DISCOVERY 



233 



" It is a mistake to suppose that a foreigner will 

 always respond to an application for a loan of money." 

 On one of my earliest expeditions in the Japanese 

 Alps, I found myself sharing the shelter of a primitive 

 hut with a little rural policeman, whose acquaintance 

 I had made near the mountain foot. At night he in- 

 sisted on sleeping on the floor beneath my hammock, 

 which I had slung on a convenient beam in the roof. 

 Yet, when I chanced to roll out and land on him some- 

 what heavily, as he lay snoring peacefully below, his 

 sole comment on this sudden and violent interruption, 

 instantaneously delivered on waking up, was but the 

 politest of apologies — •" jama uv itashimashita " — 

 ' I am sorry to have been in your honourable way ! " 



Standards of Correctness 

 in English' 



By Henry Cecil Wyld, M.A. 



Merton Professor of Entjlish Lttnguage and Literature in tlie University 

 of Oxford 



Those who are acquainted with the details of English 

 pronunciation, and the grammar of colloquial speech 

 among good speakers, during the 17th century and 

 the first half, at any rate, of the i8th, cannot fail to be 

 struck by the free and easy character of this period 

 compared with our own day. 



The difference may be briefly summed up by saying 

 that at the present time, most speakers who have at 

 least the pretension of elegance and correctness, are, 

 consciously or unconsciously, considerably influenced 

 by the traditional spelling of words, whereas the men 

 and women of the days of Charles II, James II, 

 William III, and Queen Anne did not trouble them- 

 selves much about spelling, and certainl}- did not allow 

 this to influence their speech. 



The standard of politeness in uttered speech in the 

 17th and early iSth century was the traditional 

 practice current in good society, and it is hardly con- 

 ceivable that anyone in that age whose English would 

 peiss muster in what Lord Chesterfield called the ' best 

 companies,' should ever have laid down the law on 

 such matters, as we sometimes hear it done to-day, 

 by saying, " We speU in such and such a way, there- 

 fore we ought to pronounce thus or thus." There 

 was, it is true, no lack of learned pedants in the 17th 

 century, especially in the earher part of it, who applied 

 such tests and recommended people to speak according 

 to their theories of what ought to be, but I cannot 



• For further reading in this subject the author's recent 

 book, A History of Modern Colloquial English (T. Fisher Unwin, 

 21S.), may be consulted. — Ed. 



find that anyone paid the slightest attention to such 

 vagaries. 



It was not vmtil about the middle of the i8th cen- 

 tury, so far as I can discover, that there was a serious 

 reaction against the prevailing habits of what we 

 should now consider slipshod, careless, or even vulgar 

 speech. 



This reaction was very largely due to the influence 

 of Dr. Johnson, which was e.xerted directly over a 

 wide and distinguished social circle, and indirectly 

 through his Dictionary, which was published in 1755. 



Certain remarks in this great work gave an authori- 

 tative sanction to the small fry of teachers of elocu- 

 tion and obscure writers on the art of good spelling. 

 Henceforth, down to our own time, the process of 

 ' correcting ' well-established pronunciations is still 

 going on. Each generation of school teachers sweeps 

 away something of traditional speech and puts some- 

 thing new and strange in its place. It is an interesting 

 fact that these new pronunciations, made according 

 to the supposed intention of the spelling, the history 

 of which is rarely known to the reformers, often gain 

 a footing in circles where a few years ago such things 

 would have been accounted ignorant vulgarisms 

 associated only with the half-educated. 



I may mention a few at haphazard that have pene- 

 trated during my own lifetime far beyond the sphere 

 of influence of the Primary School. The following are 

 all strange to me and still give me something of a 

 shock : humour, htimoroiis pronounced with an initial 

 aspirate ; waistcoat pronounced like icaist and coat ; 

 Marylebone pronounced in three syllables with the 

 first element like the name Mfiry, the le, and then the 

 last syllable like the word bone ; Pall Mall with both 

 parts rhyming with shall ; landscape with the second 

 syllabic rhyming with shape ; ojten with a < in the 

 middle (though we know that as far back as the i6th 

 century Queen Elizabeth omitted it !) ; Cirencester 

 with the first part like syren (though 500 years ago 

 Sissister or Sisseter was established) ; the suffi.\ -ham 

 in place-names like Birmingham, etc., often pronounced 

 with an initial h- ; (does any one pronounce h in 

 exhaust and exhibit, I wonder ?) ; southern with the 

 vowel of the first syllable like that in south ; Wednesday 

 with a. d in the middle (though it had been lost in 

 natural pronunciation at least as early as the 15th 

 century !). Such are a few of the novel pronuncia- 

 tions which occur to me. None of these things were 

 typical of good English in the past ; some of them 

 arc still regarded as very vulgar ; others may be 

 heard from speakers whose English is in other respects 

 free from the \'ulgarism of sham refinement. This 

 shows that a . style of pronunciation, based solely 

 upon spelling, and with no justification from traditional 

 usage, is coming in more and more. The efforts of 



