Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/556

552 for the language, which the Germans call 'Sprachgefühl' is, after all, a safer guide than the rules laid down by the pedants. Candor compels us to admit that the popular tendency is more in harmony with the genius of our vernacular. But the scholars have made a brave fight for what we may denominate abstract propriety, and the result, thus far, is a drawn battle. Each side has scored some points, and each side has had to make some concessions. Thus balcony, academy, decorous and metamorphosis, to cite a few concrete examples, have finally triumphed over the earlier pedantic pronunciations, which required the accent on the penult of these words. Horizon, on the other hand, stands as a monument of a concession to the learned, since this word in Elizabethan times had the stress on the initial syllable, as had also the name of the month July. Popular usage in favor of the received pronunciation of auditor, senator, victory, orator and many similar words has achieved' a decided triumph over the early orthoepists, who, it was very obvious, were fighting a losing battle in their efforts to retain the classical accent.

It follows that pronunciation is the resultant product of several forces which are silently but constantly acting upon the living language. There are, to be sure, various methods of pronunciation, but the standard is that sanctioned by the most cultivated circles of society. Now, it is the function of the pronouncing dictionary, and its sole reason for existence, to determine and record the usage of the most cultured classes. But here is where the rub comes. This is the stumbling-block in the way of the lexicographers. It may seem, upon first blush, that the task of the orthoepist is easy enough. But not so in actual practice. Countless and insuperable difficulties soon begin to loom up a little ahead in the path of the intending orthoepist, and he finds, to his regret and his occasional disgust, that the way he has marked out for himself is not strewn with roses. It is an arduous undertaking which holds out but meager hope of successful accomplishment, to make an accurate record of the pronunciation received in any large class of society. The labor and trouble are multiplied many times when an attempt is made to determine the best orthoepical usage in a democracy. There is really no absolute standard of pronunciation in English and there can not be, from the very nature of the case, as Professor Lounsbury has clearly demonstrated in his recent luminous book on this subject.

Yet it is unquestionably true that the pronouncing dictionary is constantly making for uniformity of pronunciation. There is far less difference in English orthoepy at the beginning of the twentieth century, even despite the present diversity of good usage, than there was at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A glance at the history usage. If we may trust Professor Lounsbury, an eminent authority