Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/108

 this as an American trait: to tell ladies, without provocation, to go to h—l In New Zealand or Asutralia (or in England, for that matter) the first thing an American notices is the queer pronunciation of words by the residents. I have mentioned this before, but mention it again because I have just come across this statement by Rudyard Kipling:

"The American I have heard up to the present is a tongue as distinct from English as Patagonian."

From which I imagine that our pronunciations also jar on English ears. I believe I can take their own dictionary, and convince the English that they do not obey its rules of pronunciation. There is not the slightest authority in any English dictionary for many of their pronunciations. The pronunciation of the English people is arbitrary; there is no authority for much of it, as there is no authority for the cockney dialect. At one place on this trip we met two old-maid high-school teachers, and they almost spoke good English. And this is a rule that may be depended upon: the educated English have a better pronunciation than the uneducated. The pronunciation of Americans is nearly always the same, but the English do not themselves use the same pronunciations. Perhaps it is an intonation or quality of the voice, or an inflection, but it is a fact that frequently an American understands them with difficulty. For several days we traveled with an English barrister, a very polite gentleman, and we frequently sat with him at hotel, steamboat and dining-car tables. Half the time we could not understand him. And he found equal difficulty in understanding us, unless we spoke slowly and