ABSTRACT
The Saturday Review finds our "twang" sometimes unpleasant, and n'O American with any sort of ear for fine sounds will disagree with him. Very unpleasant it certainly 'Often is, as one hears it from many American mouths, especially in Europe, when contrasted with the lower"pitched, softer voices of many English people, notably those of English ladies; and teachers and parents of American children will do well to pay more attention to inculcating better intonation. But "twang," after all, is not peculiar to this side of the ocean. I am t'Old that the "jerking tone of voice popularly called the Parliamentary twang" which Bulwer Lytton noted (in "My Novel," Book 10, Chap. 44) is about as 'Observable now as it was when that book appeared. And then-a more important point-one must be careful not to draw the comparison only with the speech 'Of well-bred English people. Have our rural and laboring classes anything to learn from the management of their v'Oices by the peasantry of the three kingdoms or the poorer classes of British towns? CQuid you find material in this country for a composition like Tennyson's "Northern Farmer"? '''ho ever heard an American, 'Of h'Owever humble social
ISO U R ENG LIS' H D E G ENE RAT I N G ~ 31 position, so speak that it was difficult to distinguish his words? Where, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, will you discover any such utter disability of hearing or discernment as can permit men to drop or multiply their h's or transpose their w's and v's? Who ever heard an American gamin call paper piper, or lady lidy, or rain rine, or take tike? Outside of a very restricted district in New England (it being distinctly a Yankee pro;vincia1ism) who ever heard an American call pound as it seems to me that all Englishmen pronounce it, paound? Says the. Westminster Review, No. 234, page 278: "If an Englishman is introduced as a character in a French vaudeville, the first words he is made to say are 'Aoh, nao,' to announce as it were his nationality; this impurity in the sound of 0 is undoubtedly a vice in our pronunciation, ridiculed wherever we are known in Europe." On the whole, it appears to me that if, as I believe is the case, a nasal twang is the only fault that can be found with American intonation broadly considered, we make up for it and more than make up for it in half a dozen other respects in which we speak our words better than the majority of British people speak them. Prof. Ernest Whitney put it this way, in a very elaborate review 'Of the matter published in the New York Tribune: "In England, where we should naturally look for a standard, pronunciation in general is worse than in America. That vulgarisms are heard far oftener, that carelessness and indifference in enunciation are
34 A MER I CAN ENG LIS H is more commonly Norwich, I think, than N oridge; St. Louis and Louisville 'are often called St. Lewis and Lewisville; a resident of Delaware County in New York would not know what place was meant if you spoke of the Icounty seat as "Daily," so perfectly settled is "Delhi" as the pronunciation as well as the spelling of the name. A multitude of other instances might be mentioned, among the most remarkable of which, perhaps, is the change that has taken place in the popular sounding of the name Chautauqua. As long as it was spelled with a final e, people persisted in $aying Chautawk, notwithstanding that the local practice was always otherwise; but an immediate reformation 'Was effected 'by the simple expedient of substituting an a. It is probably quite safe to say that no mispronunciation of a geographical name, growing out of an attempt to follow too closely the sound of its letters, has ever become so prevalent in Great Britain as even to suggest the idea of making the spelling conform to the orthoepy, 'and, furthermore, that if such a difficulty occurred, the attempted remedy in question would be found in that country quite unproductive of any change in the popular usage.
