it Standard Pronunciation (StP) or Public School Pronunciation (PSP). H. C. Wyld prefers to call it Received Standard English (RS), but agrees that it owes its dominance to “the custom of sending youths from
certain social strata to the great public schools.”
30
Wyld says that “it is not any more the English of London, as is sometimes mistakenly maintained, than it is that of York, or Exeter, or Cirencester, or Oxford, or Chester, or Leicester; … it is spoken everywhere, allowing for individual idiosyncrasies, to all intents and purposes, in precisely the same way.” He believes that it is “the best kind of English,” and in particular commends its vowels.
31
Nevertheless, there are plenty of Britons who dislike it heartily, and especially that form of it prevailing at Oxford. The late Robert Bridges delivered an onslaught upon it in Tract No. II of the Society for Pure English (1919) and drew up a formidable list of its absurdities and inconveniences,
e.g.
, the confusion, amounting to identification in pronunciation, of
lord
and
laud, maw
and
more, flaw
and
floor, alms
and
arms, source
and
sauce, ah
and
are, root
and
route, tray
and
trait, bean
and
been
. He also belabored such pronunciations as
ikstrodnry
for
extraordinary, intrist
for
interest
, and
pictsher
for
picture
. Dr. J. Y. T. Greig, in “Breaking Priscian’s Head,”
32
calls it “that silliest and dwabliest of all the English dialects,” and argues that it is “artificial, slovenly to a degree, absurdly difficult for foreigners to acquire, and except to ears debased by listening to it, inharmonious.” He continues:
It obliterates distinctions, tends to reduce all unstressed vowels to the same natural grunt, and then — as if by some obscure process of psychical compensation — diphthongizes and breaks up vowels that in other Standards are cleanly and simply articulated.… It needs to be taken out into the open air, and buffeted by trans-Atlantic winds.
Dr. Greig is a Scotsman, and his indignation may be discounted on that ground. But the following is by an Englishman born in East Anglia:
I speak for millions of Englishmen when I say that we are as sick and tired of this so-called English accent as you Americans are. It has far less right to be called Standard English than Yorkshire or any other country dialect has — or than any American dialect. It is as alien to us as it is to you. True, some of my neighbors have acquired it — for social and other reasons —, but then some of the Saxon peasants took pains to acquire Norman French, which was also imposed on them from above. The advantages to be gained from its acquisition, if not wholly imaginary, are of specious value. Boys from the great public schools, the cradles of snobbery, find that their speech is a passport to jobs in motor showrooms in Great Portland street
and the Euston road, but even there its function is mainly decorative. As soon as the customer has been well slavered and purred over, he is passed on to a salesman who, whether he speaks broad Cockney or broad Northumbrian, knows something about cars.
33
In 1925, when the announcers of the B.B.C., the government radio monopoly, began loosing this PSP over the air, there were many protests, and some of them were even leveled at the use of the broad
a
in
dance
, which most Americans think of as typically English. In consequence, the B.B.C. administration appointed an Advisory Committee on Spoken English, headed by Dr. Bridges and including Dr. Jones, Sir Johnston Forbes-Roberston, George Bernard Shaw and the American-born Logan Pearsall Smith, and handed over to it the difficult business of deciding disputes over pronunciation. This committee has been enlarged since, and now (1936) includes representatives of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1928 it issued a pamphlet for the guidance of announcers, dealing with 332 words; in 1932 there was a new edition, covering 503; and in 1935 there followed a third, covering 779.
34
This list, rather curiously, shows some concessions to American example,
e.g.
, the throwing forward of the accent in
adult
, but in general it follows the canons of PSP. George Bernard Shaw, a member of the advisory committee, has apparently dissented from most of its judgments. On January 25, 1934, he said in a letter to the London
Times:
An Oxford accent is considered by many graduates of that university to be the perfection of correct English; but unfortunately over large and densely populated districts of Great Britain it 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. The best English today is literally the King’s English. Like his Royal grandmother before him, King
George is the best speaker in his realm; and his broadcasts are astonishingly effective in creating loyalty. If he delivered a single broadcast in an Oxford accent his people would rise up that very day and proclaim a republic.
But not many of the Britons who object to the PSP join Professor Greig and Mr. Lewis in commending American pronunciation. Its monotonous speech-tunes commonly seem unpleasantly drawling to their ears, and they are jarred by its frequent nasalization of vowels. As a Cockney once said after suffering an American talkie, “It ain’t so much their bleedin’ lengwidge; it’s their blawsted neysal tweng.” “The Englishman,” says Philip R. Dillon, “squirms at the sounds of American English; they are strange to him, grate on him, offend his sense of harmony. The Dublin Irishman and the Edinburgh Scotsman also dislike and criticise American spoken English, but they have more humor than the Londoner, and refrain from being rude about it.”
35
This adversion began to show itself soon after the War of 1812, and many of the English travelers of the decades following denounced the American accent as well as the American vocabulary. Thus Frances Trollope in her “Domestic Manners of the Americans” (1832):
I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American. There is always something either in the expression or the accent that jars the feelings and shocks the taste.
The patriots of the time met these sneers with claims that the American accent was not only quite as good as the English, but much better. Said J. Fenimore Cooper in “Notions of the Americans” (1828):
36
The people of the United States, with the exception of a few of German or French descent, speak, as a body, incomparably better English than the people of the mother country.… In fine, we speak our language, as a nation, better than any other people speak their language. When one reflects on the immense surface of the country that we occupy, the general accuracy, in pronunciation and in the use of words, is quite astonishing.… The voices of the American females are particularly soft and silvery.
37
Cooper’s views are generally held by Americans today. Unconscious of the monotony of their speech-tunes, and of the nasalization which offends Englishmen, they believe that their way of using English is clearly better than the English way. In consequence, there is little imitation of English usage in this country. The relatively few Americans who have lived in England sometimes acquire the PSP accent, and it is mimicked by a small sect of Anglomaniacs, but the average American regards it as effeminate and absurd, and will thus have none of it. The broad
a
that the American schoolmarm formerly tried to propagate was not the English
a
, but the Boston
a
. What moved her to favor it was hardly a liking for English speech-habits, but rather a respect for the cultural preëminence of New England, and especially of Boston, now no more. This
a
survives in the more fashionable finishing-schools, but hardly anywhere else. There was a time when all American actors of any pretensions employed a dialect that was a heavy imitation of the dialect of the West End actors of London. It was taught in all the American dramatic schools, and at the beginning of the present century it was so prevalent on the American stage that a flat
a
had a melodramatic effect almost equal to that of
damn
. But the rise of the movies broke down this convention. They attracted actors from all parts of the world, to many of whom English was a foreign language, and when the talkies followed it was found that most of these newcomers had picked up ordinary American. Moreover, the native-born recruits were mainly without formal professional training, so the majority of them also spoke the vulgate. From time to time Hollywood has made some effort to model its speech on that of its English-born luminaries, but never with much success. Nor has the American Academy of Arts and Letters got far in the same direction, though it has given gold medals and other gauds to actors equipped with the PSP accent,
e.g.
, Edith Wynne Matthison, Julia Marlowe and George Arliss. The ideal of Broadway now seems to be what Kerry Conway has called a denationalized accent. It is, he explains, “clear, rounded speech, smacking neither of England nor of America, and free from the repugnant localisms of both countries. The late Hol-brook Blinn achieved it. Walter Hampden and Arthur Byron employ it. It graces the utterance of the Canadian-born Margaret Anglin.”
38
On April 26, 1931, it was reported by the Chicago
Radio Weekly
that the two big American radio chains, the Columbia and the N.B.C., were forcing their announcers to use “English as she is spoke in England.” On inquiry I found that this was a canard. “What we try to get,” I was told by Mr. Walter C. Stone of the N.B.C., “is decent American pronunciation, affected as little as possible by localisms.”
39
Columbia, at the same time, announced that it had appointed Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly to advise its announcers in matters of pronunciation, and called attention to the fact that Dr. Vizetelly described himself as “a man ever ready to help in spreading the best traditions of American speech, which does not suppress its consonants, nor squeeze all the life out of its vowels.”
40
Nevertheless, there are American announcers who affect what they think is English usage, and they have been belabored heartily for it by Dr. Josiah Combs.
41
As for the schoolmarms, they have been warned by Dr. Louise Pound. “My first caution,” she says, “is, do not rely too far on British dictionaries, in these days. It is of interest to consult them, but they are no longer to be cited as authoritative for American English.”
42
The extent to which this differentiation has gone is but little appreciated. In Palmer, Martin and Blandford’s “Dictionary of English Pronunciation with American Variants”
43
no less than 28% of the words listed show differing pronunciations in England and the United States. The authors classify the major American variants in twelve categories, and add fourteen categories of minor ones.