The standard of pronunciation in English Author:Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: nature of the difficulty attending it, and, in the second place, the efforts to remove it which have been resorted to in the past. Two general statements can ... more »be made at the outset. One is that there is a body of English words certain pronunciations of which every cultivated man the world over recognizes at once as belonging to the speech of the uneducated or the imperfectly educated. We characterize them as illiterate. The use of them stamps everywhere the present social condition of the speaker or proclaims the class from which he sprang. Allied to this, although representative of a distinctly different grade of cultivation, is what may be called the geographical pronunciation. There are or- thoepical peculiarities which belong to a certain region or to certain regions. They are unconsciously adopted by him who has heard them from infancy. If an educated man, he may, and usually does, discard them in later life. Even if he chooses to cling to them, he recognizes that they are provincial, that they are not sanctioned by the best general usage. Yet it is not always an easy matter to shake them off even if he desires so to do. If once fastened upon him in early youth, he is liable at times to revert to them in moments of carelessness or excitement. This is the first point. But for most of us there is no more difficulty in avoiding what is clearly illiterate or provincial pronunciation than there is in avoiding the violation of the ordinary rules of grammar. The second point is of more importance in this discussion. This is that another and very much larger body of words exists—embracing, in fact, the immense majority of the words of the language used in conversation or public address—about which there is a substantial agreement among the cultivated, wherever English is spoken ...« less