AUTHORITY IN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. 551 



furnished by the British pronunciation of clerk and Derby. The Eng- 

 lish, as is well known, pronounce these words as if written ' dark ' and 

 ' Darby.' They used to pronounce clergy with the same vowel sound, 

 and many other words besides. But it is a significant sign of the 

 approaching change in British usage in respect to these words that a 

 recent British dictionary, the New Historical, in commenting on cleric 

 admits that the American pronunciation of this word has become some- 

 what frequent of late in London and its neighborhood. (Are we to 

 look upon this as a result of the much-discussed American invasion?) 

 But our British cousins are still wedded to their Derby (Darby) and 

 show no sign of abandoning either the old pronunciation or the custom. 

 Even we Americans cling tenaciously to sergeant and show but little 

 inclination to make that conform speedily to the analogy of other words 

 of its class and to pronounce it in accordance with the spelling. But, 

 no doubt, this word, also, in the course of time, will yield to the pressure 

 of analogy, and our time-honored serjeant, with the flight of years, 

 is destined to be classed among those pronunciations that have lost 

 caste. The early orthoepists uniformly pronounced this entire class 

 of words as our British cousins pronounce them at the present time, 

 that is, as if they were written ' dark,' 'sarjean^ ' and so on. Indeed, 

 it is the spelling that has been the main factor in effecting the change 

 in the pronunciation of these words. There is a strong tendency in 

 English to pronounce a word as it is written, and this tendency has 

 been asserting itself with ever increasing force since English spelling 

 has been crystallized and thereby rendered less subject to preference or 

 caprice. 



A constantly recurring question, which never ceased to vex the 

 spirit of the early orthoepists, was, where to place the accent in the case 

 of contemplate, demonstrate, illustrate and similar words of classical 

 origin. The question at issue here is whether the stress shall fall 

 upon the antepenultimate or the penultimate. Even with all the 

 accumulated knowledge of the centuries we are no nearer a solution 

 of this perplexing question than were the Elizabethans. Shakespeare 

 could say indifferently confiscate or confiscate, demonstrate or demon- 

 strate. Here the battle has been waged between the scholars, on the 

 one hand, who insist upon strict propriety, and the uninitiated, on the 

 other, who follow the line of least resistance and by intuition place the 

 accent upon the initial syllable. As is evident at a glance, these words 

 come to us from the classics. The scholars therefore, somewhat 

 pedantically, insist upon retaining the stress on the syllable which 

 bore it in the original Latin or Greek. Per contra, the common people, 

 who know ' little Latin and less Greek ' and care not a fig for the 

 original accent, instinctively throw the stress upon the first syllable, 

 in keeping with their feeling for their mother tongue. This feeling 



