. The Argonaut . sout. Whose English? I hope not my own,he says. I hope not the Scotsmans En-glish, or the Irishmans English, or the Welsh-mans English. Not. I trust, the English ofDorset, or the English of Yorkshire, or theEnglish of Devonshire, or the English ofXorthumbria. Above all, I pray you, not theEnglish of the cockney. Vet, as he furtherremarks, Yorkshire and Devon and Dorsetprobably guard the Anglo-Saxon better thanOxford or Cambridge. Clearly, the problem is a complex the only rule that may safely be laiddown is that one should speak the speech asit is spoken by the bes
. The Argonaut . sout. Whose English? I hope not my own,he says. I hope not the Scotsmans En-glish, or the Irishmans English, or the Welsh-mans English. Not. I trust, the English ofDorset, or the English of Yorkshire, or theEnglish of Devonshire, or the English ofXorthumbria. Above all, I pray you, not theEnglish of the cockney. Vet, as he furtherremarks, Yorkshire and Devon and Dorsetprobably guard the Anglo-Saxon better thanOxford or Cambridge. Clearly, the problem is a complex the only rule that may safely be laiddown is that one should speak the speech asit is spoken by the best people of the cityin which he may chance to live. If he live inNew York, let him speak New Yorkese; ifin Boston, let him speak as the Bostoniansdo; if in San Francisco, as the San Fran-ciscans, nor mind if the Kiplings or theJameses are affronted. The extended controversy which has beencarried on in the columns of New York papersover questions of pronunciation since HenryJamess few remarks on the subject, seems. Courtesy of Sunset Memorial Church, was concerned, the language of thieves. Andthey all do. Where we put the accent for-ward, they throw it back, and vice versa;where we give the long a they use the short,and words so simple as to be past pronounce somewhere up in the domeof their heads. . The American has nolanguage. He is dialect, slang, provincialismaccent, etc. Now that I have heard theirvoices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is beingruined for me, because I find myself catchingthrough the roll of his rhythmical prose thecadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get anAmerican lady to read to you How SantaClaus Came to Simpsons Ear, and see how-much is. under her tongue, left of the beautyof the original. A pretty forcible arraignment! And whentwo so acute observers as Henry James andRudyard Kipling, one writing from San Fran-cisco and the other speaking in Pennsylvania,agree precisely. Americans must needs admitthat American speech is not
Size: 1528px × 1635px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectjournal, bookyear1877
