Authors: Bill Bryson
It is probable, though less certain, that words such as
herd,
birth, hurt,
and
worse,
which all today carry an identical "er"
sound—which, entirely incidentally, is a sound that appears to be unique to English—had slightly different pronunciations up to Shakespeare's day and perhaps beyond. All of these pronunciation changes have continued up until fairly recent times. As late as the fourth decade of the eighteenth century Alexander Pope was rhym-ing
obey
with
tea, ear
with repair,
give
with
believe, join
with
devine,
and many others that jar against modern ears. The poet William Cowper, who died in i800, was still able to rhyme
way
with
sea. July
was widely pronounced "Julie" until about the same time.
Gold was
pronounced "gould" until well into the nineteenth century (hence the family name) and
merchant
was still often
it
marchant" long after Webster's death.
Sometimes changes in pronunciation are rather more subtle and mysterious. Consider, for example, changes in the stress on many of those words that can function as either nouns or verbs—words
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like
defect, reject, disguise,
and so on. Until about the time of Shakespeare all such words were stressed on the second syllable.
But then three exceptions arose—outlaw,
rebel,
and
record—in
which the stress moved to the first syllable when they were used as nouns (e.g., we re bel' against a rebel; we re ject' a re'ject). As time went on, according to Aitchison
[Language Change,
page 96], the number of words of this type was doubling every hundred years or so, going from 35 in 1700 to 70 in i800 and to 150 by this century, spreading to include such words
as object, subject, con-
vict,
and
addict.
Yet there are still a thousand words which remain unaffected by this 400-year trend, among them
disdain, display,
mistake, hollow, bother,
and
practice.
Why should this be? No one can say.
What is certain is that just
as
English spellings often tell us something about the history of our words, so do some of our pro-nunciations, at least where French terms are concerned. Words adopted from France before the seventeenth century have almost invariably been anglicized, while those coming into the language later usually retain a hint of Frenchness. Thus older
ch-
words have developed a distinct "tch" sound as in
change, charge,
and
chim-
ney,
while the newer words retain the softer "sh" sound of
cham-
pagne, chevron, chivalry,
and
chaperone. Chef
was borrowed twice into English, originally as
chief
with a hard
ch
and later as
chef
with a soft
ch.
A similar tendency is seen in
-age,
the older forms of which have been thoroughly anglicized into an "idge"
sound
(bandage, cabbage, language)
while the newer imports keep a Gallic "ozh" flavor
(badinage, camouflage).
There has equally been a clear tendency to move the stress to the first syllable of older adopted words, as with
mutton, button,
and baron, but not with newer words such as
balloon
and
cartoon.
Presumably be-cause of their proximity to France (or, just as probably, because of their long disdain for things French) the British have a somewhat greater tendency to disguise French pronunciations, pronouncing
garage as
"garridge,"
fillet as
"fill-ut," and putting a clear first-syllable stress on
café, buffet, ballet,
and pâté. (Some Britons go so far as to say "bully" and "bally.") Spelling and pronunciation in English are very much like trains
PRONUNCIATION
on parallel tracks, one sometimes racing ahead of the other before being caught up. An arresting example of this can be seen in the slow evolution of verb forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that turned
hath
into
has
and
doth
into
does.
Originally
-th
verbs were pronounced as spelled. But for a generation or two during the period from (roughly) 1600 to 1650 they became pro-nounced as if spelled in the modern way, even when the spelling was unaltered. So, for example, when Oliver Cromwell saw
hath
or
chooseth,
he almost certainly read them as "has" or "chooses"
despite their spellings. Only later did the spellings catch up. [Cited by Jespersen, page 213]
Often, however, the process has worked the other way around, with pronunciation following spelling. We will see how the changes of spelling in words like
descrivel describe
and
parfet/perfect
re-sulted in changes in pronunciation, but many other words have been similarly influenced.
Atone
was once pronounced "at one"
(the term from which it sprang), while
atonement
was "at one-ment." Many people today pronounce the
t
in
often
because it's there (even though they would never think to do it with
soften,
fasten,
or
hasten)
and I suspect that a majority of people would be surprised to learn that the correct (or at least historic) pronuncia-tion of
waistcoat
is "wess-kit," of
victuals
is "vittles, "
of forehead
is
"Torrid," and of
comptroller
is "controller" (the one is simply a fancified spelling of the other). In all of these the sway of spelling is gradually proving irresistible.
Quite a few of these spelling-induced pronunciation changes are surprisingly recent. At the time of the American Revolution,
hus-
band
was pronounced "husban,"
soldier
was "sojur," and
pavement
was "payment," according to Burchfield [page 4 1]. Until well into the nineteenth century,
zebra
was pronounced "zebber,"
chemist
was "kimmist," and
Negro,
despite its spelling, was "negger"
(hence the insulting term
nigger).
Burchfield goes on to point out that until the nineteenth century
swore
was spoken with a silent
w
(as
sword
still is) as were
Edward
and
upward,
giving "Ed'ard" and
"up'ard."
Much of this would seem to fly in the face—indeed,
does
fly in the face—of what we were saying earlier, namely that pronuncia-
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tions tend to become slurred over time. Although that is generally true, there are constant exceptions. Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. People say things sometimes because they are easier or more sensible, but sometimes simply because that's the way everyone else is saying them.
Bounteous,
for instance, was in Noah Webster's day pro-nounced "bountchus"-a clear case of evolutionary slurring—but for some reason purists took exception to it and
bountchus
quickly became a mark of ignorance. It is for the same reason precisely that in modern England it is considered more refined to pronounce
ate
as "et."
But without doubt the most remarkable example of pronuncia-tion change arising purely as a whim of fashion was the sudden tendency in eighteenth-century upper-class southern England to pronounce words like
dance, bath,
and
castle
with a broad
a,
as if they were spelled
dahnce, bahth,
and
cahstle.
In the normal course of things, we might have expected the pronunciations to drift back.
But for some reason they stuck (at least they have so far), helping to underscore the social, cultural, and orthoepic differences be-tween not only Britons and Americans but even between Britons and Britons. The change was so consequential and far-reaching that it is not so much a matter of pronunciation as of dialect. And that rather neatly takes us to the topic of our next chapter.
7.
V RUMMIES OF ENGLISH
WHETHER YOU CALL A LONG CYLINDRI-cal sandwich a hero, a submarine, a hoagy, a torpedo, a garibaldi, a poor boy, or any of at least half a dozen other names tells us something about where you come from. Whether you call it cottage cheese, Dutch cheese, pot cheese, smearcase, clabber cheese, or curd cheese tells us something more. If you call the playground toy in which a long plank balances on a fulcrum a dandle you almost certainly come from Rhode Island. If you call a soft drink tonic, you come from Boston. If you call a small naturally occurring object a stone rather than a rock you mark yourself as a New Englander. If you have a catch rather than play catch or stand on line rather than in line clearly you are a New Yorker. Whether you call it pop or soda, bucket or pail, baby carriage or baby buggy, scat or gesund-heit, the beach or the shore—all these and countless others tell us a little something about where you come from. Taken together they add up to what grammarians call your
idiolect,
the linguistic quirks and conventions that distinguish one group of language us-ers from another.
A paradox of accents is that in England where people from a common heritage have been living together in a small area for thousands of years, there is still a huge variety of accents, whereas in America, where people from a great mix of backgrounds have been living together in a vast area for a relatively short period, people speak with just a few voices. As Simeon Potter puts it: "It would be no exaggeration to say that greater differences in pro-nunciation are discernible in the north of England between Trent and Tweed [a distance of about 100 miles] than in the whole of
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North America."
[ Our Language,
page 168] Surely we should ex-pect it to be the other way around. In England, the prolonged proximity of people ought to militate against differences in accent, while in America the relative isolation of many people ought to encourage regional accents. And yet people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical voices. Accord-ing to some estimates almost two thirds of the American popula-tion, living on some 8o percent of the land area, speak with the same accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.
Some authorities have suggested that once there was much greater diversity in American speech than now. As evidence, they point out that in
Huckleberry Finn,
Mark Twain needed seven separate dialects to reflect the speech of various characters, even though they all came from much the same area. Clearly that would not be necessary, or even possible, today. On the other hand, it may be that thousands of regional accents exist out there and that we're simply not as alert to them as we might be.
The study of dialects is a relatively recent thing. The American Dialect Society was founded as long ago as 1889, and the topic has been discussed by authorities throughout this century. Even so, systematic scientific investigation did not begin until well into this century. Much of the most important initial work was done by Professor Hans Kurath of the University of Michigan, who pro-duced the seminal A
Word Geography of the Eastern United States
in
1949. Kurath carefully studied the minute variations in speech to be found along the eastern seaboard—differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and the like—and drew lines called isoglosses that divided the country into four main speech groups: Northern, Mid-land, Southern, and New England. Later work by others enabled these lines to be extended as far west as Texas and the prairie states. Most authorities since then have accepted these four broad divisions.
If you followed Kurath's isoglosses carefully enough, you could go to a field in, say, northern Iowa and stand with one foot in the Northern dialect region and the other foot in the Midland region.
But if you expected to find that people on one side of the line spoke a variety of American English distinctively different from people on
100
VARIETIES OF ENGLISH
the other side, you would be disappointed. It is not as simple as that. Isoglosses are notional conveniences for the benefit of geo-graphical linguists. There is no place where one speech region begins and another ends. You could
as
easily move the line in that Iowa field
200
yards to the north or 14 miles or perhaps even loo miles and be no less accurate. It is true that people on the North-ern side of the line
tend
to have characteristics of speech that distinguish them from people on the Midland side, but that's about
as far as
you can take it. Even within a single region speech pat-terns blur and blur again into an infinitude of tiny variations. A person in Joliet sounds quite different from a person in Texarkana, yet they are both said to live in the Midland speech area. Partly to get around this problem, Midland is now usually subdivided into North Midland and South Midland, but we are still dealing with huge generalities.
So only in the very baldest sense can we divide American speech into distinct speech areas. Nonetheless these speech areas do have certain broad characteristics that set them apart from one another.
People from the Northern states call it frosting. To southerners it's icing. Northerners say "greesy." Others say "greezy." In the East groceries are put in a bag, in the South in a poke, and everywhere else in a sack—except in one small part of Oregon where they rather mysteriously also say poke. Northerners tend to prefer the
"oo" sound to the "ew" sound in words like
duty, Tuesday,
and
newspaper,
saying "dooty" instead of "dewty" and so on. The Northern and Northern Midland accents are further distinguished by a more clipped pattern, as evidenced by a pronounced tendency to drop words at the beginning of sentences, as in "This your house?" and "You coming?" People from the same area have less ability to distinguish between rounded vowel sounds like -6- and