Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/1050

 APPENDIX I. TO PART FIRST, OR ORTHOGRAPHY. OF THE SOUNDS OF THE LETTERS.

In the first chapter of Part I, the powers of the letters, or the elementary sounds of the English language, were duly enumerated and explained; for these, as well as the letters themselves, are few, and may be fully stated in few words: but, since we often express the same sound in many different ways, and also, in some instances, give to the same letter several different sounds,--or, it may be, no sound at all,--any adequate account of the powers of the letters considered severally according to usage,--that is, of the sound or sounds of each letter, with its mute positions, as these occur in practice,--must, it was thought, descend to a minuteness of detail not desirable in the first chapter of Orthography. For this reason, the following particulars have been reserved to be given here as an Appendix, pertaining to the First Part of this English Grammar.

OBSERVATIONS.

OBS. 1.--A proper discrimination of the different vowel sounds by the epithets most commonly used for this purpose,--such as long and short, broad and slender, open and close, or open and shut,--is made difficult, if not impossible, by reason of the different, and sometimes directly contradictory senses in which certain orthoepists [sic--KTH] have employed such terms. Wells says, "Vowel sounds are called open or close, according to the relative size of the opening through which the voice passes in forming them. Thus, a in father, and o in nor, are called open sounds, because they are formed by a wide opening of the organs of speech; while e in me, and u in rule, are called close sounds, because the organs are nearly closed in uttering them."--School Grammar, 1850, p. 32. Good use should fix the import of words. How does the passage here cited comport with this hint of Pope?

"These equal syllables alone require,   Though oft the ear the open vowels tire." --Essay on Criticism, l. 344.

OBS. 2.--Walker, too, in his Principles, 64 and 65, on page 19th of his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, mentions a similar distinction of vowels, "which arises from the different apertures of the mouth in forming them;" and says, "We accordingly find vowels denominated by the French, ouvert and fermé; by the Italians, aperto and chiuso; and by the English [,] open and shut. But whatever propriety there may be in the use of these terms in other languages, it is certain they must be used with caution in English for fear of confounding them with long and short. Dr. Johnson and other grammarians call the a in father the open a: which may, indeed, distinguish it from the slender a in paper; but not from the broad a in water, which is still more open. Each of these letters [the seven vowels] has a short sound, which may be called a shut sound; but the long sounds cannot be so properly denominated open as more or less broad; that is, the a in paper, the slender sound; the a in father, the broadish or middle sound; and the a in water, the broad sound. The same may be observed of the o. This letter has three long sounds, heard in move, note, nor; which graduate from slender to broadish, and broad [,] like [those three sounds of] the a. The i also in mine may be called the broad i, and that in machine, the slender i; though each of them is equally long; and though these vowels that are long [,] may be said to be more or less open according to the different apertures of the mouth in forming them, yet the short vowels cannot be said to be more or less shut; for as short always implies shut (except in verse,) though long does not always imply open, we must be careful not to confound long and open, and close and shut, when we speak of the quantity and quality of the vowels. The truth of it is," continues he, "all vowels either terminate a syllable, or are united with a consonant. In the first case, if the accent be on the syllable, the vowel is long, though it may not be open: in the second case, where a syllable is terminated by a consonant, except that consonant be r, whether the accent be on the syllable or not, the vowel has its short sound, which, compared with its long one, may be called shut: but [,] as no vowel can be said to be shut that is not joined to a consonant, all vowels that end syllables may be said to be open, whether the accent be on them or not."--Crit. Pron. Dict., New York, 1827, p. 19.

OBS. 3.--These suggestions of Walker's, though each in itself may seem clear and plausible, are undoubtedly, in several respects, confused and self-contradictory. Open and shut are here inconsistently referred first to one principle of distinction, and then to another;--first, (as are "open and close" by Wells,) to "the relative size of the opening," or to "the different apertures of the mouth;" and then, in the conclusion, to the relative position of the vowels with respect to other letters. These principles improperly give to each of the contrasted epithets two very different senses: as, with respect to aperture, wide and narrow; with respect to position, closed and unclosed. Now, that open may mean unclosed, or close be put for closed, is not to be questioned; but that open is a good word for wide, or that shut (not to say close) can well mean narrow, is an assumption hardly scholarlike. According to Walker, "we must be careful not to confound" open with long, or shut with short, or close with shut; and yet, if he himself does not, in the very paragraph above quoted, confound them all,--does not identify in sense, or fail to distinguish, the two words in each of these pairs,--I know not who can need his "caution." If there are vowel sounds which graduate through several degrees of openness or broadness, it would seem most natural to express these by regularly comparing the epithet preferred; as, open, opener, openest; or broad, broader, broadest. And again, if "all vowels that end syllables may be said to be open," then it is not true, that "the long sounds" of a in paper, father, water, cannot be so "denominated;" or that to "call the a in father the open a, may, indeed, distinguish it from the slender a in paper." Nor, on this principle, can it be said that "the broad a in water is still more open;" for this a no more "ends a syllable" than the others. If any vowel sound is to be called the open sound because the letter ends a syllable, or is not shut by a consonant, it is, undoubtedly, the primal and most usual sound, as found in the letter when accented, and not some other of rare occurrence.

OBS. 4.--Dr. Perley says, "It is greatly to be regretted that the different sounds of a vowel should be called by the names long, short, slender, and broad, which convey no idea of the nature of the sound, for mat and not are as long in poetry as mate and note. The first sound of a vowel[,] as [that of a in] fate[,] may be called open, because it is the sound which the vowel generally has when it ends a syllable; the second sound as [that of a in] fat, may be called close, because it is the sound which the vowel generally has when it is joined with a consonant following in the same syllable, as fat-ten; when there are more than two sounds of any vowel[,] they may be numbered onward; as 3 far, 4 fall."--Perley's Gram., p. 73.

OBS. 5.--Walker thought a long or short vowel sound essential to a long or short quantity in any syllable. By this, if he was wrong in it, (as, in the chapter on Versification, I have argued that he was,) he probably dis-