20 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



i" is no vowel at all but a diphthong. Again, however long he may 

 continue vocalizing the "short a" of fat, he can never make it at all 

 like what his teacher calls the "long a" in fate. The result is that 

 he has no proper conception of long and short; time values he can 

 get only from music; and the musical notes are always contradict- 

 ing what he has been taught about long and short in vowels. To 

 him the art world of sound is a chance world. It is a great help to 

 be brought in contact with a living language of reasonably honest 

 spelling like German or Italian; then he may come back to his English 

 with a more appreciative ear for its marvelous harmonies. Our 

 spelling is bad; but Shelley, Milton and Shakespeare have erected 

 palaces of sound whose wealth of vocal expression is approached 

 only by the ancient Greek. 



Teaching the Roman pronunciation of Latin will not do as well: 

 for if the student learns to pronounce Latin instinctively by quantity, 

 he is at the same time acquiring a tendency instinctively to mis- 

 pronounce thousands of domesticated or derived words in his own 

 tongue; he adds another jumble to the chaos of his English phonetics. 

 Nor will the study of the English dictionary help matters : the muddle 

 is in the dictionary; that is where the teacher gets it. Let us read 

 the first line of The Merchant of Venice — 



In sooth I know not why I am so sad. 

 The dictionary tells us that sooth is long and sad is short; but the 

 appreciative reader may give the "short" sad a half more time than 

 the long sooth. Quantity is properly duration of utterance. The 

 dictionary marks quality or the kind of utterance. Speakers and 

 poets use the same qualities as either long or short in duration. 



Duration, pitch and stress are the great modes in which human 

 language is delivered; but these are for the most part undiscriminated 

 by the student trained only in English. 



In the deeper matters of grammar and word-formation the student 

 trained only in English is at a disadvantage ; any inclination toward 

 linguistic study may be baffled by the anomalous wreckage of Anglo- 

 Saxon confused with debris from Romance and classic tongues; but 

 in German he finds a systematic and orderly language, yet living, 



