Daniel Jones (originally entitled ‘Speech training: the phonetic aspect’ (1935). Reprinted from British Journal of Educational Psychology 5: 27–30)
Daniel Jones (1881–1967) is generally considered to be the greatest British phonetician of the twentieth century and the man who laid the foundations worldwide for phonetics as we know it today. Although one of his important contributions was his detailed description of English pronunciation on the basis of traditional RP, he was perhaps the first linguist to set down clearly his opposition to prescriptivism in speech training and to advocate respect for native accents of all kinds.
The aim of the phonetician is twofold: (1) to determine with precision the movements made by the tongue and other parts of the organs of speech in pronouncing words and sentences, (2) to cause his pupils to perform unaccustomed movements with their organs of speech; in other words, to pronounce new sounds or new combinations of sounds.
The processes of phonetics can be applied in various ways. For instance, it is possible by means of them to teach an apt pupil to pronounce a foreign language in a manner almost indistinguishable from a native, whether that language is one such as French, which has certain affinities with English, or whether it is an absolutely remote one such as Chinese or Zulu. It is also possible to teach a pupil to make changes in his pronunciation of his mother tongue; and it is this aspect of phonetic work in which this [paper] is chiefly interested.
It should be explained here that phonetic work is not concerned with voice-production. The phonetician is concerned with tongue articulations, etc.; we leave the manner of producing the voice to those who are specialists in that subject. These two branches of speech training should, in my view, be kept distinct; any pronunciation can be combined with either good or bad voice-production. There are plenty of people, for instance, who speak what is called ‘good’ English but use bad voice-production. And conversely one not unfrequently hears good voice-production combined with quite incorrect pronunciation; this may be observed notably when good singers sing foreign songs.
Another point to be noted is that the phonetician concerns himself with the recording of facts, and his teaching is based on such records; he does not (or at any rate it is better that he should not) concern himself with what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in pronunciation, or with what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or with the ‘prettiness’ or ‘ugliness’ of sounds.
In fact, it is his function to take up a rather detached attitude in regard to such questions. By doing so he finds that much of what is sometimes called ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ in speech is not intrinsic beauty or ugliness at all, but is merely convention. The use of a certain sound recalls an unpleasant circumstance or reminds us of somebody we do not like or whom we despise, and (often without realizing the connexion) we attribute ugliness to the sound instead of to the circumstances recalled by it.
To give an example: many people think it ugly to pronounce face as [fais]. But if you come to think of it there is nothing intrinsically ugly about this syllable or about any parts of it; we use the vowel-sound [ai] in nice, twice, and ice without thinking it ugly, and the sound cannot become ugly simply because someone puts an f in front of it. In fact, I can imagine that if we are thinking of snow and ice or skating, many people might consider the sound of the word ice rather pretty. But if I were to make exactly the same sound [ais] in speaking of the ‘[ais] of clubs,’ some of those people might regard that same sound as being ugly. This instance shows that we are not dealing with intrinsic prettiness or ugliness: the sound [ais] cannot vary its inherent prettiness according as a person uses it to denote frozen water or a certain card in a pack.
The real reason why people who pronounce [feis] do not like the sound of [fais] is that they connect the variant [fais] with Cockneys and slums and what they call ‘vulgarity,’ while they connect by a convention [feis] with gentility or elegance or culture. (Incidentally, it may be remarked that [feis] and [fais] may both be said with either good or bad voice-production.)
This detached attitude of merely regarding sounds as sounds (apart from any inherent beauty they may possess, if any), of examining them as we find them, of analysing their mode of formation and noting who are the people who use them, leads to very useful results. When we come to study pronunciation with this attitude of mind, we make many interesting discoveries, some of which may cause surprise. One discovery which the observer of phonetic phenomena makes at quite an early stage of his studies is that he finds he actually uses a great many pronunciations which at first he might have been tempted to condemn. Another is that when you listen carefully to the speech of those who condemn particular forms of pronunciation, you will often hear them use the very pronunciations they are condemning. It is also interesting to find out the effect which one’s own pronunciation has on different people; my pronunciation was, for instance, once described by a teacher of some position as ‘the speech of costermongers and servant girls,’ and on another occasion by a provincial amateur philologist as a ‘nauseating London simper.’
We learn from such experiences to be very tolerant about other people’s pronunciation; and that tolerance greatly facilitates the task of practical teaching. If one is trying, for instance, to teach the sort of English I am now using to a class of Cockney schoolboys, and if one is intolerant about their speech and tells them that their way is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or ‘ugly,’ it simply antagonizes them. They do not like being told that the kind of English they have always used and which is used by their parents, their brothers and sisters and friends, is ‘bad.’ But if the teacher takes up a more tolerant attitude and explains that they have a language which serves its purpose well for home use, but that there exist many other ways of talking; that some of these ways are only understood well in restricted areas, say London, or South Lancashire, or the neighbourhood of Dundee, while others are readily understood over much wider areas – some, in fact, over the whole of the English-speaking world; that it often comes in very usefully if a man can talk a kind of English which is easily understood everywhere, and that is why a special kind of English is taught in school; then the teacher can get the boys on his side, and they become willing to learn the school pronunciation instead of thinking it silly and affected.
As to details of the methods of applying phonetics in the teaching of speech, I could, of course, give many examples to show what can be done, but it is hardly necessary to do so here, since most if not all of [us] are familiar with modern methods of teaching pronunciation. But I should like to emphasize one thing, namely, that phonetic methods deal not only with the articulations of consonants but also with the more difficult problem of the utterance of vowels. It is a relatively easy thing to teach a child to say butter when his home pronunciation is to use what we call the ‘glottal stop’ instead of the t, or to say getting when his home pronunciation is gettin; and it is generally not difficult (provided you can induce the pupil to co-operate willingly) to cure lisping and other individual mispronunciations of consonants. But it is a good deal more difficult, though none the less feasible, to teach the so-called ‘cultured’ pronunciation of face, tea, and two to pupils accustomed to say [fais], [thəi], [thəu]. Such things are mainly a matter of directing the pupils to put their tongues and lips into certain positions, and helping them by suitable dictation exercises to discriminate by ear between different shades of sound-quality.
Any pronunciation can be combined with either good or bad voice-production.
Much of what is sometimes called ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ in speech is merely convention. The beauty or ugliness applies to certain environments, and we are apt to attribute beauty or ugliness to sounds which remind us of those environments.
A study of phonetics often reveals that we ourselves use pronunciations which at first sight we might be tempted to condemn. We thus learn to become very tolerant of other people’s pronunciation; this tolerance on the part of a teacher of speech makes him more efficient.