Publisher's Synopsis
From the PREFACE.
Whether one thinks this should or should not be so, it is a fact that most cultivated persons in America nowadays, and an increasing number in England, are more or less self-conscious about their speech. The present very general interest in the practical applications of the science of phonetics is one of the proofs of the truth of this statement. With our strange mingling of races, our widely separated but rapidly inter-communicating local units of population, our constantly shifting social boundaries between class and class, it is inevitable that, in America at least, such should be the case.
When people become conscious of so familiar an activity as speech, it means that changes are taking place in it. The universal possession of all persons in the land, the rich and the poor, the learned and the unlearned, of farmer, artisan, laborer and merchant, speech is not only the great social solvent which makes the nation one, but also the readiest test by which such differences as exist are measured and known. And where these differences and distinctions arise out of a rapidly developing civilization, as in America, it is often extremely hard to determine their value. If we had but a single standard of speech, universally accepted and practiced, the task undertaken in this book would be easy, though obviously it would be unnecessary. But we have no standard beyond opinion, which in a democratic society must always be many-headed. If therefore in the following pages the author has been at times less dogmatic than some of his readers think he should have been, his plea is that where there is a diversity of opinion and practice among reasonable people, there must be also an equally broad charity in judgment. Could anything be more absurd than to stigmatize as incorrect a pronunciation which is actually in general use, to put down in a dictionary only one pronunciation of a word when several are current among cultivated speakers? All cultivated speakers do not speak alike in America. If we think they should, that is a theory hard to enforce by compelling one group to yield to another. To be sure, opinion may be well-informed or ill-informed, and genuine blunders are usually due to lack of information, not to perversity. It is the purpose of this book to provide a rational method of examining pronunciation, the most important of the practical aspects of speech, in order that those who have a conscience in the matter may exercise it with justice both to themselves and to others.
The materials of the book have been ordered under the several sounds of the language. To one experienced in phonetics, no other plan would seem possible, and though perhaps at first embarrassed by an unfamiliar method, the untrained student will in the end find this the most profitable way of approach to the subject. The important thing is to acquire skill in hearing sounds as sounds, to be able to think of them as sounds apart from their representation in conventional spelling. The market is plentifully provided with dictionaries, with alphabetical lists of words said to be frequently mispronounced. The information contained in these books may or may not be trustworthy, but the best of them can offer little help to the student who wishes to observe the facts for himself and to arrive at his own judgments. And even the fullest of these lists cannot possibly be complete or contemporary. Pronunciation changes day by day, and dictionaries soon become antiquated. The intelligent person is one who makes his own dictionary as he goes along. The author's intention has not been, therefore, to provide exhaustive lists of words which may be mispronounced, but to show how the whole subject should be approached. Such words as are treated, however, will be found in alphabetical order in the index at the end of the book....
