Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/438

 430

NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th S. I. MAY 28, '98.

is a coarse osier basket of a double pannier shape, which holds 500 herrings. Harrod is correctly quoted in Murray's 'Eastern Counties,' 1892, p. 240. There is a harry- carry in Norwich Castle Museum, and an illustration of it at p. 288 of the official guide to that fine institution. JAMES HOOPER. Norwich.

SHORT A v. ITALIAN A (9 th S. i. 127, 214, 258). MR. R. WINNINGTON LEFTWTCH will find an answer to his question as to the American usage in this respect in the fol- lowing remarks by the late Richard Grant White, who, himself the representative of a line of cultivated New Englanders, was a keen and highly competent student of Eng- lish as spoken on either side of the Atlantic. He observes thus :

"I am surprised to learn from Prof. Whitney that the leading [American] orthoepists now require a flattened sound, like the vowel sound of fat, or one between the sounds of far and of fat, in the following words : calm, calf, half, aunt, alas, pass, bask, path, lath, laugh, staff, raft, and after. With- out giving particular authorities, I must be per- mitted to say that this citation of all the leading orthoepists in favour of the flattened sound is far too sweeping ; and I have no hesitation in adding that among the best speakers, both of English and of American birth, that I have ever met these words all have the broad ah sound of a in far and in father. [In a foot-note he adds : " This chapter was first published in October, 1875. On my sub- sequent visit to England, my observation of the pronunciation of the best speakers there confirmed me in the opinion expressed above."] In answer, chance, blanch, pant, can't, clasp, last, which Prof. Whitney classes with the former, a somewhat flattened sound has of late prevailed. In blaspheme, which he also ranges with them, the best usage fluctuates between the ah sound and that of an." ' E very-day English,' London, 1880, pp. 11, 12.

" There is, in fact, in the pronunciation of the upper classes in England no marked difference from that of well-educated, well-bred people in the Northern and Eastern States of the Union. I observed, however [during a visit to England], on the one hand a stronger tendency to the full, broad ah in some words, and on the other to the English diphthongal a (the name sound of the letter, aee) in others. At Westminster Abbey I observed that the officiating canon said commahndment and re- membrahnce, trilling the r as well as broadening the a; and at King's Chapel, Trinity, Cambridge, where I sat next the reader, my ear was pleased with his power and commahndment. I heard the same broad ah sound of a in transplant, past, cast, ask, and the like from three distinguished authors, one of them a lady, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in London. At the debates among the young men at the Oxford Union, I heard the same broad sound, grahnted, clahss, pahsture, and so forth. But at

St. Paul's, in London, a young deacon said, 'And

it came to pass,' and even worse path, clipping his a's down to the narrow vowel sound of an. On the whole, however, the broad sound very greatly pre-

vailed among the university-bred men." ' England, Without and Within,' London, 1881, pp. 378-9.

I may be allowed to add, as the result of my own personal observation during several visits to the United States, that the middle and lower classes in that country appear to me to have almost, if not altogether, lost the broad sound of a. DAVID MAcRiTCHiE.

Edinburgh.

Here is a little sid e-light on the pronunciation of Ralph, which comes back to me from long oblivion. A certain Sir Ralph - had lost a dog named Trim, and bothered Sheridan to write his epitaph. Sheridan yielded, and gave him the following :

Poor Trim !

Sorry for him :

I 'd rather by half

It had been Sir Ralph.

C. B. MOUNT.

The epitaph written by Sheridan on the death of a favourite monkey (see Wraxall's 'Memoirs,' vol. iii. p. 411, edit. 1884), for the beautiful Lady Payne, wife of Sir Ralph Payne, K.B. (1772), afterwards (1795) Lord Lavington, shows the pronunciation of the letter a in Ralph at the close of the eighteenth century :

Alas ! poor Ned,

My monkey 's dead !

I 'd rather by half

It had been Sir Ralph.

G. E. C.

It was some press comment, noted by me at the time of the inquiry referred to, that made me write of PROF. SKEAT as having said (with the late Lord Tennyson) that the " proper " sound of " Ralph " was Raff. I am pleased now to note that that press comment must have been erroneous, and that so high an authority as the Professor would give Rafe (rhyming with safe) as the correct Eng- lish pronunciation which any one "on his guard " should give. We have to contemplate the fact, then, that in the North, where Rafe is the sound usually given, and given properly, to " Ralph " as a Christian name, the mean- ing of the sound, as referring to a Christian name, had no sooner become dim, when it was uttered in the place-name cited, than it be- came " corrupted " (if the Professor will allow that word) by degrees, possibly through the form Raff, till it became "Roof"; and \yas even taken to mean Roof. Yet this Christian name Ralph, of which the proper sound is, as we have seen, Rafe, is the English form of the Latin name Radul'phus : in which latter word we, even in England, now give to the a the Italian sound. The French plume themselves on their language being, par excel-