coins pass current, who will pay a premium for unmutilated dollars? The tendency of popular usage to diminish volume of utterance is shown by some phenomena attending the learning of a foreign speech. One may perfectly master French under a teacher in New York, and yet be quite at a loss to understand the French heard in social life in Paris. The instructor unconsciously, or of set purpose, cultivates a full phonetic expression, such as is heard in the best public speaking. But only fractions, larger or smaller, of these phonetic elements are used by Frenchmen; the stranger must learn to take a part for the whole before spoken French will become intelligible. Foreigners, in whatever strange land they may wander, complain that the natives speak indistinctly. Even Italian, when used for conversation, loses some of it sphonetic richness; and if it ever becomes the social speech, even of the better half of the nation, its voweled magnificence must decline.

Another neglected orthoëpical phenomenon facilitates the ravages of carelessness in speaking English. At an early stage in a language there are commonly several canons of good taste which have about equal importance; but, by a kind of volitional-natural selection, some one of these takes the supreme place of law, and tends to destroy all the others. This stress point of orthoëpy is seldom, if ever, the same in two really distinct speeches. In Greek, it probably lay in the peculiarly perfect system of accentuation; in Latin the prosodical value of the vowels was, without much room to doubt, the field of orthoëpical stress. In Italian, the fullness of the vowels takes precedence of other canons; and in English, what we call accent devours all other rules.

One of the most obvious facts is that popular usage exaggerates the point of stress whenever it is simple enough to be popularly used at all. Genoese vocal expression is in this way a parody on the stress point of Italian, a reckless contempt of the rights of consonants, being one of its features.*

This tendency appears in English in the increasing laxity of the pronunciation of the unaccented syllables, accompanied by an increase of accentual stress. It is a common observation that vowels not under the accent lose their distinctive quality.

* Genoese elides the consonants, without blending the vowels, and four vowels are sometimes uttered one after the other, in the same word. Besides, these vowels are as plump as Tuscan wheat.

Initial vowels suffer least, preserving in some cases (as ache) their proper sounds, but in others (as accept and except) falling into confusion before a consonant favored with the accentual prerogative. But, in the medial and final positions, popular pronunciation has no mercy for the individuality of vowels; they are all consigned to the limbo of a universal u. The identity of the spoken word seems to be passing into the accent, and, if this be placed where we are accustomed to find it, all the rest of the word is taken in fractions of sounds.

The stress of English orthoëpy is wonderfully simple and convenient for popular use; and, if proper care be taken in our public schools and colleges to counteract the tendency here noticed, we may congratulate ourselves on this happy facility of popularization; but should these tendencies continue at their recent rate of progress, we may find ourselves in the year 1950 with a national dialect rather than a national speech; or, if the statement be preferred, a spoken English departing widely from its orthographical brother.*

The universal diffusion of newspapers and books is another new fact in the history of languages, and the first and most marked results of this influence will appear in the English spoken in America. The period over which the action of this force has extended is so brief, that any discussion of it must partake of the nature of speculation. That considerable consequences must appear is evident from a mere contrast. Most languages have spent their lives mostly upon human tongues, rarely passing into literature at all, and then only for a very restricted form of existence. The ear has shaped, guided, and preserved their development. And in the outcome every language must submit to acoustic predominance.t

But our language is addressed very largely to the eye; and it is this which renders orthographical classicism so very easy, for all have a common interest in the conservation of familiar forms. The contrast thus presented between them, for example, Anglo-Saxon and our American speech, raises an *Space forbids illustration of a fact known to most readers, that English shows historical tendencies to this divorce of orthography and orthoëpy.

That is to say, whenever a spoken tongue or dialect, departs widely from its orthography, a literature may be expected in the popular branch, and the classic will pass away.

Orthographical (by a natural blunder usually called phonetic) reform is re

expectation of wide-reaching consequences. Beyond this, we must advance by speculating upon the value and significance of a few facts; and any one may lawfully expound the facts in another and more hopeful manner.

The independence of the eye in reading is established only by much practice. From passages in the Latin rhetoricians, one may doubt whether the eye had obtained this emancipation among the educated classes at Rome. We observe that a child needs to repeat his words to his ear in order to understand them, and older persons of very little education seem to require the same acoustic aid to intelligence. The power to read silently is acquired by practice, and most readers of newspapers have mastered the difficulty. But when this power has been acquired, do the two renderings, oral and visual, subsist independently? Certainly not, at first. An attentive self-observer may detect a kind of muffled whisper going on while the eye runs over the symbols of sounds. It has been maintained that this mind-reading is always a reproduction of the sounds to the mental ear the sounds are fancied, and if they are not the reading is interrupted. Whether this be universally and necessarily true is of course a matter for faith. We do observe,

however, that we unravel tangled places by reading aloud or consciously muttering the different passages.

Practically, however, the eye acquires independence of the ear, and the written language becomes a mere symbolic notation divorced from any consciously known relation to sounds. The apparent necessity of phonetic expression is a fruit of habit, and passes away whenever vocal exercise is wholly relinquished for a considerable period.

If, therefore, a people read more than they speak, it would seem to follow that the spoken and written language would more and more separate; the latter becoming a notation for the eye, and the former ceasing to be under the control of the literary orthography. Even if the habit of reading cannot extinguish the phonetic accompaniment, it certainly can and does attenuate it, and the results in this case must be as disastrous as in that of total loss of a mental phonesis.

sisted by an overwhelming majority of those who form public opinion, and the democracy are here conservative. If you doubt, print books in a reformed spelling and see whether the masses will buy them.

These are some of the reasons for supposing that our spoken English is losing orthoëpic volume, and that, if the forces at work to produce decay are not arrested or checked, or balanced by counter-agents, the national speech will more and more separate from the old standards, lay aside phonetic elegance and compass, and become a popular dialect, with the novel peculiarity of being the speech of a continent.

The task of phonetic regeneration is usually performed by dialects, which locally renew by furnishing new compounds for those which have been corrupted to the verge of annihilation, and replenish the volume of phonesis by the interaction of dialect and language pronunciation. The dialect usually has fewer sounds with fuller volume, and, when its words pass into the language, they carry, and for some time retain, their wealth of lusty energy,* just as foreign words keep for some time their old accents. The effort to speak these words will extend to others, and so swell out the volume of the sounds. affected. What our dialect does for one class of sounds, another may do for another class, and thus a living force, springing out of dialects, constantly renews the wasting literary speech.

English at home, that is, in England, is surrounded by a family of dialects which, doubtless, act powerfully against decay of phonetic energy. The dialect dictionaries give us from twenty thousand to forty thousand words now in use in the dialects of England, and not in use in the language. The words of English proper do not number forty thousand, for technical terms and the most recent additions to the language are not, phonetically speaking, truly English. They are not yet under the phonetic regimen of our tongue. Here, then, is another English speech of almost equal etymological extent surrounding the literary tongue and pressing up into its society. These dialects, taken together, cover the whole range of English phonesis, and express it with more strength. Those who speak these rude vernaculars learn the book-language, and

*If it should be claimed that the theory of barbarian wealth in a narrow phonesis is not established, we should fall back upon the fact, chiefly operative in modern life, but equally applicable to dialects intermingling at any period, that a foreign word requires more vocal effort than a native word. This is solid ground.

bring to its expression the energy which the dialects require of their voices. The influence of their example extends to others, and gradually to all, and dialect words from time to time enter the book-English and reinforce its sounds.

It is probably true that the uneducated classes speak with more force over a smaller range of sounds than the educated classes. In other words, that a dialectic phonesis will always prevail among those who know little or nothing of books. If this be true, then we shall see how the non-reading classes do for us in this country what the dialects do for the Englishcounteract in some degree the decay of our pronunciation.

It is not meant that such a countervailing force is equal to the destructive force. Probably all the opposing forces do not match the destructive in our American-English. If they did so the decay would be unobserved.

But this is not the only barrier put up in this country against phonetic lapse. English is here subjected to a greater external pressure than in England. All the languages of the civilized world are imported by their speakers, and brought into living contact with the English. Dutch, German, and French have from the first contested the ground with the language of the Pilgrim Fathers, and in some sections they have taken a place in the etymology. Portions of New York are covered by Dutch influences, and a class of true dialect words arise out of this fact. In portions of Pennsylvania German has been long spoken with similar consequences. The German spoken there does not perhaps act sensibly upon English etymology, but it does act on English phonesis. In Louisiana and other parts of the Union, and in Canada, French has been spoken longer than English, and it influences both etymology and orthoëpy.* These cases would once have been local, and would have produced no marked effect on the rest of the country; but in our day rapid and incessant intercommunication spreads them over the entire land.

The Indian dialects have doubtless done more for us than we know. The earliest periods of our history were marked by considerable intercourse between the savage and his invading oppressor. The names taken from the aborigines were at first sounded in imitation of them, and to this day they lay an un

*Add African dialects in the Southern States.