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The Speaker, Or Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Best English Writers. to Which Is Prefixed an Essay On Elocution, by W. Enfield
The Speaker Or Miscellaneous Pieces Selected from the Best English Writers to Which Is Prefixed an Essay On Elocution by W Enfield Author:William Enfield General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1804 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: RULE IV. Pronounce your words with propriety and elegance. J. T is not easy to fix upon any standard, by which the propriety of pronunciation is to be determined. Mere men of learning, in attempting to make the etymology of words the rule of pronunciation, often pronunce words in a manner , which brings upon them the charge of affectation and pedantry. Mere men of the world, notwithstanding all their politeness, often retain so much of their provincial dialect, or commit such errors both in speaking and writing, as to exclude them from the honour of being Ihc standard of accurate pronunciation. We should perhaps look for this standard only among those who unite these two characters, and with the correctness and precision of true learning, combine the ease and elegance of genteel life. -An attention to such models, and a free intercours- with the polite world, are the best guards against the peculiarities and vulgarisms of provincial dialects. Those which respect the pronunciation of words are innumerable. Some of the principal of them are: omitting the aspirate h where it ought to be used, and inserting it where there should be none ; confounding and interchanging the v and w; pronouncing the diphthong ou like au or like oo, and the vowel i like oi or e; and cluttering many consonants together without regarding the vowels. These faults, and all others ofthe same nature, must be corrected in the pronunciation of a gentleman who is supposed to have seen too much of the world, to retain the peculiarities of the district in which he was born. RULE V. Pronounce every word consisting of more than one syll...« less