VARIATION OF ACCENT. 3I 



passed the point of variant pronunciation of a word and 

 reached that of two words differentiating from one. 



Of these 2234 words, 1020 van,' in consonant sounds, 818 

 in vowel sounds, and 396 in syllabic accent. Some words, 

 however, varj^ in more than one characteristic, such as half- 

 pe7i7ty, where the a is a when the / is heard and a when the f 

 is silent. This specimen might therefore be counted as vari- 

 ant in consonant or in vowel sound, or both, and in this 

 enumeration such examples are counted as belonging to the 

 particular variation which seems to the writer the more 

 important. This personal element in the statistics, it is 

 hoped, is not large enough to affect the conclusions to be 

 drawn from them. 



These figures are prima facie significant. They indicate 

 that the greatest current instability of English pronuncia- 

 tion is in consonants, that the instability of vowels is about a 

 fifth less, and that the instability of accent is less than a 

 sixth of the whole. These relations, however, must be cor- 

 rected by the fact that a particular consonant or vowel of fre- 

 quent occurrence may be now vacillating in pronunciation, 

 and thus inordinately increase the number of specimens of 

 that characteristic. Thus t when uttered before English long 

 71 tends to become palatalized. Hence, 7iat7ire (t var\'ing 

 between /)' and ch) with eight derivatives, and i7itellcctiial , 

 with nine, count large in these totals ; in fact, this variant / 

 constitutes more than half the consonantal variants. 



Though variants in syllabic accent form but a sixth of the 

 variant pronunciations authorized by the lexicographer, yet 

 they are particularly illustrative of the present purpose because 

 the stress on one of the syllables of an English word is more 

 characteristic of it than some of its vowel or consonant 

 sounds. Thus, if the speaker says ''partiac'larly'' he would 

 hardly be understood, but if he say — as he often does — 

 ^' p'tic'lrly " he is understood, because so much of the signifi- 

 cance of the word is on the accentuation of the syllable fie. 



The tonic accent of an English word falls upon the syl- 



