Another trait of speech remarked upon by British orthoepists has a bearing upon the present question. The London Spectator, in a generous review of a book recently published, takes it somewhat to heart that in that book a peer is represented as dropping his g's in participles ending in ng, and a young guardsman as doing the same, and also as being incapable of the letter r, for which he uses w.1 What would have been the anguish of this kindly critic if both peer and guardsman (with whom the readers of The Atlantic are not unacquainted) had been represented as dropping the h in every word beginning with wh, and saying w'at and w'en for what and when, etc. Yet this might have been done with perfect truthfulness; and that the writer of that book did not so represent them must have been from a touch of kindly weakness which led him to treat his subjects tenderly, or perhaps from a feeling that it would be pleasanter and more grateful not to overload the speech of his personages with signs of deviation

house (but a sure house), an husband (but a bloody husband), an hypocrite."

It is worth while to add that in The Witch of Edmonton, by Ford and Dekker (which I happened to be reading with quite another than our present purpose, when I was writing this article), we have "an honest man," as we might expect ; but we also have "an hard case, an husband, an homely man, an hair's breadth, an high morris, an hundred." It would be unreasonable to believe that an, used in the first instance because the following h was silent, was used in the other cases before an h aspirated. And so as to the examples cited from the Bible.

1 This difficulty with r, and the use of w instead, is far from being general in England, but pertains almost exclusively to the upper classes, and among them is found very rarely in women. I remember but one instance. Among men of this class it is not uncommon. See the following illustrations from two social sketches by Du Maurier and Charles Keene in Punch.

A young swell is talking with an elder swell who is in the army:

"Swell Jun. (in a sketchy manner). Ah! 've been staying at Woolwich lately. D'lightful s'ciety there. Knew most o' th' officers. Jolly fellows. Ah, d' you?'

"Swell Sen. (stwangear to the other fellaw). "Bject to gawison town m'self; have to meet so many second-wate men.'"

from the accepted standard of pronunciation in England.

For that the majority, the vast majority, of the people of England do thus mutilate the initial wh, and say w'at, w'ich, w'en, etc., for what, which, when, etc., is as true as that, notwithstanding these and other common deviations from their own standard, their speech is on the whole far pleasanter to the ear than that of the "average American," with his generally stricter conformity to the normal standard of English pronunciation. At least seventy per cent. of the people of England, including a large proportion of "the best speakers," who would as soon be caught standing on their heads as dropping their initial h's, do drop the h in almost all words beginning with the combination wh. Let any British reader of The Atlantic who is tempted to indignant protest against this assertion pause a moment before declaring that he "denies the allegation and scorns the allegator." For there is evidence, British testimony, that a hun

The second is "at Mrs. Lyon Chacer's small and early." A belle and two cavaliers are looking at a knot of woman's-rights advocates:

"Fair Enthusiast. Look! look! There stands Miss Gander Bellwether, the famous champion of woman's rights, the future founder of a new philosophy! Isn't it a pretty sight to see the rising young geniuses of the day all flocking to her side, and hanging on her lips, and feasting on the sad and earnest utterances wrung from her indignant heart by the wrongs of her wretched sex? Oh, is n't she divine, Captain Dandelion?'

"Captain Dandelion (of the 17th Waltzers). 'Haw! 'fair of taste, you know. Wather pwefer she-women myself; wather pwefer the wetched sex with all its wongs. Haw!'

"Mr. Millefleurs (of the Ess. Bouquet Club). 'Haw! Wather a gwubby, scwubby lot, the wising young geniuses. Haw, aw !'"

To assume that this vewy stwange style of speaking is wholly confined to dawdlers of the Dandelion, Millefleurs, and Dundreary type, or is a passing trait of recent origin, would be erroneous. The author of Random Recollections of the House of Commons recorded nearly fifty years ago (1836) the prevalence of this r difficulty among members of that body. Writing of Mr. Gisborne, he says, "He is not a fine speaker. He is one of the many members in the house who labor under a defect in their organs of speech when attempting to pronounce the letter r." (Page 274.)

dred years ago this pronunciation was regarded as the normal pronunciation, and that it has continued to this day.

Perry, a British orthoepist of repute, published in 1788 his Royal Standard English Dictionary, in which he gives with care and noteworthy minuteness the pronunciation regarded by him as "standard." In thoroughness and systematic treatment of the principles of orthoepy if it has any principles - he is not to be compared with his immediate successor, Walker; but as a recorder of the best usage of his time his evidence is not to be lightly gainsaid. Now Perry gives as the normal standard pronunciation of all, or almost all, words beginning with the combination wh that which sinks the h into silence: for instance, instead of whale wale, wharf warf, what wat, wheel weel, when wen, where were, whiff wiff, while wile, whip wip, whistle, wistle, whist wist, etc. I find, on examination of the Royal Standard English Dictionary, that the number of wh words which those who consult it are instructed to pronounce without the h is just one hundred, although Perry's vocabulary is small when compared with the vocabularies of such lexicographers as his contemporaries Sheridan and Walker. Nor would it be safe to reply that his dictionary represents an old and exploded fashion; for about 18652 was published The Universal Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language in five volumes, large octavo, edited by the well-known Thomas Wright, M. A., F. S. A., etc., and in that the same pronunciation of these words is given as correct.

Upon this point we have also the testimony of Walker, who sets forth as follows the "third fault of the Londoners:" "The aspirate h is often sunk, particularly in the capital, where we do not find the least distinction of sound between while and wile, whet and wet,

1 This is the date of my copy. The first edition may have been published a few years earlier. Here Lowndes gives no help. NO. 327.

VOL. LV.

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where and were," etc. Here it is to be remarked that this suppression, like the sinking of the initial h, is passed over both in Mr. Bell's report of the parish clerk's speech and in the Morning Herald's police reports, in which all other deviations from our present standard of language are set forth to ridicule with such gusto, particularly the sounding v for w and w for v. True, we have vot for what, but there the point is the v and w one; and, moreover, to say what, or rather hvat, is almost impossible. Walker is again in error in supposing that this v and w trouble is or was peculiar to London, and the same is true as to the suppression of the h in the initial wh. There is ample evidence (of which I must here ask my readers to accept my assurance) that both were widely distributed over England. Indeed, writers on provincial dialect have claimed them as provincialisms! - being led to do so by a tendency, prevalent among men who give themselves up to a special subject of study, not only to exaggerate its importance and to magnify their office, but to gather subjects with more greed than discrimination, and to look at all things from one point of view.

The suppression of h in the initial whi is recognized also, and briefly remarked upon, by a distinguished philologist, Mr. Henry Sweet, who is a member of the council of the Philological and Early English Text societies, and was president of the British Philological Society. In his History of English Sounds he refers twice, but very briefly, as I have said, to the suppression and confusion of h; considering it, as the subject of his book naturally led him to do, merely as an incident of the phonetic history of language. Under the head of Notes on the Consonants, in his section on the Latest Modern Period of our language, he says of the Scandinavian sounds in

2 The book is published without date; a literary crime not uncommon with publishers of dictionaries, maps, and gazetteers.

dicated by the combinations rh, lh, wh, and uh that they are "nothing else but the breath sounds corresponding to r, l, w, and u respectively," and that "modern English preserves one of them in the simplified form of wh;" adding, at the close of some remarks which are not here important to me nor to the readers of The Atlantic, "The change from hl tol is not, therefore, to be explained as the result of apocope of the initial h, but rather as the leveling of the voiceless lh under the voiced 1,. a change which is at the present moment being carried out with the only remaining sound of this group, the wh." (Page 75.) That is, the suppression of h in wh (as wen for when), which at the present moment is being carried out, is to be regarded as a leveling of the voiceless wh under the voiced w. And in his remarks on Transposition, in the section General Alphabetics, he says, "There seem also to be cases of transposition in different words or whole classes of words, such as the confusion between 'air hair and hair air, which seems to be often made in the London dialect." (Page 14.)

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being a change which "is at the present moment being carried out," it is, on the contrary, beginning slowly to pass away. For general (not universal) as it is in England, it is less prevalent than it was a century ago, when, as we have seen, an orthoepist like Perry gave it as the normal pronunciation of one hundred words beginning with wh!

The truth upon this subject seems to be that while the full wh, or rather hw, sound is rightly insisted upon as normal, and is conformed to by a small proportion of the best speakers in England, the weight of general usage even among such speakers was, and even yet is, so largely on the side of the suppression or sinking of the h that orthoepists and lexicographers, who content themselves with recording what is, and do not give themselves to insisting upon what ought to be (to which Walker had a tendency), declare in favor of w'at and w'ich, instead of what and which, and so forth.

As to the dropping of g in the ng of the final unaccented syllable of participles (bein', seein', doin', amusin', and buyin', for being, seeing, doing, amusing, and buying), the exhibition of which by a peer has disturbed the London Spectator and other British critics, it was asserted even by Walker to be the polite, and indeed the universal, pronunciation of such words. Rebutting assertions to the contrary by some writers upon language, he says,

"We are told, even by teachers of English, that ing, in the words singing, bringing, and swinging, must be pronounced with the ringing sound which is heard when the accent is on those letters, in king, sing, and wing, and not as if written without the g, as singin, bringin, swingin. No one a greater advocate than I am for the strictest adherence to orthography, as long as the public pronunciation pays the least attention to it; but when I find letters given up by the public, with respect to sound, I then consider them

as ciphers; and, if my observation does not greatly fail me, I can assert that our best speakers do not invariably pronounce the participial ing so as to rhyme with sing, king, and ring. Indeed, a very obvious exception seems to offer itself in those verbs that end in these letters, as a repetition of the ringing sound would have a very bad effect on the ear; and therefore, instead of singing, bringing, and flinging, our best speakers are heard to pronounce sing in, bringin, and flingin." (Dictionary, p. 52, ed. 1807.)

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au

This, then, according to the testimony of the best English orthoepist of his time, and the one the most nearly thoritative" that has ever written, was the pronunciation of " the best speakers" in England eighty years ago, the propronunciation of the fathers of the mature men among the best speakers in the England of to-day. Is it not natural, is it not to be expected, that a very large proportion of those best speakers of today should retain the pronunciation which they heard at home in their childhood? In fact, they do retain it. Seven in ten of the superior and best bred speakers in England say singin' and bringin' and flingin' to-day, just as their highbred fathers and grandfathers did in 1807.1 It is more common with them than it is with speakers of the class just below them: the reason of which, I think, is that they, the former, depend more upon tradition and association in the formation of their haoits of speech; while the latter, conscious of defect and desirous of improvement, in their endeavor after correctness study more, depend more upon books, upon dictionaries and grammars, and thus conform more strictly and consciously to the proclaimed standard of orthoepy.

1 And as I have heretofore pointed out, Mr. Punch (good authority on such subjects) represents dukes and duchesses and "swells" as saying goin', puddin', and huntin'.

Only this last summer I had the pleasure of meeting one of them several times in New York,

As to the suppression of r in the first syllable of words like pardon, which, in the speech of an Englishman of high social position, has provoked a wondering and dissenting comment like that elicited by the suppression of g in ing of participles, Mr. Sweet recognizes this absolutely. In his Full Word Lists (in which, by the way, he concerns himself only with purely English words, in distinction from those of Latin, French, and Italian derivation), he records the disappearance of r in the modern pronunciation of harvest, darling, and morning. He is right, according to my observation. Those words are generally pronounced in England, and quite commonly in the United States, hahvest, dahling, mawning. If his scheme had included all the words now in accepted English in which appears in a like position, I am sure that in all he would have recorded its suppression.

Alexander J. Ellis, too, eminent as a philologist, and facile princeps among British phonologists, in his great work on English Pronunciation, records the following pronunciations, taken down immediately after hearing them. By Professor Jowett, master of Baliol College, Oxford: attachin' 'imself to 'im, for attaching himself to him; describin' 'im, for describing him; lectsha and natsha, for lecture and nature; ventshahd, for ventured by Dr. Hooker, president of the British Association: eitha, for either; so neitha; undataken, for undertaken by a peer: obse'vin', for observing; brighta, for brighter; conve'sant, for conversant; directa, for director; pa'cels, for parcels ; my laud, for my lord (r, Mr. Ellis remarks distinctly absent); cha'rmen, for chairmen: by a physician: futsha, for future; 'ospital, for hospital: 2 by Professor Tyndal, and very many speakers:

and a very accomplished, charming, and admirable man he was. I had not been in his company ten minutes before he said bein', seein', amusin', and buyin'.

2 Here Mr. Ellis remarks, "This one speaker invariably omitted the aspirate in this word only,

stren'thened, for strengthened by certain professional men: boa'd, for board; rema'ks, for remarks.1

me.

What I have written in the foregoing pages, and elsewhere have in other ways set forth upon this subject, is not, as some have seemed to suppose, a criticism of the standard of speech in England. Such criticism would ill become That which is according to the recognized standard of speech in England is English. As to this point there can be no dispute. If the orthoepists of England and the best speakers of England unite in opinion and in practice upon bein' and seein' and singin' as the pronunciation of being, seeing, and singing; upon wat and wich and wip and wistle as the pronunciation of what and which and whip and whistle; upon pahdon and hahvest and dahlin' and mawnin' as the pronunciation of pardon and harvest and darling and morning; and even, I will add, upon 'ead and 'art and hair and 'air as the pronunciation of head and heart and air and hair, those are the English pronunciations of the day, and people who do not pronounce in that way do not speak good English. But I venture to say that this is not the case, and that the orthoepists of England and a considerable number of the best bred and best educated people there support, by opinion and by practice, a pronunciation in which the h's and r's and g's are enunciated.

The simple fact of the case is that in England there is, even in "the best society," a frequent and often a even to the extent of saying 'a nospital,' for an hospital, - an archaism." Perhaps so; certainly so as regards the declared standard of English orthoepy. But I could show Mr. Ellis a score and more of examples from British authors of repute, taken from books published within the last ten years, in which "an hospital" was written and is printed.

1 See the following examples, found casually as this article was in proof:

Scene: A railway station. Swell at the office window.

"Railway Clerk. 'Have you twopence, sir?'

wide variation from the recognized standard of normal speech, -a variation which in regard to pronunciation, the sounds of letters, is much greater than any that will be found in corresponding classes of speakers in the United States. The speech of a well-bred Englishman when it conforms to the recognized standard in England is perfect and admirable; but in case of a very considerable number of such speakers it does not so conform.

Why is it, then, that the presentation in fiction of persons who in this respect are representative provokes the British critic, if not to resentment, at least to denial, to scoffing, and to irony? Observant orthoepists record certain phonetic facts in England, and there is evidence and testimony in their support; yet when a concrete English gentleman of high social position is represented as speaking merely in accordance with this evidence, this testimony, this eminent professional opinion, the British critic revolts. The reasons seem plain: first, the assumption (altogether unfounded) that there is a general conformity among well-bred Englishmen to the received standard of pronunciation; next, lack of opportunities of observation; last, defective perception. Not I, but the leading phonetist in England, shall decide this point. Mr. Ellis says:

"In past times we are obliged to be content with a very rough approximation to the sounds uttered. . . . But at the present day, with the language in the air around us, surely it must be easy to determine what is said? It is not "Swell. 'Deaw, no! Nevaw had twopence in my life.'

"Railway Clerk. Then I must give you tenpence in copper, sir.'"

Young Ponsonby cuts the army, and goes to Oxford to read for the Church.

"Tutor. You are prepared to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles?'

"Ponsonby. Ah - 'th pleashah. Ah-how much?""

And a young swell clergyman reading service said,

"Heah beginneth the first chaptah," etc.