“In London and some parts of the South [of England],” said R. J. Lloyd in 1894, “the r following a vowel at the end of the word or syllable has disappeared, but there is no other part of the English-speaking world except Eastern New England where this is quite the case.”2 Lloyd might have excepted also the Tidewater South, but everywhere else in the United States, including even the Hudson Valley area, the r is usually sounded. The late C. H. Grandgent of Harvard (1862–1939) once estimated that, in the West, it appears before consonants, as in card, north, part and farm, 81 times out of 100, in the Middle States 64 times, in New England 36 times, and in the South 24 times.3 Bernard Bloch, one of the collaborators in the Linguistic Atlas of New England, has since shown that it is now conquering even New England. In the Western third of the area he has found it prevailing in more than 75% of the cases, and even within the Boston territory there are speechislands in which it is clearly sounded. The older speakers, he says, still omit it; the young ones insert it. Its eastward extension, he concludes, “reflects not merely the spread of a single feature from Southwestern New England, but a gradual victory of the chief type of American English over a specifically provincial dialect.”1 There are, to be sure, some neighborhoods in which a contrary tendency seems to be showing, but Bloch inclines to think that even there the r will finally conquer.
Archibald A. Hill has shown that the loss of r after vowels and before consonants is frequent in the English dialects,2 and has produced examples from as long ago as the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, e.g., hoss for horse (1473–88), assenycke for arsenic (1530) and cott for court (1552).3 Wyld says that it was lost earliest before s and sh.4 It is sounded in England when it is followed by a vowel, as in red, ride and rode, but it is omitted when it stands at the end of a word, as in car, fair and fur. In the latter case, however, it is commonly restored when the word following begins with a vowel, as in “The car is at the door.”5 But this restoration is not invariable, and there are situations in which many speakers seem to find it difficult to decide whether they should sound the r or not. As a result, some of them, eager to be correct, insert it where it has no place, as in “the idear is” and “vanillar ice-cream.” This confusion is promoted by the fact that many quite dissimilar words, e.g., law and lore, are pronounced precisely alike in Southern English. People so afflicted, says A. Lloyd James, “will not infrequently talk about the lore of Moses when they mean the law of Moses.”6
The best discussion of the American r that I am aware of is in a paper by John S. Kenyon.7 He describes at length the vocal mechanism whereby the various r-sounds, ranging downward from the trilled r of German, French and Scots, are produced, and distinguishes between the mere muffling of the sound and its complete extinction. In many cases, in the middle ground, he says, r is reduced to a sort of vowel. He observes, like Ring Lardner before him,1 that the literary custom of representing the vulgar pronunciation of fellow, window and their like by feller, winder, etc., is misleading, for the final syllable in most cases does not show r at all, but is simply the neutral vowel.2 Why has r survived in General American? Kenyon rejects the theory that the schoolma’am, egged on by Webster, preserved it by insisting on spelling-pronunciations, and points out very wisely that there were more of her clan in Eastern New England, where it vanished, than to the westward, where it persisted. He rather inclines to believe that the character of the immigration into the West was mainly responsible. It was largely made up of Scotsmen, of Irishmen and of Englishmen coming from regions outside the influence of London speech, and “they brought their r’s with them.” “There is much reason to think,” he concludes, “that the Western treatment of r … is parallel to the Western pronunciation of words like half, which belongs to an ‘older family’ than Eastern hahf.” Even more than the use of the flat a, the sounding of r is the chief hallmark of General American speech; indeed, Leonard Bloomfield says that this General American, or, as he calls it, “Central-Western type of American Standard English,” may be defined as “the type which preserves old r in final position and before consonants.”3 Its sound, one may admit without cavil, is very far from lovely,4 but as the late Frank H. Vizetelly was fond of pointing out, it at least makes for intelligibility.5 – and the desire to convey ideas is the chief purpose of speaking at all.1
The dropping of the final g in words ending in -ing seems to be more widespread in England than in America, and is tolerated, if not exactly recommended, by most of the English authorities on speech. Kenyon says2 that, in the United States, it “appears to be more common among the educated in the South than in the North and East.” “The spelling-pronunciation,” he goes on, “is now so general that it is in excellent usage, but it must not be hastily concluded that the pronunciation -in is necessarily a mark of ignorance or lack of cultivation. It is still commoner than most people suppose. It is a good illustration of the muddling through by which forms and usages regularly become established in standard use. Hundreds of people have religiously practised saying coming instead of comin without ever intelligently considering the facts, or whether the effort was worth while.” Krapp shows3 that -in is to be found plentifully in the early American records, and that it must have been general in the Seventeenth Century. He ascribes the prevalence of -ing to the rage for spelling-pronunciations, and notes that, among the innocent, “the analogy of words” has produced such forms as kitching and garding. Lardner noted that in the common speech the final g is commonly dropped in nothing and something, but retained in anything and everything.4 Lieut.-Col. F. G. Potts5 accounts for this on the plausible ground that “anything and everything have strong secondary accents on their last syllables, and are pronounced as if those syllables were separate words.” Americans, like Englishmen, seldom give a clear sound to the g in such words as length and strength. It becomes, at best, k, and this sound is recorded without comment by Jones in his “English Pronouncing Dictionary.” Dr. Alfred D. Schoch argues that this substitution is quite rational. “The g in these words,” he says, “is only an orthographic expedient; they really have no g in them – that is, no g sound. What they do have is a velar nasal consonant like the n in ink, which stands between two other sounds that are articulated forward in the mouth, and so stands to have its articulation shifted forward to the n-position. I don’t remember, though, that I have ever heard these words with a plain n-sound. What is more likely to occur in ordinary talk is that the ng nasal consonant may disappear and leave the nasality of the e to take its place.”1
It is as grievous to an Englishman of tone to be accused of dropping his h’s as it is to a white Southerner to be accused of using you-all in the singular. Nevertheless, both are guilty to some extent. Daniel Jones, in prescribing the usages of what he calls Received Pronunciation (RP), lists hospital with a clear h but allows both hostler and ostler, and when he comes to hotel says that “some use the form otel always; others use it occasionally, when the word is not initial.”2 All Americans believe that they sound the h invariably, but when they use an before hotel, which happens sometimes, they actually say an ’otel, for sounding h after consonants is phonologically unhandy, as the cases of on his and to kiss (or neck, or shoot) her sufficiently show. They are saved from cockneyism by the fact that, as a practical matter, they seldom use an before hotel and its allied words, despite the assumed influence on their speech habits of the King James Bible, which gives it before haven,3 hair,4 host,5 hedge,6 helmet,7 herb,8 hidden,9, high,10 hand,11 hole,12 holy,13 horn,1 horse,2 house,3 householder,4 hundred,5 hypocrite, etc.6 In late years the more popular American prints of Holy Writ have quietly substituted a for an before all these words, though in a few aberrant cases an is retained. In the only instances in which hen, hind, hot and huge appear in the text with an indefinite article the King James Version itself uses a, which is also used before horrible. Hunt never appears as a noun and hurt never with an indefinite article.
It is hard to make out whether the use of a or an influences the pronunciation in more cases than the pronunciation influences the use of the articles. So far as I know the only study of English and American practise has been one reported by Louis N. Feipel in 1929. He investigated three hundred contemporary books by authors of decent standing on both sides of the water and found that the English used an much oftener than the Americans. In the case of hallucination, for example, the score ran three to one, in that of horizon four to one, and in that of hysterical five to one. An historical was found in six English writers and four Americans, but a was likewise used by six Englishmen and four Americans, which left a sort of stalemate. An heroic was used by eight Englishmen and four Americans – including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford –, but two Americans used a heroic, which all the English avoided. No author of either country used a hour, a heir or a honest, which seems to indicate that the h is dropped in all of them in both countries. No American used an hereditary, an hermaphrodite, an hermetically, an hydraulic, an hyena, an herculean, an hypnotic, an hypocrisy or an hilarious, but a few Americans used an heraldic, an habitual and an hiatus. Such an one was used by twelve Englishmen and seven Americans, and such a one by six of the former and four of the latter.1 Mark Twain was noting these differences in 1879, when he said to an Englishman encountered on a German train:
Your educated classes say humble now, and heroic, and historic, etc., but I judge that they used to drop those h’s because your writers still keep up the fashion of putting an an before those words, instead of a. This is what Mr. Darwin might call a rudimentary sign that an was justifiable once, and useful – when your educated classes used to say umble, and eroic, and istorical.2
“In the American pronunciation,” wrote Noah Webster in 1789, “h is silent in the following: honest, honor, hour, humor, herb, heir, with their derivatives. To these the English add hospital, hostler, humble. But an imitation of these, which some industriously affect, cannot be recommended, as every omission of the aspirate serves to mutilate and weaken the language.”3 Perhaps the best present-day American practise is set forth in the Style-Book of the Atlantic Monthly, as follows:
Before words beginning with h use a with monosyllables and words accented on the first syllable: a hat, a habit, a hurricane. In such cases one bears heavily on the aspirate, so that it is equivalent to a consonant. Before polysyllables accented elsewhere than on the first syllable use an: an habitual, an historical, an heretical. In such words the h is naturally so slurred in pronunciation that its presence is scarcely apparent, and a distinct effort is required to pronounce it distinctly, as one must if a is used before it. With those words beginning with hu in which the combination is pronounced almost like yu, a should always be used, without regard to the accent: a humane, a humility.4
The leading English authority, F. Howard Collins’s “Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary,”5 ordains a before hope, horse, hospital and humble, and also before honorarium, which last is somewhat puzzling, for Thomas R. Lounsbury, in 1904, listed honor as one of “four words beginning with h in which the initial letter is not pronounced by educated men anywhere,” the others being heir, honest and hour. “This usage,” he said, “extends of course to their derivatives.”1 “Whether,” he went on,
they will continue to hold out forever against the stream of tendency which is bringing about the resumption in speech of letters once silent must be left to the prophets to announce. In this instance their predictions can be uttered with perfect safety. None of those now living will survive to witness their fulfilment or non-fulfilment. So far no one has ever advocated the pronunciation in them of the initial letter save Walter Savage Landor. He may have been led to take this course by the irritation he felt at having his own usage criticized, for when he came to the employment of the h he is reported to have frequently exhibited distinct orthoepic frailty.2
When it appears in any save the initial position h is frequently dropped, even by speakers of General American. No one, for example, sounds it in exhaust and exhort, and many also omit it in exhibit.3 The English long ago dropped it from forehead, which is forrid or forred in their speech. There was a time when they also dropped it in blockhead, hothouse, hedgehog, greenhouse, abhor and adhere.4 The compensatory insertion of h in situations where it does not belong is purely dialectical in English and does not occur in Standard Southern English. In American it is quite unknown, save only in such vulgar forms as hit for it and overhalls.1 But Americans sometimes retain the h where English usage does not sound it, especially in proper names, e.g., Northampton.2
The elision of other sounds from vulgar American speech is discussed in AL4, pp. 352–54. Such forms as bound’ry, comf’table, and prob’ly are fit matches for the English secret’ry and extr’odn’ry. The sound most often dropped is that of medial r, and the late George Hempl (1859–1921), professor of Germanic philology at Stanford University, long ago published a formidable list of examples, e.g., pa’tridge, su’prise, qua’ter, co’ner, the’mometer, pe’formance, lib’ary, yeste’dy,3 sa’sparilla, pu’sy (for pursy, usually encountered in pussy-gut), pa’lor and Feb’uary.4 Some of these are to be found also in English usage. Other sounds that are likewise dropped on occasion are those of k, as in e’cept;5 n, as in kill for kiln;6 th, as in scythe;7 l, as in a’ready and cert’n’y;8 v as in fi’ cents;9 d, as in We’nesday, kin’ness and tole; t, as in of’n,10 apos’le and Chris’mas, and s as in some of the almost innumerable deteriorated forms of yes.1 Sometimes, in careless speech, one consonant is substituted for another, as in grampa and robm (robin), or two for two, as in sebm (seven);2 sometimes a cluster of consonants is omitted, as in gra’ma; and sometimes there is elision of a combination of consonant and vowel, as in pro’bition, guv’ment and o’n’ry.3
Hilaire Belloc, in 1924, alleged that th, in American speech, was becoming d, “even in carefully pronounced words, traditional and in the mouth of a highly-educated man.”4 “The,” he went on, “has not yet become de, but it is on the way.” This change, so far as I know, has never been acknowledged by any American phonologist, but many of them have studied the parallel change of t to a kind of d that they call the voiced t, as in water, butter, battle, twenty, etc. An Englishman commonly pronounces the t in pity clearly, but in colloquial American speech the word often comes close to piddy. This voiced t, according to Kenyon,5 “occurs most commonly between vowels, sometimes between a vowel and certain of the voiced consonants when it is at the end of an accented syllable before an unaccented one (twenty), or sometimes when it is at the beginning of an unaccented one where there is some doubt which syllable the t is pronounced with (want to go).” It also occurs between two unaccented syllables, as in join us at eleven. It does not occur at “the beginning of syllables initial in the phrase, whether accented or unaccented (table, today), nor at the end of syllables final in the phrase, whether accented or unaccented (repeat, rivet), nor at the beginning of accented medial (Miltonic) or final syllables (retain).” In 1942 Dr. Victor A. Oswald, Jr., of Columbia, made an attempt to discover the extent to which this d-like sound was substituted for t in ordinary literate speech, using students of the Hazleton, Pa., Senior High School as laboratory animals. He found that in bitter, betting, plotting, and sorted the overwhelming majority of them sounded a clear t, but that in bleating, waiting, hearty, hurting and writing most of them used a consonant that sounded like d.1 An ingenious correspondent2 tells me that he hears this sound even in street: “most Americans say sdreet.”3 He also hears g for k in score and b for p in sponge. The use of s for sh before r, noted in many English dialects, seems to be common in the South. It was denounced by a Baltimore orthoepist, so long ago as 1856, as “the affected pronunciation of over-refined school-girls who cannot bring themselves to utter the homely English sound of sh when combined with an r, for fear apparently of distorting their faces,”4 but it survives below the Potomac in speakers of all ages, though it is far from universal. Sir Richard Paget believes that both s and sh, along with f and the sound of th in both, should be “thrown out of our language” and replaced by their voiced equivalents, to wit, z, zh (as in pleasure), v and the th of thy. “These unvoiced or whispered sounds,” he says, “are in every way inferior to the voiced sounds – as inferior, in fact, as whispered speech is to voiced speech. Their carrying power is one-tenth to one-twentieth of that of the voiced sounds; they are incapable of being sung or of carrying vocal inflection – they are the prime cause of all verbal misunderstanding. On the telephone they are practically inaudible.”1
The displacement of consonants by metathesis, as in prespiration, hunderd, modren, childern, calvary, neuraliga, govrenment, apurn and interduce, is not pathognomonic of vulgar American but is ancient in English and has produced a number of everyday words, e.g., third, which started out in life in the Ninth Century as thrid. Equally widespread is the intercalation of redundant vowels, though many familiar examples are probably of American origin, e.g., athaletic, reality (realty), fillum,2 Cubéan, mountainious, golluf, cruality, mayorality3 and municipial. It was apparently commoner in the earlier days than it is today. Henry Alexander, in a study of the spellings in a pamphlet by an ill-educated New England farmer, written in 1798, finds tremendious, conterary (contrary), constitutiants (constituents), docterin (doctrine), vagarant (vagrant), and cuntery (country), all of them indicative of the author’s customary speech.4 This farmer also added a g to words ending with n, and in brethering he both intruded a vowel and added a g. The addition of g to the n of unstressed syllables has been traced by Wyld5 to the Fifteenth Century. Some of his later examples are chicking, 1653; lining (linen), 1657; chapling, 1662; fashing, 1664; childering, 1692, and slouinglie (slovenly), 1549. In the American common speech such forms are still frequent, e.g., kitching, capting, leming (lemon), Sometimes a t is added, as in varmint (vermin), which is traced by Wyld to 1539 and is now reduced to dialect.1 Often the t follows an s-sound, as in the familiar wunst, twict, acrost and sinct.2 Wentworth traces grievious and bretheren to 1837, hunderd (I hear it as hundert) and childern to 1840,3 and modren to 1905. The last is undoubtedly much older. Bron-ix seems to have arisen among the Jews of that borough, and fil-lum probably comes from Hollywood. There is a story about an author who, after a year or two in the movie Zion, quit in disgust. As his train pulled out of Los Angeles he apostrophized his place of exile thus: “What a people! They know only one word of more than one syllable, and that is fil-lum.”4 Mountainious, used quite seriously, is in Harper’s Magazine for 1860,5 and Patapsico is common in Maryland. I have heard heightht many times, and lengtht, elevingtht and strengtht more than once. According to a writer in American Speech6 “intrusive n remains a recurrent phenomenon in oral and written speech,’ e.g., menance, prowness and grimance. Other familiar forms are chimbly, traced by Wentworth to 1818; conflab;7 lozenger, traced to 1850; bronichal, asthema, blasphemious, mischievious, drownded, attackted, somewheres, portry and holler.8 Such changes as those which converted licorice into likerish,9 recipe into receipt,10 jaundice into janders, picture into pitcher and larceny into larsensy have been noted in AL4.11 A lovely example of double metamorphosis is offered by savage corpse for salvage corps.12
2 Standard English, Die neuren Sprache, 1894, p. 53. I take this from Sidelights on the Pronunciation of English, by Giles Wilkeson Gray, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Nov., 1932, p. 556. Gray’s paper gives a sympathetic and excellent account of Lloyd (1846–1906), who was a lifelong resident of Liverpool, and thus stood outside the Oxford influence that shows in nearly all other English phoneticians.
3 Notes on American English, quoted by Gray, just cited.
1 Postvocalic R in New England Speech, Acts of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists; Copenhagen, 1936, pp. 195–99.
2 Early Loss of R Before Dentals, Publications of the Modern Language Association, June, 1940, pp. 308–59.
3 Just how cott was pronounced is not clear. It may have been the remote forerunner of the Southern cote, as in co’t-house.
4 A History of Modern Colloquial English; London, 1920, p. 298.
5 I take this example from Broadcast English No. II, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1930, p. 14. James does not indicate how door is here pronounced, but other British authorities clip off the final r and make it nearly identical to the doh in the Southern cracker and Negro “Shet ’at doh.”
6 Our Spoken English; London, 1938, p. 99. James also discusses this blunder in The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 107, 108 and 183. Mr. George W. Thompson calls my attention to the fact that the Southern proletariat is lavish with redundant r’s, as in holler (noun and verb), yeller or yaller, ager, marshmeller, Ednar, Emmar, etc.
7 Some Notes on American R, American Speech, March, 1926, pp. 329–39.
1 AL4, p. 425, n. 1.
2 The nature of the sound in this position is discussed in New Light on the Origin of Eastern American Pronunciation of Unaccented Final A, by James L. Clifford, American Speech, Oct., 1935, pp. 173–75. Various correspondents assure me, pace Lardner, that they have frequently heard feller. It may be a spelling-pronunciation. See Notes, by Moyle Q. Rice, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 237.
3 The Stressed Vowels of American English, Language, June, 1935, p. 97.
4 Henry James described it, in The Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905, p. 29, as resembling “a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth,” and an editorial writer for the Hartford Courant, on July 6, 1938, accused the speakers of General American of hanging on to it “with the painful tenacity of a clumsy dentist drilling out a cavity.” The Romans called r the litera canina, the dog’s letter.
5 Alas, even this is denied by a Southern correspondent, Lieut.-Col. F. G. Potts, U.S.A. (ret.), of Mt. Pleasant, S. C. Under date of Jan. 20, 1945 he writes: “American r, carefully sounded, tends to make words indistinct, especially when two or more r’s occur close together. Just have a Middle Westerner say Yorkshire terrier and see what you think of it. The rolled or trilled r’s of Scotland, Ireland and the Continent … are usually pleasant to listen to, and do not detract from clarity of utterance. But the American r is not only disagreeable in itself, but also the cause of modification in the pronunciation of nearby vowels, so that Mary, marry, merry and Murray are frequently pronounced alike, and heart becomes hurt.”
1 Interesting speculations about r are in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 217–31; The Dog’s Letter, by C. H. Grandgent, in Old and New, Cambridge (Mass.), 1920, pp. 31–56; Dropping of the R, by L. A., American Notes & Queries, Sept., 1945, p. 92, and Loss of R in English Through Dissimilation, by George Hempl, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, No. VI, 1893, pp. 279–81.
2 American Pronunciation; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. 149.
3 The English Language in America, Vol. II, pp. 13–17.
4 AL4, p. 352, n. 2.
5 Private communication, Jan. 20, 1945.
1 Private communication. Strengths, incidentally, must be a hard dose for foreigners learning English. It not only includes the difficult sound of th, but is a nine-letter word with only one vowel. But when it comes to clusters of consonants English is a relatively humane language. In his Notes on Duwamish Phonology and Morphology, International Journal of American Linguistics, Oct., 1945, p. 204, Jay Ellis Ransom says that Duwamish, one of the Indian languages of the northwest Pacific Coast, includes sxw, gwlts, gwlgw, bdtcd, sqwqw, txw, djdtcd and bdtcdz.
2 An English Pronouncing Dictionary, p. 211.
3 Genesis IL, 13; Acts XXVII, 12.
4 I Kings I, 52.
5 II Chronicles XIV, 9; do., XXVI, 11; Psalms XXVII, 3; do., XXIII, 16; Ezekiel I, 24; Daniel VIII, 12.
6 Job I, 10; Proverbs XV, 19. But in Ecclesiastes X, 8 and Mark XII, 1 a is used before hedge.
7 Isaiah LIX, 17; I Thessalonians V, 8. But in I Samuel XVII, 5 a is used.
8 Isaiah LXVI, 14.
9 Job III, 16; Proverbs XVIII, 11; do. XXI, 4; Isaiah XXX, 13; John XIX, 31; Acts XIII, 17.
10 Psalms CI, 5; Exodus XIV, 8; Numbers XXXIII, 3; do. XV, 30.
11 Ezekiel II, 9; do. VIII, 3; Daniel X, 10. But a is in Exodus XIX, 13.
12 Exodus XXVIII, 32; do. XXIX, 23. But a is in Jeremiah XIII, 4, Ezekiel VIII, 7; II Kings XII, 9.
13 II Kings IV, 9; Ezekiel XLV, 1; Acts X, 22; I Peter II, 5; Romans XVI, 16; I Corinthians XVI, 20; II Corinthians, XIII, 12; I Thessalonians V, 26; II Timothy I, 9. But a is used in Exodus XIX, 6; Isaiah XXX, 29; Romans XII, 1.
1 Luke I, 69.
2 Psalms XXXIII, 17. An horseman is in II Kings IX, 17. But a horse is in I Kings X, 29 and Isaiah LXIII, 13.
3 Exodus XII, 30; Judges XVII, 5; I Kings II, 24; do. XI, 18; do. XII, 31; Psalms LXXXIV, 3; Proverbs XVII, 1; do. XXIV, 3; Matthew X, 12. But a is in Job XX, 19 and Psalms XXXI, 2.
4 Matthew XII, 52.
5 An hundred occurs in the King James Bible more than seventy times.
6 Job XIII, 16; Proverbs XI, 9; Isaiah IX, 17.
1 A and An Before H and Certain Vowels, American Speech, Aug., 1929, pp. 442–54. See also Is It Pedantry?, by Clifford H. Bissell, Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 13, 1927; A or An?, by J. T. Hillhouse, Modern Language Notes, Feb., 1928, pp. 98–101; A and An Before H, by Steven T. Byington, American Speech, Oct., 1929, pp. 82–85, and Initial Long U, by Edwin B. Davis, the same, April, 1944, pp. 152–53.
2 Concerning the American Language, “part of a chapter crowded out of A Tramp Abroad” (1880); in A Stolen White Elephant; New York, 1882, pp. 265–69.
3 Dissertations, p. 122.
4 Text, Type and Style: A Compendium of Atlantic Usage, by George B. Ives; Boston, 1921, p. 269.
5 Seventh edition; London, 1933, p. 1.
1 The Standard of Pronunciation in English; New York, 1904, p. 195. Strictly speaking, honorarium is not a derivative of honor, for the former came into English direct from the Latin, whereas the latter came from the Anglo-French onour. But onour was itself of Latin origin, and honorarium is always associated with honor in the minds of those who use it.
2 In Talks With Ralph Waldo Emerson; New York, 1890, p. 51, Charles J. Woodberry reports that Emerson said to him of Landor: “He does not aspirate; drops his h’s like a cockney. I cannot understand it.” Thomas Adolphus Trollope said of him in What I Remember; New York, 1888, p. 440: “He was, I think, the only man in his position in life whom I ever heard do so. That a man who was not only by birth a gentleman, but was by genius and culture – and such culture! – very much more, should do this seemed to me an incomprehensible thing. I do not think he ever introduced the aspirate where it was not needed, but he habitually spoke of ’and, ’ead and ’ouse.”
3 I do not pause over the not infrequent pedantic complaint that many Americans drop it in which, where, when, etc. As a matter of fact, sounding it there is almost beyond human power; to get it in it must be transferred to the first place in these words, so that which becomes hwich. That is where it was a thousand years ago. But it is not there today, and the effort to pronounce it is a mere affectation. See Phonetic Illusions, by Harold E. Palmer, John o’London’s Weekly, Dec. 23, 1938.
4 The Sounds of Standard English, by T. Nicklin; Oxford, 1920, pp. 78 and 79.
1 Wyld says that hit was in general use in England in the Sixteenth Century. I seize the chance to fill a small nook with a sentence from a London letter in the Penang Gazette, June 10, 1938: “An Hollywood seeress who is now in England has cast Mr. Chamberlain’s horoscope.” Obviously, this connotes the pronunciation of Hollywood as Ollywood.
2 I am indebted here to Mr. Alexander Kadison. In Nov., 1946, the Rev. F. H. J. Newton, vicar of Blackheath, South England, advocated in his parish magazine that h be dropped from the alphabet. He argued that the Cockney version of “Has Herbert had his haircut?,” to wit, “Azerbert addiz aircut?,” “comes out almost as one word – and how beautiful it is, because it is effortless and not self-conscious.”
3 Perhaps oftener yistidy. Yistidy was approved in the late Eighteenth Century by Sheridan, Kenrick and Nares, but Walker was against it.
4 Loss of R in English Through Dissimilation, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, No. VI, 1893, pp. 279–81.
5 Two Observations on Current Colloquial Speech, by A. R. Dunlap, American Speech, Dec., 1939, p. 290.
6 Kiln or Kill, by Joseph Jones, American Speech, Oct., 1931, pp. 73 and 74.
7 Bender recommends syth in the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, but Louise Pound reports (Some Folk-Locutions, American Speech, Dec., 1942, p. 247) that sy “is in rather common usage,” and “seems to have fairly wide currency” from South Dakota to Maine. In Maryland, in the 80s, I never heard anything else.
8 Wyld shows in A History of Modern Colloquial English, p. 175, that the English formerly omitted the l from almost, almanac, falter and various other words. It is still absent from almond.
9 I am indebted here to Miss Jane D. Shenton, of Temple University.
10 Bender recommends awf’n. So does Jones for England, but he lists often as an admissible variant. Miss Ward presents evidence, in The Phonetics of English, p. 27, that the t was omitted in England in 1701, but the frequent newspaper discussions of the pronunciation indicate that there is now a tendency to restore it. It long ago disappeared from listen and castle.
1 Popular Variants of Yes, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Dec., 1926, p. 132. This study was published before the great success of oh yeah. The vowel here, of course, is not that of lay, but a lengthened form of the e of yes itself. I am indebted for this to Mr. Edgar W. Smith, of Maplewood, N. J. See also Yes and Its Variants, by Albert H. Marckwardt, Words, Feb., 1936, pp. 7 and 18.
2 Some Recurrent Assimilations, by Louise Pound, American Speech, June, 1931, pp. 347–48. When ph appears for f it is often changed to p, as in dip’theria, nap’tha, amp’theater and dip’thong. See AL4, pp. 352 and 407.
3 The DAE gives onery and ornery, tracing the former to 1860 and the latter to 1830. It derives both from ordinary. I can only say that in the Baltimore of my youth o’n’ry was the only form in general use, and that it was understood to signify, not ordinary, but vicious. Mr. L. Clark Keating tells me that onery is heard in Minnesota.
4 The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 225.
5 American Pronunciation, ninth edition; Ann Arbor (Mich.), 1945, p. 232.
1 Voiced T – a Misnomer, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 18–25. Oswald objected to calling this sound a voiced t. “From the point of view of phonemics,” he said, “it is a combinatory variant of both t and d.” See also Kenyon, before cited, pp. 232–33; Notes on Voiced T in American English, by Einar Haugen, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Parts XVI and XVII, 1938, pp. 627–34; Language, by Leonard Bloomfield; New York, 1933, pp. 81 and 100.
2 Mr. Dooley Toepel, of Detroit; private communication, Sept. 2, 1940.
3 The contrary substitution of t for d, as in holt for hold, has been long noted, but is not frequent.
4 Punctuation and Improprieties of Speech; Baltimore, 1856, p. 68. I take this from Pronunciation of Shrimp, Shrub and Similar Words, by George H. Reese, American Speech, Dec., 1941, pp. 251–55, in which the occurrence of s in English dialects is reviewed. Reese says it became dominant in Standard English in the late Seventeenth or early Eighteenth Century, but was subsequently replaced by sh, “probably under the influence of spelling.”
1 The Nature and Origin of Human Speech, S.P.E. Tract No. XXII; Oxford, 1925, p. 32. Lieut. Col. F. G. Potts, of Mt. Pleasant, S. C., tells me that he believes that these sounds are more often voiced in the South than in the North. He cites explosive, exclusive, Japanese and rinse as examples. Bender ordains the unvoiced s in all of these save Japanese. Spellings, says Col. Potts, are sometimes misleading, and he reports hearing Stee-fen for Stephen instead of Stee-ven. Occasionally, he adds, one is taken aback by hearing a voiced consonant where it is not expected, as in diagnoze for diagnose. My mother (1858–1925), born and brought up in Baltimore, showed a liking for the voiced sounds, as in zinc for sink and azzembly for assembly, maybe due to Southern influence.
2 Mrs. Pieter Juiliter, of Scotia, N. Y., says (private communication): “The correct modern Dutch pronunciation of Delft, elf, etc., has this same swarabhati vowel: Deluft, eluf, etc.”
3 Headline in the Congressional Record, May 2, 1939, first page of House section: “The Chicago Mayorality Election.” The frequent use of the term in Ottawa was noted in That Fourth Syllable, Ottawa Evening Journal, Dec. 13, 1939.
4 The farmer was William Manning and his pamphlet was The Key of Liberty. Alexander’s investigation is reported in A Sidelight on Eighteenth Century American English, Queen’s Quarterly (Kingston, Ont.), Nov., 1923, pp. 173 ff.
5 p. 290.
1 Wentworth offers examples from all parts of the country, ranging in date from 1837 to 1943.
2 In Middle English once was ones, i.e., one in the genitive. It and the allied words were corrupted in the early Modern period by the influence of against, etc.
3 Hunderd was listed as acceptable in John Jones’s Practical Phonography, 1701.
4 In a paper in Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part V, 1922, pp. 133–38, Intentional Mispronunciations in the Central West, Louise Pound called attention to the fact that fillum, ellum and their congeners are often used by persons “wishing to contribute to the entertainment of others.”
5 Dec., p. 132.
6 Dec., 1940, p. 360.
7 The Reconteur, Montreal Gazettte, Jan. 19, 1924.
8 The Hon. Sam C. Massingale of Oklahoma in the Congressional Record, Aug. 5, 1939: “Will Rogers came across the American scene with … a hoot and a holler.”
9 Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part II, 1890, p. 74.
10 Receipt-Recipe: A Request for Information, by Wendell R. Fogg, American Speech, Feb., 1931, pp. 218–19.
11 p. 353.
12 There are many books on pronunciation, but most of them are of small value. Those of more dignity are listed in Kennedy; pp. 267–81, 429, 447 and 466; The Phonetics of English, by Ida C. Ward; Cambridge (England), 1929, pp. 169–70; An English Pronouncing Dictionary, by Daniel Jones, London, 1937, pp. xxvii and xxviii; and The Broadcast Word, by A. Lloyd James; London, 1935, pp. 201 and 202. Others are referred to in the text, hitherto and hereafter.