Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/558

554 on English, the method formerly adopted was very much after this fashion: The lexicographer studies in his own library the pronouncing dictionary of everybody who has taken the pains to compile one, whether he be an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotchman, or an American. He compares these several dictionaries and records their variations. From these he selects those pronunciations which, for any special reason, commend themselves to his individual taste or judgment. These are usually such pronunciations as he is accustomed to hear or himself to use. These are published with the stamp of the lexicographer's authority and approval, and the dictionary is sent out into the world as so-and-so's record of the most approved usage.

This was doubtless the way pronouncing dictionaries used to be compiled. But we may believe that this method is not the course ordinarily followed by the authors of our best modern dictionaries. If our best standard dictionaries to-day were made in this fashion, their authority would richly deserve to be heavily discounted for such carelessness of method. But greater efforts are made by the most recent orthoepists, we may believe, to determine the accepted usage in polite society. Yet, after all, the personal equation enters as an important factor into the compilation of every pronouncing dictionary. The author or authors who compile the dictionary naturally follow their own preferences and prejudices in the matter of pronunciation; and their results, even at best, repose on very restricted and imperfect observation. An orthoepist ought not to be cocksure and dogmatic. Indeed, the proper attitude of the author of a dictionary is that of the late Mr. Ellis. It was quite natural that a man of his superior scholarship and rare orthoepical attainments should have been frequently asked as to the proper pronunciation of a particular word.

"It has not unfrequently happened," observes Mr. Ellis in his monumental work on 'Early English Pronunciation,' in reference to his practice, when appealed to as an authority, "It has not unfrequently happened that the present writer has been appealed to respecting the pronunciation of a word. He generally replies that he is accustomed to pronounce it in such or such a way, and has often to add that he has heard others pronounce it differently, but that he has no means of deciding which pronunciation ought to be adopted, or even of saying which is the more customary."

This attitude will, no doubt, commend itself to the favor of the reflecting and judicious man much more forcibly than that spirit of assumed infallibility which is a sure sign, in an orthoepist, of insufficient knowledge and lack of preparation for his work. The business of a lexicographer is to record what good usage authorizes, not to tell us what we shall not use. The orthoepist who goes farther, and dogmatically asserts that a given pronunciation is correct and another