Phonology individual words — can be extrapolated from the pages of the contempo- rary pronouncing dictionaries. Thus, by taking individual words from Benjamin Smart's The Practice of Elocution (1842:22-24) and calculating their phonemic content (in terms of English English 150 years ago), one can evoke a sense of the change that has been caused to English by phonotac- tic alterations. Smart has /i:/ in PROF/LE, BREVIARY; /I/ in CL^F, V/SOR; /ei/ in PLACABLE, BRAVADO; /e/ in F^OFF, ^POCH, PANE- GFRIC; /ae/in R^/LLERY; /A/in HOUSEWIFE, SFRUP; /O:/in GR<X4T; /u/in RUTHLESS; and/u:/in BEHOVE. With material from over 200 years ago, namely some of the entries in Thomas Sheridan's A GeneralDictionary of the English Language of 1780, one can calculate the pronunciation not only of individual words but of entire sentences, in what might loosely be described (for the moment — see sec- tions 5.4.6—9) as Southern English English. Differences of segmental dis- tribution, in terms both of structure and lexical incidence, are very noticeable. (It is impossible to be dogmatic about the quality and quantity of the individual allophones; hence only a broad phonetic (i.e. phonemic) transcription is given.) /di Ambl jeman laeft az da hAzwif suind/ The humble yeoman laughed as the housewife swooned /da soctar fram tjeini: pleid a kwaentiti: av saneitaz fersli:/ The soldier from China played a quantity of sonatas fiercely /do kwinstar so: de bwi: ni:r da ke:/ The chorister saw the buoy near the quay. 5.2 The historical sources and their interpretation 5.2.1 Even though a sufficient quantity of information exists in print about the pronunciation of English over the last 220 years (supplemented for a century and more by audio recordings), much of it must be used with cir- cumspection, especially for the period 1760 to about 1860. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, few of the people who wrote about the pronunciation of English, either in the British Isles or the USA, could be described as phoneticians, in the sense of persons with an objective appre- ciation of pronunciation and the necessary technical knowledge for describing it. The two most influential writers, both during their lifetimes and after, were Thomas Sheridan (1719-88) and John Walker 375 Michael К. С. MacMahon (1732-1807). Sheridan was born in Dublin but spent a few years at a London school before returning to Dublin. His later, professional career was as an actor on the Dublin and London stages. As well as lecturing on elocution in various cities in England and Scodand, he was also the author of several works, three of which are direcdy relevant to pronunciation: British Education (1756), A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762) and a General Dictionary of the English Language (1780). 4 He established a reputation as an authority on English English pronunciation. Yet, the anonymous author of a tract was warning the public about the Vicious', 'deformed' and 'ridiculous' pronunciations that Sheridan was advocating, including /tj*/ in NATURE, instead of the /tj/, and /1/ in ENJOY, instead of /e/(Anon. 1790)! John Walker (1732-1807) lived in or near London all his life. His career paralleled that of Sheridan in many ways: he was an actor, an elocutionist, and an author of works on pronunciation. His seminal work was the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), with revisions and many reissues, which, as well as listing the pronunciations of words, also included a lengthy (and valuable) discussion of the 'Principles of English Pronunciation'. In America, the first major author of this period was the lexicographer Noah Webster (1758—1843). His influence can be gauged from the pro- nunciations he gave in his Dictionary of 1828 (and reprints) as well as from his comments on pronunciation in his much earlier Dissertations on Language (1789). 5.2.2 Considerable caution is needed, nevertheless, when interpreting the pro- nunciations given for the period from the mid-eighteenth century until the time of Alexander Ellis in the 1860s. The main sources of information are the pronouncing dictionaries, grammar books (which contained informa- tion about pronunciation), 5 and more general works on the English lan- guage. Both in Britain and America, a number of writers attributed to themselves the status of 'orthpepists', that is self-appointed 'authorities' on current, but, usually more specifically, 'correct', pronunciation. The list of such people includes Thomas Batchelor, James Buchanan, James Elphinston, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Nares, Thomas Sheridan, Benjamin Smart, William Thornton, John Walker, Noah Webster, and Joseph Worcester. It should also be noted that works first published in Britain were sometimes reprinted without alteration of content in America. 376 Phonology 5.2.3 The question of the reliability of the testimony of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century orthoepists requires to be examined in more detail (cf. Sundby 1976: 45; Rohlfing 1984: 4; Jones C. 1989: 280). One would wish to know whether an individual orthoepist was aware of differences between putative standard and non-standard forms. Could he or she 6 have been delib- erately selective and have suppressed information about certain pronuncia- tions? For example, for various British speakers in the eighteenth century, the first phoneme in CHART was /k/, not /tj/, yet only a handful of authors draw attention to this. Was the orthoepist aware of register differences within social groups or individual speakers? Is it possible that the orthoepist could have had some phonetic training, or was he or she self-taught? (One assumes that acting, the profession of, for example, Thomas Sheridan and John Walker, contributed to their understanding of English pronunciation, and hence of phonetics.) Even if an orthoepist had acquired this expertise, then he or she presumably lacked sophistication in one critical area, namely the methodology for describing with any degree of accuracy the precise differences between vowel-sounds. Being able to devise, or simply know how to use, a set of vowcl-symbo/s was no substitute for being able to infer the con- figurations of the vocal tract, especially of the tongue and lips^ in the pro- duction of vowtl-sounds. (Daniel Jones's Cardinal Vowel system, the basis of most modern descriptions of vowel-sounds, was not developed until about the time of the First World War.) 7 To what extent did an orthoepist use another author's work as a source, perhaps uncritically? Did the orthoepist have a deferential attitude to orthography, and regard that as the arbiter of the pronunciation of particular words? Was the resulting pronouncing dic- tionary (or introduction to pronunciation contained within a grammar book) a response to a desire to be descriptive, prescriptive or proscriptive? Because of commercial pressures to produce a particular sort of 'manual' of pho- netic etiquette, it is feasible that some authors at least may have suppressed their own accent in favour of the one their prospective readership wished to see being encouraged. In general, little is known about the precise back- ground of each orthoepist (particularly in Britain), although London (or one of the neighbouring counties) plays a part in many of their biographies. 8 5.2.4 The later nineteenth-century phoneticians were heavily critical of the orthoepists of the earlier period. In America, Samuel Haldeman commented 377 Michael K. C. MacMahon that orthoepists 'blind themselves to the genius and tendencies of the language, and represent a jargdn which no one uses but the child learning to read from divided syllables' (Haldeman 1860: 122; cf. Ellis 1874: 1187). In Britain, Ellis was adamant that their pronouncements could not be relied upon: 'all pronouncing dictionary writers and elocutionists give rather what they think ought to be given than what they have observed as most common' (1874: 1208). 9 5.2.5 There is much evidence to show that John Walker was sometimes prone to adopt an authoritarian and highly prescriptive view of what constituted an acceptable current English English pronunciation of certain words. For example, he objected to ANY, MANY and THAMES with /e/, maintaining that the vowel should be /ae/. The words GEOGRAPHY and GEOMETRY with initial /d3D-/ were, he said, 'monsters of pronunciation'. (All such examples are contradicted by entries in other, contemporary, pronouncing dictionaries.) Yet his influence on the pronunciation of particular words in English was wide and long-lasting - 'immeasurable far down into the nine- teenth century' (Sheldon 1938: 380; cf. also Sheldon 1947: 130). Six later editors were to revise the contents of his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, allegedly bringing it into line with current pronunciations (Wrocklage 1943: 15; cf. also Sheldon 1947:130). Even so, Ellis reserved his strongest criticisms for Walker and his 'ush- erism', the 'constant references to the habits of a class of society to which he evidendy did not belong [and] the most evident marks [in the Dictionary] of insufficient knowledge, and of that kind of pedantic self-sufficiency which is the true growth of half-enlightened ignorance' (Ellis 1869:624—5). A German commentator, Voigtmann, had also recognised that the pro- nunciation given in one of the many reprints of Walker's 1791 Dictionary was fundamentally out of line with the current pronunciation of the lan- guage fifty years later. 10 See also the first edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, which contains a long and with- ering critique of Walker's English English pronunciation (Webster 1828: xxxii—b: N 5.2.6 Walker himself — not surprisingly — was critical of some of his immediate contemporaries: perhaps more as a means of justifying his own Dictionary 378 Phonology than on account of any genuine defects he had noticed in their notations of individual words. Of Thomas Sheridan, he said that there are 'numer- ous instances of impropriety, inconsistency, and want of acquaintance with the analogies of the language' (Walker 1791: iii). And Robert Nares, despite 'clearness of method and an extent of observation', was criticised for being 'on many occasions mistaken [about] the best usage' (1791: iv). 5.2.7 In many cases, then, it is impossible to be certain whether pronunciations of particular words given in any of the orthoepical dictionaries represented actual current usage, a minority usage that carried with it a certain social cachet, or an as yet unspoken fantasy form that the author, for whatever reason, would like to have heard being used. It must be remembered too that, given the relatively limited geographical movement of speakers of English, more so in Britain than in America, up until at least the mid- nineteenth century, very few people would have had access to a genuinely varied set of pronunciations of the language upon which to base their gen- eralisations. 5.2.8 Other sources of information on pronunciation before about the mid- nineteenth century include a miscellaneous group of people, who, more by accident than design, reveal something of current pronunciation. For example, the famous London printer Philip Luckombe attached a list of homophones to his History and Art of Printing (1771: 477—86). He rhymes ALOUD and ALLOWED, and FREES, FREEZE, and FRIEZE, and AN ODE and A NODE - the latter is perhaps, incidentally, the first example of pho- netic juncture in English to which specific attention is drawn in print. But he also lists ADAPT, ADEPT, and ADOPT as homophonous; similarly, EMERALDS and HAEMORRHOIDS. It is unlikely that a late eighteenth- century educated accent, or even a Cockney accent, would have treated these word-sets as homophones. Other potentially useful sources of information include letters on lin- guistic matters to the daily press and periodicals — usually from academics - reformed spelling and shorthand systems, and poems and hymns. For example, John Keats rhymed THOUGHTS and SORTS in 1816 (Mugglestone 1991: 58); and John Keble rhymed POOR and STORE in a hymn he wrote in 1820. 11 Data of this sort has, however, to be used with 379 Michael K. C. MacMahon equal caution since it is not always possible to distinguish unequivocally between eye rhymes and those ear rhymes which had a restricted regional and/or social distribution, as well as between ear rhymes and eye rhymes in general. 12 5.2.9 The list of reliable authorities on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pronunciation contains the names of about a dozen phoneticians. In Britain, it included Alexander Ellis, Alexander Melville Bell, and Henry Sweet; in the USA, Samuel Haldeman, William Dwight Whitney, and Charles Hall Grandgent. Without exception, they were well aware of the problems surrounding the objective validity of statements about pronun- ciation, both those deriving from a person's attempts to report his or her own speech-patterns, and, secondly, from socially induced attempts to argue the correctness — even the very existence — of particular pronuncia- tions. Indeed, as early as the end of the eighteenth century, William Thornton, a scholar who had lived in England, Scodand and, finally, America, 13 had remarked in the specific context of speech analysis that 'some of the most learned men are men of the least knowledge — take away their school learning, and they remain children' (1793:269). A century later, Sweet was to warn that 'the statements of ordinary educated people about their own pronunciation are generally not only value-less, but misleading' (Sweet 1890a: viii); and that 'there are not 100 people in England capable of writing down their own pronunciation]' (Sweet to Storm 18 Feb. 1889). Ellis too said much the same thing: 'I have an idea that professed men of letters are the worst sources for noting peculiarities of pronunciation; they think so much about speech, that they nurse all manner of fancies, and their speech is apt to reflect individual theories' (1874: 1209). In America, Thomas Lounsbury warned similarly that 'on this subject there is no ignorance so profound and comprehensive as that which envelops the minds of many men of letters' (Lounsbury 1903: 582). 5.2.10 Since the First World War, the number of phoneticians (and university- level courses in phonetics) has grown considerably, and there is no lack of expert commentary on the state of English pronunciation from that time onward. 14 In Britain, the descriptive bias has been towards RP, a minority accent in terms of the number of its speakers (about 3 per cent of the 380 Phonology British population). In the USA, General American (henceforth GenAm.) pronunciation (used, however, by the majority of the population) has been accorded most attention. Much has also been written about other educated accents (e.g. Southern and Eastern American). 5.3 Methods of phonetic/phonological analysis 5.3.1 Before Ellis in the late 1860s, very few authors indicate that they were aware of any of the phonetics literature which had been published in Britain from the sixteenth century onwards and which could have aided them in their descriptions of pronunciation. 15 Even so, there is considerable evidence that many of them had intuitively developed a phonemic approach to the analysis of sounds, as a result of comparing the pronunciation with the spelling. Thus, for example, John Walker's analysis of the phonology (and some of the phonetics) of late eighteenth-century English (Walker 1791) bears obvious similarities, allowing for differences of terminology, to a present-day 'place-and-manner' analysis of consonant sounds. 16 Indeed, there are several striking similarities between the type of pho- netic/phonological analysis undertaken by various authors, particularly during the second half of the eighteenth century, and certain twentieth- century procedures for phonemic analysis. For example, many writers con- sciously use the minimal-pair principle, which results variously in 'chimers' (cf. Elphinston 1790: 33), 'contrasted examples' (cf. Batchelor 1809: 22), and 'precise pairs' (cf. Ellis 1869: 57). 17 And Edward Search's list of prac- tice sentences for vowel contrasts (1773: 12) has its counterpart in practi- cally every modern EFL textbook: 'I can't endure this cant', 'Sam, sing me a psalm', and 'Look at Luke.' The analysis of word-accent, moreover, is generally sophisticated, and derives from an appreciation of the technical- ities of classical Greek and Latin prosody. 5.3.2 By the time of Whitney and Sweet in the 1870s, a well-developed system of phonetic and (sometimes) phonemic analysis was in existence. Whitney's study (1875) of his own idiolect benefits from his knowledge of phonetic procedures — his background as an orientalist is observable in some of his remarks. Particularly noteworthy are his statements about the distributional rules for several consonant and vowel phonemes, as well as 381 Michael K. C. MacMahon his close attention to phonetic detail: see, in particular, his comments on the allophones of /r/, /s/, /k/, and /h/ (Whitney 1875:passim). Sweet's analysis of English phonology (Sweet 1877) is similar, despite differences of terminology and symbology, to a comparable twentieth- century phonetic/phonological one. But his most obviously theoretical analysis of English phonology, or what he called 'the process of fixing the elementary distinctive sounds', is his virtually unknown paper of 1882 (cf. MacMahon 1985:107). It anticipates the work sixty years later of phonol- ogists such as George Trager, Bernard Bloch and Henry Smith with its argument that the number of 'elementary distinctive vowel-sounds' can be reduced from twenty to nine (see especially 1882:14). 5.3.3 Most authors use some sort of phonetic notation, usually based on respelling of English. 18 For example, Walker, like many other orthoepists, uses a system of traditional orthographic characters with superscript numbers, pioneered by Sheridan (1780). He transcribes the /e:/ of FATE as a, the /a:/ of FAR as a, the /o:/ of FALL as a, and the /ae/ of FAT as a. However, he retains some 'silent' letters: e.g. PSALM is sam, but SAME is same. Ellis uses one or other of his own phonetic notations (Glossic, Palaeotype, and variants thereof). Sweet and later writers tend to use a tran- scription which is either IPA or similar to it. 5.4 Standards and styles of pronunciation The British Isles 5.4.1 Until the mid-eighteenth century, the pronunciation of English had gener- ally been regarded as of secondary importance to matters of grammar and style. It was Thomas Sheridan who was to ask that correct pronunciation be put onto the intellectual agenda, by arguing that it was the variability of pronunciation, more than any other linguistic feature, which signalled the 'decline' of English as a language. In his British Education (1756) and Lectures on Elocution (1762) he outlined the problem. Variant pronunciations of the same word were rife; English appeared to be 'ruleless' in its pronunciation; certain 'letters' were being lost ('wh' was being replaced by 'w', and initial 'h' was being dropped, for example); unstressed syllables were not being 382 Phonology given their full, stressed, values. The solution, he said, had to be a conscious movement towards imitating the speech patterns of 'people of education at court'; otherwise 'our language, in point of sound', would continue to 'relapsfe] into it's first state of barbarism' (Sheridan 1756: 221). By 1780, and the publication of his General Dictionary of the English Language, his analysis was even more dispiriting: The greatest improprieties are to be found among people of fashion; man y pronunciations, which thirty or forty years ago were confined to the vulgar, are gradually gaining ground; and if something be not done to stop this growing evil, and fix a general standard at present, the English is likely to become a mere jargon, which every one may pronounce as he pleases. It is to be wished that such a standard had been established during the reign of Queen Anne, [i.e. 1702-14, the time of Addison, Pope, Steele, and Swift], as it is probable that English was then spoken in its highest state of perfection'. (Sheridan 1780: Preface; cf. Danielsson 1948: 417-18) Part of the problem lay, he claimed, in the variant pronunciations used by different professions within the higher echelons of English society: There is a great diversity of pronunciation of the same words, not only in individuals, but in whole bodies of men. That there are some adopted by the universities; some prevail at the bar, and some in the senate-house. That the propriety of these several pronunciations is controverted by several persons who have adopted them. (Sheridan 1780: Preface; cf. Danielsson 1948: 417-18) 5.4.2 His calls for speakers of English to imitate court speech, if only to 'fix' the language, coincided with the continuing growth in the power and prosper- ity of the middle classes. They in turn, conscious of their material and social strengths, did not wish their speech to betray the working-class origins of many of their forebears. A receptive audience existed - or could be created - for works on the 'correct' pronunciation of English, which would show people how to rid their speech of any unfortunate 'vulgarisms' or, equally importandy, any pedantries arising from a simplistic imitation of upper-class speech. Sheridan's role, as he saw it, was to identify the various sociolinguistic and stylistic factors; he left to his immediate successors the challenge of producing appropriate manuals of correct pronunciation which would cater for the middle classes' needs. 383 Michael K. C. MacMahon 5.4.3 However, an alternative, and rather different, interpretation of the range of contemporary pronunciations of English was put, a few years later, in 1791, by John Walker. He had the advantage over Sheridan of having been brought up close to London and having spent all his professional life as an actor and elocutionist in the city. (Sheridan, despite having spent some time at a London school, had an Irish background, and his accent was Irish.) In Walker's opinion, the notion of extensive variant pronunciations had been overstated: The fluctuation of our Language, with respect to its pronunciation, seems to have been greatly exaggerated. Except for a few single words, which are generally noticed in the following Dictionary, and the words where e comes before r, followed by another consonant, as merchant, service, &c, the pronunciation of the Language is probably in the same state in which it was a century ago. (Walker 1791: vi) He could call to mind only a small number of cases where the pronun- ciation reflected variability, or else socially unacceptable forms: an indis- tinct pronunciation of /s/ after /st/ e.g. in POSTS (Walker 1791: xii); the use of /v/ for /w/ and vice-versa 'among the inhabitants of London, and those not always of the lower order' (Walker 1791: xii-xiii); the loss of //A/ 'particularly in the capital, where we do not find the least distinction of sound between while and wile, whet and wet, where and were, &c.' (1791: xiii); and /h/-dropping (and /h/-insertion) in certain words. Not only HEIR, HONEST, HONOUR, etc, had no initial /h/, but so too did HERB, HOSPI- TAL, HUMBLE, HUMOUR, and certain others (see further, 5.10.8) (Walker 1791: xiii). Almost all of these variants had been noted earlier by Sheridan. 5.4.4 Evidence of the type of variability that Sheridan emphasises, but Walker downplays, can be found, slightly later, in the anonymous A Vocabulary of Such Words in the English Language as Are of Dubious or Unsettled Pronunciation (1797), which lists just over 900 words which had fluctuating pronuncia- tions. Leaving aside about 200 of them which by any criterion would be counted as belonging to specialist registers, e.g. GELABLE, MYROBALAN, PAROQUET, and SARDONYX, there still remain about 700 whose pronun- ciation varied. The author quotes the opposing views of the leading orthoepists of the day to prove the point: words like ALMOND pronounced 384 [...]... 1750 and the end of the eighteenth century, however, and despite what Sheridan in particular had said, the speech of the socially secure and the learned, rather than the genteel speech of the Court, became increas ingly recommended: the standard of these sounds is that pronunciation of them, in most general use, amongst people of elegance and taste of the English nation, and especially of London... guide? The answer is extremely easy; the rules of the language itself and the general practice of the nation universal undisputed practice, and the principle of analogy* (Webster 1789.1:27-8) He went on: W h e r e such principles cannot be found, let us examin [sic] the opinions of the learned, and the practice of the nations which speak the pure English, that we may determine by the weight of authority,... advocate the adoption of the British standard of pronun ciation, as some enthusiasts have done' (Kurath 1928: 282) The leader of 40 2 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Phonology the enthusiasts was Miss E M De Witt, the author of various works on the subject, including Euphon English in America (1925) 5 .4. 33 During the last sixty years, GenAm has taken on the role of the phonetic... and the usage of the whole body of the learned and polite portion of this one people must be the standard' (Pickering 1828: 202) This, in turn, re-opened the question of whether Walker reflected actual London usage Joseph Worcester, one of the editors of Webster, felt that 'in this respect, no one has been more favourably situated than Walker, and in the pronunciation of the great mass of words in the. .. over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality, and admitting a certain degree of variety It may be especially considered as the educated pronunciation of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit and the bar', with some regional varia tion (1 869 : 23) He later added to the list the categories of 'the stage, the universities — and, in a minor degree, parliament, the lecture room, the. .. of provincial utterance running through the whole' (Ellis 1 869 : 23; see also Ellis 18 74: 1215- 16) In this respect, Ellis's views were precisely the same as those of his American contemporaries (see below 5 .4. 30) The other caveat is that he had serious reservations about the natural ness of r.p.: whether it really was the result of historical speech patterns, rather than a somewhat uneasy amalgam of. .. best-spoken English' were 'the middle-aged clubmen of London' (quoted by Fuhrken 1932: 18) 5 .4. 22 Jones's conception of RP as a form of English moulded by boyhood pat terns of speech behaviour has been moderated to a great extent over the last thirty years Thus, Gimson notes only the historical, not the presentday, role of the public schools in RP (Gimson 1 962 : 82-3; 1970: 84- 5; 1980: 89; 1989: 85) The RP of. .. e : / ; the first syllable of C U C U M B E R pronounced either as c o w or Q U E U E ; D U K E with or without a / j / ; M O B I L E with the stress on the second or the first sylla ble; S H O N E with the vowel of either G O N E or M O A N ; and W E A P O N with either / i : / or / e / as the stressed vowel 5 .4. 5 The effect of the awareness, from about the mid-eighteenth century onwards, of variable... especially of London (Johnston 17 64 : 1; cf Danielsson 1 948 : 41 6) the actual practice of the best speakers; men of letters in the metropolis (Kenrick 1773: vii; cf Sheldon 1938: 272) By being properly pronounced, I would be always understood to mean, pronounced agreeable to the general practice of men of letters and polite speakers in the Metropolis (Kenrick 17 84: 56) 19 5 .4. 7 It was left to John Walker,... (19 24, quoted in Kenyon 1 9 46 : vi) explicidy pointed out that 'no attempt is made to set up or even to imply a standard of correctness based on the usage of any part of America' Instead, he chose to base his observations on the 'cul tivated' pronunciation of his own locality, namely the Western Reserve of Ohio (Kenyon 1 9 46 : vi) By contrast, Hans Kurath was adamant that 'the cultured groups in each of the . pronunciation of them, in most general use, amongst people of elegance and taste of the English nation, and especially of London. (Johnston 17 64 : 1; cf. Danielsson 1 948 : 41 6) the actual. 1 948 : 41 7-18) Part of the problem lay, he claimed, in the variant pronunciations used by different professions within the higher echelons of English society: There is a great diversity of. Sheridan in particular had said, the speech of the socially secure and the learned, rather than the genteel speech of the Court, became increas- ingly recommended: the standard of these sounds