H. W. Fowler ventures the opinion5 that yu is yielding to oo in English usage. “It was formerly de rigueur,” he says, “to put in the y-sound; a flute had to be called a flyoot, or the speaker was damned in polite circles.… But for most of us [Southern English] anything but bloo [blue] and gloo [glue] is surely now impossible, however refined we like to be where the trials of articulation are less severe.” Fowler adds that loodicrous, voloominous, loobricate, saloot and diloot also prevail in England, and that oo is ousting yu from all accented syllables, e.g., in lunatic, lurid, aluminum, salute, lugubrious, lukewarm, fluent, and from monosyllables. Krapp, in “The English Language in America,” gives the history of the pronunciation of lieutenant.1 It was originally leftenant in this country, as it is in England, but Webster, with his fondness for spelling pronunciations, declared for lootenant, and lootenant it now is.2 An American police lieutenant is commonly Loot to his men, and the same abbreviation is not unknown in the Army and Navy. Sometimes the English use liftenant or litenant instead of leftenant.3
Jones says in “An English Pronouncing Dictionary”4 that route is pronounced rowt by English soldiers, but root by the rest of the population. In the United States root seems to be prevailing, helped by the analogy of routine. Webster preferred rowt, but George R. Howells reported in 18835 that “ninety Americans out of a hundred,” at that time, used root. Kenyon and Knott apparently prefer root, but also give rowt. Bender gives root without mentioning rowt. Larsen and Walker give root, and dismiss rowt as “dial.” Webster 1934 gives root, but adds that rowt “prevails in military use, among railroad men, and colloquially, of a delivery route.” Krapp says that rowt occurs only “in very colloquial English, as in speaking of a milk-route or a mailcarrier’s route.”
The intrusion of y before the broad a as in cyard and gyarden, is still thought of by most Americans as a Southernism, but it actually goes back to Eighteenth Century England, when it was described by Walker (1791) as prevailing “in polite pronunciation.” At the same time there was a fashion in London for inserting it before the diphthong of such words as kind and cow. Webster was against this intrusion, and denounced it in his “Dissertations” in 1789. In the case of ow he called it characteristic of the “barbarous dialect … of the Eastern country people,” and in the case of ai an affectation of “those polite speakers who are so fond of imitating the English stage pronunciation as to embrace every singularity, however disagreeable.”1 “It is presumed,” he added prissily, “that the bare mention of such barbarisms will be sufficient to restrain their progress, both in New England and on [sic] the British theatre.” But so late as 1853 Punch was still chiding the English actors for using gyarden and kyind.”2 After k and g the y-sound, says Krapp,3 “can still frequently be heard, both in cultivated Virginian speech and in the Negro’s naïve imitation of cultivated speech.”4 Greet, himself a Southerner, says5 that there is much variation of usage among Southerners who affect the y-sound, and that they are seldom consistent. He tells, for example, of “two gentlewomen” who used cigya (for cigar), cyahmly and cyahnt (for can’t), but nevertheless failed to insert the y in car and garden. It is not fashionable, he says, in words showing the vowels of gift, get and carry, but it occurs before the u-sound, as in gyirls for girls. To insert the y-sound before the ow of cow, he says, in “a real fauxpas.” In this he agrees with Webster, who carried on, as we have seen, a war against cyow, cyounty, tyown and their like, which were common in the New England of his time, and still survive there among the remoter country people. Webster laid down specifications for schoolmasters eager to put down this y. “In order to pronounce cow, power or gown with propriety,” he said, “the pupil should be taught, after placing the organs in the position required by the first consonant, to open his mouth wide before he begins the sound of ow. Otherwise, in passing from that position to the aperture necessary to pronounce ow, he will inevitably articulate ee, keow.”6
In the dialect speech of the Republic the diphthongs have made heavy weather of it. Either they displace other sounds, as in the thoid of the Brooklyn dialect, or they are themselves displaced by other sounds, as in hist for hoist, rile for roil, jice for joist, pisen for poison, snoot for snout, and thar for there.1 The use of the diphthong of wine in the words in oi was quite correct in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Samuel Butler’s rhymes indicate that he heard it in toil, purloin and enjoin, Dryden’s that it was then current in toil and coin, and Pope’s that it was admitted in enjoy and join. But William Kenrick, whose “New Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1773, indicated that the oi-sound was then ousting the ai-sound. He declared that it would still “appear affectation” to use the former in boil and join, but that the retention of ai in oil and toil had become “a vicious custom” tolerated only “in common conversation.”2 Some English observers detect a movement toward the diphthongization of vowels even in educated American speech. “To an Englishman,” says Oscar Browne,3 “an impression is given that many Americans have acquired habits of restricting the functions of the nasal sinuses, placing unorthodox values and pitches upon vowels, including a change of simple vowels into diphthongs.”4 On the vulgar level many other changes in vowels, e.g., jedge for judge, empire for umpire,5 ingine for engine, chaw for chew,1 and shet for shut still flourish more or less, but it is my impression that they are gradually succumbing to the schoolma’am. Whether the current plan to run every American moron through high-school will ever dispose of them altogether remains to be seen.
1 New York, 1924, p. 224.
2 Some Unrecorded Southern Vowels, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 209. See also Some Phases of American Pronunciation, by William A. Read, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1923, pp. 237 and 238, and Haf and Haef, by C. H. Grandgent, Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part VI, 1893, p. 271.
1 Trends in American Pronunciation, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Dec., 1942, pp. 452–56.
2 The Phonetic Concepts of John Walker and Daniel Jones, by Benjamin Newman, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Oct., 1941, p. 365.
3 To wit, ah, eh, ee, aw, oh and oo.
4 Paget’s paper was first printed in French in the Bulletin of the Institut Général Psychologique in 1925. An English translation, made and revised by the author, is in S.P.E. Tract No. XXII; Oxford, 1925. See his p. 31. On p. 24 he apparently increases the number of vowels to fourteen. In The Sounds of Spoken English; Oxford, 1920, p. 31, T. Nicklin said that “there are in modern English nine simple vowels,” but he actually listed eleven, and then added eight diphthongs.
5 The Stressed Vowels of American English, Language, June, 1935, p. 97. In the same volume of Language, pp. 148–51, some of Bloomfield’s conclusions are criticized by Morris Swadesh in The Vowels of Chicago English.
1 The Quality of a Spoken Vowel, Archives of Speech, July, 1937, pp. 15 and 25.
2 Remarks on Paget’s paper, lately cited, S.P.E. Tract No. XXII, p. 39.
3 The Effect of Pitch and Intensity on the Quality of Vowels in Speech, Archives of Speech, July, 1937, p. 59. “Each vowel,” say C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño, Quarterly Journal of Speech, June. 1932, p. 366, “has a typical or characteristic position around which variations may take place.”
1 The Effect of the Consonant on the Vowel, by John W. Black, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Jan., 1939, pp. 203–95. In The Stability of the Vowel, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Feb., 1939, Black shows that the vowels of a given speaker may change perceptibly within so short a time as two years, and that such changes, though not great, are “apparently consistent.”
2 Notes on the Length of Vowels, April, 1937, p. 128. Heffner continued the discussion of the subject in American Speech for Feb. and Dec., 1940; Oct., 1941, and Feb., 1942, and in Language for Jan.-March, 1940. See also Vowel-Length in General American Speech, by Harry A. Rositzke, Language, April-June, 1937, and Two Notes on Vowel and Consonant Quantity, by Norman E. Eliason, American Speech, Oct., 1942. In both papers there are reference
s to previous studies of the subject.
3 American Speech, Feb., 1942, p. 48.
4 Outline of English Phonetics, by Daniel Jones; New York, 1932, par. 879, quoted by Heffner.
5 For example, Henry A. Perkins, in Our Changing Vowels, Hartford Courant, April 27, 1938.
6 Broadcast English No. I, p. 34; Jones, p. 151.
7 Broadcast English No. I, p. 36; Jones, pp. 173 and 236.
8 In 1937, after attending a meeting of the American Psychological Association, Dr. William J. Griffin, of the State Teachers’ College, St. Cloud, Minn., wrote to me: “Among all the learned doctors there apparently is not one who speaks of status, data, apparatus, or strata with anything save the a of hat.”
1 I am indebted for these examples to Perkins, lately cited.
2 A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, by Frank H. Vizetelly; New York, 1917, p. xxviii.
3 Old and New; Cambridge (Mass.), 1920, pp. 143 and 144. See also The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 249 ff.
4 Private communication, June 27, 1944.
1 For most of the foregoing examples I am indebted to Seaman, to Mr. R. Raven-Hart, to the Palmer-Martin-Blandford Dictionary of English Pronunciation, to Broadcast English No. I, and to The Phonetics of English, by Ida C. Ward; Cambridge (England), 1929, p. 78.
2 A History of Modern Colloquial English, before cited, p. 204.
3 The Broadcast Word, p. 99.
4 So long ago as 1874 A. J. Ellis noted, in Vol. IV of his Early English Pronunciation, p. 1148, the wide variation of usage in England, even among careful speakers. He said that at a performance of King John he had heard Mrs. Charles Kean give calf the flat a, whereas her vis-à-vis, Alfred Wigan, gave it the broad a of palm.
5 The context shows that he meant the usage of Boston and its colonies. The so-called compromise a of this region is not altogether unknown in England. In fact, it is reported by Robert Forby in The Vocabulary of East Anglia; London, 1830, Vol. I, p. 86. He says that “perhaps the nearest approach to its sound “is the bleat of a very young lamb.”
6 Oriental and Linguistic Studies: Second Series; New York, 1874, pp. 206–07.
7 Broad A in Virginia, by Chad Walsh, Feb., 1940, p. 38.
1 An A for an R (editorial), July 3, 1944. On July 5, in the same paper, the Boston a was defended with eloquence by a correspondent in Middleton, R. I., signing himself E. O. Lux.
2 I am indebted here to Mr. Hugh Morrison, of Mays Landing, N. J. The English give Pall Mall two flat a’s.
3 Private communication, Jan. 20, 1945. There was a discussion of the word in the Boston Traveler in April, 1944.
1 In Agane or Agen, a letter to the New York Herald Tribune dated Feb. 1, 1938.
2 On Feb. 5, 1937 John o’London’s Weekly, which specializes in language questions, printed an inquiry from a Scotswoman who wrote: “Can you explain the almost universal pronunciation, by English people, of the word ate as ett? The spelling of the word gives no justification for this pronunciation, and the sound ett is, to my mind, peculiarly ugly. For some obscure reason it suggests to me a wolfish, gobbling action, in contradistinction to the quiet dignity of ate.” To this the editor replied: “My correspondent has my sympathy, but is she fastidious enough to complain of red and delt as the past tense forms of read and deal? In English ears today ate sounds rather falsely ‘fastidious.’ ”
3 British Eat and American Ate, by Eston Everett Ericson, American Speech, Dec., 1937, pp. 322–23.
4 The Big Stomp, by J. H. M. C., Hartford Courant, Dec. 9, 1937.
5 Vowel Positions as Shown by X-Ray, by C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño, Quarterly Journal of Speech, June, 1932, p. 354. There is an interesting discussion of the fermentation of a in the NED, Vol. I, p. 1.
1 Boswell’s Life, March, 1772.
2 Boston, 1789, p. 116.
3 Ration, American Speech, April, 1943, pp. 128–30.
4 Rash-un or Ray-shun: Both are Correct for Ration, Jamestown (N.Y.), Post Journal, Jan. 13.
5 There is a large literature on a in English and American, and anyone becoming heated up by the subject will find fuel for his flames in Fashion and the Broad A, by C. H. Grandgent, Nation, Jan. 7, 1915 (reprinted in Old and New; Cambridge (Mass.), 1920, pp. 25–30); Observations on the Broad A, by Miles L. Hanley, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part VIII, 1925, pp. 347–50; The Pronunciation of Short A in American Standard English, by George L. Trager, American Speech, June, 1930, pp. 396–400; One Phonemic Entity Becomes Two: The Case of Short A, by the same, American Speech, Oct., 1940, pp. 255–58; The Vowel in Rather in New England, by Herbert Penzl, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1938, pp. 1186–92; Relics With Broad A in New England Speech, by the same, American Speech, Feb., 1938, pp. 45–49; The Compromise A, by the same, Anglia, Band LXIII, 1939, pp. 88–99; The Vowel Phonemes in Father, Man, Dance in Dictionaries and New England Speech, by the same, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Jan., 1940, pp. 13–32; Flat A and Broad A, by J. S. K[enyon], American Speech, April, 1930, pp. 323–26; Watch, Water, Wash, by Sarah T. Barrows, American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 301–02; The A of Father, Rather, by Kemp Malone, Modern Philology, Vol. XVI, 1918, pp. 11–22; Umlaut in Middle English, by George Bond; Dallas (Tex.), 1937, pp. 86 ff; The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 36 ff; Vays, Vayz or Vahz, by Janet R. Aiken, North American Review, Dec., 1929, pp. 716–21; and Mather Flint on Early Eighteenth Century Pronunciation, by Helge Kökeritz; Uppsala (Sweden), 1944, pp. 81–92.
1 Eether Now Heads Eyether, Associated Press dispatch from Chicago, Christian Science Monitor, March 13, 1936.
2 p. 114.
3 So was James Russell Lowell, who wrote in his famous essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 1869: “We said eether and not eyther, following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s.”
4 For example, Kenyon and Knott, Louise Pound. Krapp and Bender. Krapp says (The Pronunciation of Standard English in America; New York, 1919, p. 77) that eye-ther “is popular and general nowhere in America,” but admits that it is “heard often as a conscious refined pronunciation.” Raven I. McDavid, Jr., in Dialect Geography and Social Science Problems, Social Forces, Dec., 1946, says that it is supported by “the snob-appeal of not using the same pronunciation as the uneducated or rustic people of one’s own community.” See AL4, pp. 341–43.
1 pp. 212–22.
2 Dissertations, p. 105.
3 There are many examples in The Beginnings of American English, by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931.
4 American Sargeant et al, by Robert Withington, American Speech, Oct., 1934, p. 234. See also Early American Pronunciation and Syntax, by Henry Alexander, American Speech, Dec., 1924, p. 145.
5 Private communication, May 16, 1944.
6 Wyld presents many examples. There are others in English Pronunciation from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, by Constance Davies; London, 1934.
1 Private communications, Aug. 23 and 27, Sept. 8 and Nov. 14, 1937.
2 The difference in meaning between creek in England and creek in America is discussed in Supplement I, p. 221.
3 Boswell reported under date of Sept. 23, 1777: “[Johnson] said his reason was that if heard were pronounced herd there would be a single exception from the English pronunciation of the syllable ear, and he thought it better not to have any exception.”
1 Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, by Hall; Philadelphia, 1829; Vol. I, p. 321.
2 London, 1935, p. 180.
3 NBC Handbook of Pronunciation; New York, 1943; third printing.
1 A Desk-Book of 25,000 Words Frequently Mispronounced, p. 713.
2 The Linguistic Adas of New England, Map 516, shows that iodine and iodeen are both in use throughout the territory covered, with what appears to be iodane occasionally encountered in the western part. Kwinine seems to be a
lmost universal (Map 517).
3 Pronunciation in the Schools, American Speech, Oct., 1922, p. 476.
1 The Dialectal Significance of the Non-Phonemic Low-Back Vowel Variants Before R, in Studies in Speech and Drama in Honor of Alexander M. Drummond; Ithaca (N.Y.), 1944, pp. 244–254. A bibliography is appended. See also Short O Vowels in American Speech; Massachusetts, by C. W. Dow, Speech Monographs, 1945, pp. 74–76.
2 An Elusive Development of Short O in Early American Speech, American Speech, Oct., 1941, pp. 192–203.
3 The Contrast; New York, 1924, p. 226.
4 The Broadcast Word; London, 1935, pp. 100 and 105.
5 Oxford, 1926, p. 59.
6 The Rock in Bureaucracy, by Alexander Kadison, New York Times (editorial page), Feb. 21, 1938.
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