Pronunciation

PRONUNCIATION. By means of his organs of speech man has at his disposal, for the purpose of speech, certain devices. He can make a great variety of sounds, and, subject to the limitations imposed upon him by the physical structure of his speech apparatus, he is able to modify these sounds in certain ways : ( I) He can modify the length of time during which a sound persists.

(2) He can modify the degree of physical energy devoted to the production of a sound.

(3) He can, in the case of sounds that involve a periodic vibra tion of the vocal cords, regulate the periodicity of this vibration so as to produce varieties of pitch.

These modifications of Length, Stress and Pitch may serve dif ferent purposes, or may be used in various combinations.

z. Nature.—The spoken variety of a language consists of a certain number of sounds, influenced by the three modifications outlined above. These features, in the case of any given spoken language, constitute what we may term the acoustic matter of the language and. the reproduction of these acoustic features by a speaker is what is known as a pronunciation of the language. The term "pronunciation" is used to denote the general acoustic features of a language ; thus we speak of English Pronunciation, or the Pronunciation of Marathi. It is also used to denote the particular variety of acoustic phenomena used by an individual speaker, or by a particular section of a community; thus we may speak of disliking a man's pronunciation, or of liking the pronun ciation of a certain district or social class.

2. Analysis of Pronunciation.—Detailed analysis of the pro nunciation of individual speakers is the foundation of our knowl edge of the pronunciation of languages and dialects, and those whose business it is to carry out such analysis should so train themselves that they can give reliable and accurate information upon all the aspects outlined above. Sounds must be described in detail, and the modifications, their function and distribution must be noted. Such detailed description of pronunciation is necessary for : (I) The study and teaching of the mother tongue, and of foreign languages.

(2) The devising of scientific systems of orthography for hitherto unrecorded languages.

(3) Comparative philological work.

(4) Pronouncing dictionaries.

3.

Pronunciation and Language.—A spoken language per sists as a "language" so long and only so long, as those who speak it pronounce it in such a way as to be readily intelligible amongst themselves throughout the area in which the language is spoken.

Local variants, or fashions of pronouncing, arise in proportion to the extent of the territory over which the language is spread, but so long as those who use these local variants are conscious that they are in the main using the same language, and provided that they continue to use the written language common to the rest of their compatriots, their speech will be regarded as a variant, a dialect, of the main language.

If, for political or other reasons, any one group of dialect speakers desires a linguistic tradition of their own, and propose to make a new written form of their pronunciation, embodying a new and local vocabulary, then the seed of a new language is sown. In the past, whenever a language has, through the political expansion of a nation, spread over an area larger than that which gave it birth, disintegration has set in, beginning with divergence of pronunciation, ending with the establishment of new languages. Thus Sanskrit has given birth to the Aryan languages of India— Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.; Latin has given us Ital ian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Rumanian.

4. Pronunciation and Nationality.

Speech habits, amongst which we must include habits of pronunciation, differ from language to language; there is however a certain measure of similarity between the pronunciation of the various languages of a language family; and the language families of the world differ among themselves as considerably in the matter of pronunciation as in any other respect. The clicks of the Hottentot Bushman languages are found only in certain of the Bantu languages. The cerebral consonants of the Aryan and Dravidian languages of India are seldom found in other language families. When a lan guage takes over words from another language, embodies what we call foreign words, the pronunciation of such words will be made to fit in with the general scheme of pronunciation of the borrow ing language. French words taken into English will receive Eng lish sounds, English rhythm, English stress and English intona tion. The very considerable Arabic element in Persian is pro nounced in the Persian way, for the pronunciation system of Persian has nothing in common with that of Arabic. So European words are squeezed into Japanese moulds.