Eighteenth-Century English Ideology and Change
The eighteenth century was a key period in the development of the English language and is when the modern standard emerged and many dictionaries and grammars first appeared. This book is divided into thematic sections which deal with issues central to English in the eighteenth century. These include linguistic ideology and the grammatical tradition, the contribution of women to the writing of grammars, the interactions of writers at this time and how politeness was encoded in language, including that on a regional level. The contributions also discuss how language was seen and discussed in public and how grammarians, lexicographers, journalists, pamphleteers and publishers judged on-going change. The novel insights offered in this book extend our knowledge of the English language at the onset of the modern period. is Professor of Linguistics in the English Department at Essen University, Germany. His recent publications include Legacies of Colonial English: Studies of Transported Dialects (Cambridge, ) and Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (Cambridge, ). R AY M O N D H I C K E Y
S T U DI E S I N E NG L I S H L A NG UAG E
General editor Merja Kytö(Uppsala University) Editorial Board Bas Aarts(University College London) John Algeo(University of Georgia) Susan Fitzmaurice(University of Sheffield) Christian Mair(University of Freiburg) Charles F. Meyer(University of Massachusetts)
The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original studies of English, both present-day and past. All books are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of national and international varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series covers a broad range of topics and approaches, including syntax, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, discourse, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and is aimed at an international readership. Already published in this series: Charles F. Meyer: Apposition in Contemporary English Jan Firbas: Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication Izchak M. Schlesinger: Cognitive Space and Linguistic Case Katie Wales: Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English Laura Wright: The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts Charles F. Meyer: English Corpus Linguistics: Theory and Practice Stephen J. Nagle and Sara L. Sanders (eds.): English in the Southern United States Anne Curzan: Gender Shifts in the History of English Kingsley Bolton: Chinese Englishes Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds.): Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English Elizabeth GordonLyle CampbellJennifer HayMargaret MaclaganAndrea Sudbury and Peter Trudgill: New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution Raymond Hickey (ed.): Legacies of Colonial English Merja Kytö Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg (eds.): Nineteenth Century English: Stability and Change John Algeo: British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns Christian Mair: Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization Evelien Keizer: The English Noun Phrase: The Nature of Linguistic Categorization Raymond Hickey: Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms Günter Rohdenburg and Julia Schlüter (eds.): One Language, Two
Grammars?: Differences between British and American English Laurel J. Brinton: The Comment Clause in English Lieselotte Anderwald: The Morphology of English Dialects: Verb Formation in Nonstandard English Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith: Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö: Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar Schneider and Jeffrey Williams: The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction Hilde Hasselgård: Adjunct Adverbials in English
Eighteenth-Century English Ideology and Change
Edited by R AY M O N D H IC K E Y
CAMBR IDGE UNIVERSITY PR ESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ © Cambridge University Press This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Eighteenth-century English : ideology and change / [edited by] Raymond Hickey. p. cm. – (Studies in English language) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---- . English language–th century–Rhetoric. . English language–th century–Usage. . English philology–History. I. Hickey, Raymond, – II. Title. III. Series. PE.E .'–dc ISBN
---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of figures List of maps List of tables Notes on contributors Preface
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English
page ix x xi xii xvii
R AY M O N D H I C K E Y
Prescriptivism and the suppression of variation JOAN C. BEAL
Women’s grammars
C A RO L P E RC Y
Eighteenth-century women and their norms of correctness I N G R I D T I E K E N - B O O N VA N O S TA D E
Lowth as an icon of prescriptivism I N G R I D T I E K E N - B O O N VA N O S TA D E
Queeney Thrale and the teaching of English grammar
K A R L I J N N AV E S T
Coalitions, networks, and discourse communities in Augustan England: The Spectator and the early eighteenth-century essay
S U S A N F I T Z M AU R I C E
Contextualising eighteenth-century politeness: social distinction and metaphorical levelling
T E RT T U N E VA L A I N E N A N D H E L I T I S S A R I
Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenthcentury English I R M A TA AV I T S A I N E N A N D A N D R E A S H . J U C K E R
vii
viii
Contents
Variation and change in eighteenth-century English RICHARD W. BAILEY
Variation in sentential complements in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English: a processing-based explanation
T E R E S A FA N E G O
Nationality and standardisation in eighteenth-century Scotland
CHARLES JONES
English in eighteenth-century Ireland
R AY M O N D H I C K E Y
Changes and continuities in dialect grammar
B E R N D K O RT M A N N A N D S U S A N N E WAG N E R
‘Be pleased to report expressly’: the development of a public style in Late Modern English business and official correspondence
M A R I NA D O S S E NA
Registering the language – dictionaries, diction and the art of elocution
LY N DA M U G G L E S T O N E
Timeline for the eighteenth century
339
R AY M O N D H I C K E Y
References Late modern English language studies
R AY M O N D H I C K E Y
Indexes
Figures
.
Authors in the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts . Relative frequencies (%) of the three sets of politeness words . Male and female usage of politeness words (per , words) . Frequencies of politeness words by gender and rank (per , words) . Distribution of eighteenth/nineteenth century dialect features in Ihalainen () . Distribution of morphosyntactic categories in Ihalainen ()
page
ix
Maps
. .
Main dialect distribution in Ulster Plural verbal -s in the SED fieldworker notebooks (all NP subjects; Pietsch a: ) . The NSR in Late Middle English (based on data in LALME I: , IV: f.; Pietsch a: ) . Personal pronouns (third person singular feminine and first person plural) – pronoun exchange . Relative markers as (), at () and what () in Ellis () . Regional distribution of isn’t
x
page
Tables
. Expressions of praise (positive) and condemnation (negation) in eighteenth-century language studies . The Spectator keywords . Word clusters with humble servant . Negative keywords for the Spectator . Frequencies of extraposed and non-extraposed subject infinitives in Middle and Early Modern English . Preverbal and extraposed non-finite sentential subjects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American English . Frequencies of subjectless gerundives and infinitives as preverbal subjects from Early Modern to Present-day English, based on a ,, word sample . Gerundives and infinitives in subject position in three one-million-word corpora . Length of LME preverbal subject clauses relative to their matrix predicates . Length of preverbal subject clauses relative to their matrix predicates in earlier American English . Historical features of eighteenth-century Irish English . Main areas of Scots settlement in Ulster . Features of Older Scots and conservative Ulster Scots . Morphosyntactic features from Ihalainen () . Ellis, SED and FRED – coverage . Frequency of agreement features in Englishes worldwide . Number of PE-cases in total of pronouns (SED published) . Distribution of relative markers along the North–South axis in percentages . Distribution of pseudo-passives with stood/sat in FRED
page
xi
Contributors
R I C H A R D W. B A I L E Y
is emeritus Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His main research interest is the development of English in the early modern and late modern period. Among his recent publications in this field are Dictionaries of English: Prospects for the Record of our Language (Cambridge University Press, ), Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Cambridge University Press, ); Nineteenth-Century English (). He was lead editor of the electronic edition of the manuscript, transcript and modernisation of the mid-sixteenth-century chronicle of London life kept by Henry Machyn (). is Professor of English Language and Director of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield. Her main research interests are the English language in the late modern period and dialect and regional variation in Britain. Recent publications include English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century; Thomas Spence’s ‘Grand Repository of the English Language’ () (), English in Modern Times – (); (edited with Karen Corrigan and Hermann Moisl) Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora ( vols., ) and (edited with Massimo Sturiale and Carmela Nocera) Perspectives on Prescriptivism (). J OA N B E A L
M A R I N A D O S S E N A is Professor of English Language and Head of the Department of Comparative Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interests focus on the features and origins of British varieties of English and the history of specialised discourse. Recent publications include the proceedings of ICEHL ( vols., edited with Maurizio Gotti and Richard Dury) and the Proceedings of the first two International Conferences on English Historical Dialectology (both edited with Roger Lass). On Late Modern English she has published Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data (edited with Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade), Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations (edited with Susan M. Fitzmaurice) and Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English (edited
xii
List of contributors xiii
with Irma Taavitsainen). She is also the author of Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary (). In co-operation with Richard Dury she is currently compiling a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish correspondence. has been Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela since and is the director of the Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization (VLCG). She has published widely on aspects of English historical syntax, including the system of sentential complementation and its development since Middle English times. She is the editor of Folia Linguistica and is currently working on the history of verbs of motion in English and Spanish from a Construction Grammar perspective. T E R E S A FA N E G O
is Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield. Her research involves sociohistorical linguistic and historical pragmatic approaches to change and variation in eighteenth-century English. She has also collaborated with colleagues to produce volumes whose contributions explore methodological issues in English linguistics. Most recently, with Donka Minkova, she co-edited Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change (). S U S A N F I T Z M AU R I C E
was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College, Dublin as well as in Kiel and Bonn, Germany. He has been Chair of Linguistics at the Department of English, Essen University, since . His main research interests are computer corpus processing, varieties of English (especially Irish English) and issues surrounding language contact, shift and change. Among his recent book publications are A Source Book for Irish English (), Motives for Language Change (Cambridge University Press, ), A Sound Atlas of Irish English (), Legacies of Colonial English (Cambridge University Press, ), Dublin English: Evolution and Change () and Irish English: History and Present-day Forms (Cambridge University Press, ). R AY M O N D H I C K E Y
is Professor Emeritus of English, Department of English Language, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His research interests cover a wide spectrum which includes Scots, especially in its historical context, English diachronic phonology and questions of language change. Among his recent publications are Historical Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives: (), A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of Scots in the Eighteenth Century (), The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (), The English Language in Scotland: An Introduction to Scots (), English in the Late Modern Period (ed. with Marina Dossena and Maurizio Gotti, ) and The Pronunciation of English in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (). C H A R LES JON ES
A N DR EAS H. J UC K ER
is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich. His recent publications include Diachronic Perspectives on Address
xiv
List of contributors
Term Systems (), Speech Acts in the History of English (), both co-edited with Irma Taavitsainen, and Early Modern English News Discourse (). He is the editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (with Irma Taavitsainen) and from to he was the editor of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series. His current research interests include historical pragmatics, speech act theory, politeness theory and the grammar and history of English. He also works on hypertexts and the language of the new media. B E R N D KO RT M A N N is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His publications include four monographs, seven edited volumes, and about eighty articles and reviews in journals and collective volumes. His research interests include semantics, grammaticalisation, typology, history of linguistics and English grammar. Over the last decade he has been investigating the grammar of nonstandard varieties of English around the world, especially from a typological perspective. Among his recent publications are the two-volume Handbook of Varieties of English with CD-ROM (; vol. paperback ). Together with Elizabeth Traugott he is editor of the series Topics in English Linguistics. He is currently working as a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Language and Literature of the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies.
is Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. She has published widely on language in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent work includes Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (), ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol, nd edition (; revised and extended paperback edition ), Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary () and The Oxford History of English ().
LY N DA M U G G L E S T O N E
K A R L I J N N AV E S T is a Ph.D. student in the research project The Codifi ers and the English Language: Tracing the Norms of Standard English, University of Leiden. She is one of the contributors to Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England () and Acts of Reading: Teachers, Texts and Childhood (edited by Morag Styles and Evelyn Arizpe, ). She is currently completing her Ph.D. thesis on John Ash (–) and the rise of the children’s grammar.
is Professor of English Philology and Director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG) at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on historical sociolinguistics, language change and Modern English before . She is one of the compilers of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, and director of the research project Sociolinguistics and Language History, T E RT T U N E VA L A I N E N
List of contributors xv
which has produced the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). Her publications include ‘Early modern English lexis and semantics’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language (), Historical Sociolinguistics (, with H. Raumolin-Brunberg) and An Introduction to Early Modern English (). is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Here research explores the cultural history of eighteenth-century English. Drawing on her doctoral work on editorial corrections to Captain James Cook’s grammar, her most recent publications have considered how editors, advertisers, book reviewers, schoolteachers and grammarians contributed to the development and dissemination of standard English and to the formation of social stereotypes. Particularly interested in gender issues and standardisation, she is currently at work on a book about bad grammar in Enlightenment Britain. C A RO L P E RC Y
is Professor of English Philology, Head of the Department of English and Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, linguistic stylistics and the evolution of scientific and medical writing. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics. Her most recent edited books include Speech Acts in the History of English (, together with Andreas H. Jucker), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present (, together with Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Minna Korhonen) and Methods in Historical Pragmatics (, together with Susan M. Fitzmaurice). I R M A TA AV I T S A I N E N
T I E K E N - B O O N VA N O S TA D E holds a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden. She has published on periphrastic do in eighteenth-century English () and on multiple negation in Malory’s Morte Darthur (). She has edited various international collections of articles, including, most recently, Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar Writing (). Her research interests include historical social network analysis and the standardisation process (codification and prescription). She publishes the internet journal Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics, and is the director of the research project The Codifiers and the English Language at Leiden. She is currently writing a book on Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism. I NGR I D
H E L I T I S S A R I completed her doctoral dissertation in on the senses of the English word ‘love’ and its conceptual metaphors in Early Modern and Present-day English. From to she was a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium working on other words for emotions. She is now continuing her research on the expression of emotions, word meaning/ concepts and metaphor at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts
xvi
List of contributors
and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. received her MA and Ph.D. in English Linguistics from the University of Freiburg (Germany) where she most recently worked as head of a research project on English in Newfoundland. Her main areas of interest are variation in the morphology and syntax of English dialects on which she has published a number of articles, focusing in particular on Southwest England and Newfoundland. For the academic year / she was a Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Kent (Canterbury/UK), working on her postdoctorate thesis on Newfoundland English. She is currently working at the University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany.
S U S A N N E WAG N E R
Preface
In the past decade or so the study of English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has established itself as an area of historical linguistics in its own right. This period has come to be known as Late Modern English and covers the period roughly from the reign of Queen Anne – the Augustan Age, that of Pope, Dryden and Swift – down to the end of the Victorian era at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not a period of major categorial changes in English but of more subtle shifts in syntax and vocabulary and above all it is the time when pronunciation became a yardstick of acceptability in English society. The study of English in the late modern period is inextricably linked to the rise of prescriptivism, a phenomenon which has determined the attitudes to spoken language in present-day English society. The validity of the late modern period has been underlined by a series of recent conferences which have taken place at the universities of Edinburgh, Vigo and Leiden. The range of topics dealt with at these conferences testifies to the interest of English scholars in the period. In particular the rise in grammar writing has been a focus, but also the spread of dictionaries and their use as authoritative works in language use. The field of Late Modern English studies has been strengthened by a number of seminal publications in recent years. Joan Beal’s English in Modern Times () has provided an introduction which is already regarded as a standard. The proceedings of the Late Modern English conferences – Insights into Late Modern English () and New Insights into Late Modern English () – have gathered together the innovative work of many international scholars, both established in and new to the field. The area of grammar writing has been enriched by volumes such as that by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (), Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar Writing in Eighteenth-Century England, which summarises current thinking on this subject. It is hoped that the present volume – like its predecessor for nineteenthcentury English: Kytö et al. () – will contribute in the same vein to this vibrant field of research and be a useful source for those wishing to inform themselves about topics and insights into English in this formative period of its development. xvii
xviii
Preface
In the preparation of this book the editor received great assistance from the series editor, Prof. Merja Kytö, Uppsala University. Helen Barton, commissioning editor for linguistics at Cambridge University Press, was, as always, a great source of assistance and encouragement and ready to answer all the questions which arose in the course of the current project.
1
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English R AYMON D H IC K EY Essen University
Introduction
Like any period in the history of English there are certain recurrent themes to be found in the eighteenth century. Some of these have become standard wisdoms and are widespread among scholars and students alike. Other topics have not been in the forefront to the same extent but increasingly the focus of researchers has been directed towards them too. Among these matters can be counted the large body of grammars by female writers (Navest, Percy, Tieken-Boon van Ostade [], this volume) and the role of discourse communities within eighteenth-century English society (Fitzmaurice, this volume). The most prevalent standard wisdom about the eighteenth century is that it is the period in which prescriptivism in English established itself. Like all such wisdoms it is largely true but the details of both the nature of prescriptivism and the manner in which it arose have been shown not to correspond to the somewhat two-dimensional view which is often found, especially the view of the author who is seen as the arch-prescriptivist, Robert Lowth (Tieken-Boon van Ostade [], this volume). Another common view of the eighteenth century is that it is the period in which codes of politeness (Nevalainen and Tissari; Taavitsainen and Jucker, both this volume) became fixed and mandatory for the established classes in English society, and for those who aspired to belong to these. Again this is no doubt true and rules of etiquette were evidently rigid and compulsory. But there are clear differences between notions of politeness then and those which are prevalent today. Above all, the issue of face in social interactions (Brown and Levinson ) would seem to have been different in the eighteenth century. In addition, the tenor of disputes in print between authors had a directness and harshness which would not be accepted today. .
Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century
The previous century, the seventeenth, was a period of violent upheavals. It was a century of forced plantations in Ireland and of military conflict in all 1
2 Eighteenth-century English
parts of Britain and Ireland. It was the century of the Civil War in England (–), which saw the execution of Charles I in and the rise of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector (–). The century saw the restoration of the monarchy in but also the discontent of the Jacobites (Szechi ) in Scotland and Ireland which included violent rebellion against English forces. Stability and order in England returned towards the end of the century with the reign of William III (of Orange) from to . The reign of Queen Anne (–), which opened the eighteenth century, was thus one of internal calm in England. For Scotland, the eighteenth century opened with the union with England in and, despite the attempts of the Jacobites to seize power, it was the union which determined Scottish political life in this century. For Ireland the eighteenth century was ‘the long peace’ (Johnston [] ) which lasted essentially from the Jacobite defeat in to the United Irishmen uprising in . The internal stability of eighteenth-century England means that in the present book, historical events do not play a central role in the discussions. It is perhaps significant that the two contributions concerned with English in Scotland (Jones) and Ireland (Hickey) respectively are those in which political and military events are referred to. There is little or no mention of politics in any of the other chapters, but much discussion of the social developments of the time. The chapters of the book are largely about externally motivated change whose roots lie in English social life, in attitudes to language and in the desire to have stability and order in language (Bailey ), much as it had been attained in English public life for the eighteenth century. .
The English language in the eighteenth century
It is true to say that the eighteenth century is a period in the history of English in which the major changes in the language had already taken place (Denison : ) and few, if any, categorial shifts occurred in the grammar. This fact is reflected in the nature of the contributions in this volume. Only one is specifically concerned with grammatical change (Fanego), whereas others consider the reactions in society to change which had already been initiated and which was still in a state of flux (Tieken-Boon van Ostade []). Indeed in many ways, the advice, if not to say strictures, of many authors has led to the continuing existence of variation in areas of English grammar in which one would expect incoming variants to become dominant and lead to the disappearance of older ones in the course of a few generations at the most. A case in point is prepositional stranding (Yáñez-Bouza a, b, Percy, this volume) which came to be considered inappropriate, this then triggering its avoidance in formal and prescriptive styles down to the present day (see the assessment in González-Díaz and Auer ). The majority of contributions in this volume are concerned with external factors, with language use and the role which individual authors may have
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 3
played in its development. The size of the names index clearly shows this. The discussions in the volume are repeatedly about how language was seen and discussed in public, how individuals whose profession was connected to matters of language – grammarians, lexicographers, journalists, pamphleteers, publishers – judged on-going change. The eighteenth century is also the period in which speakers of English looked to see what variants among items of change in process were preferred by their social superiors. This is very obvious in the linguistic comments of John Walker (Beal ) who was singularly concerned with usage among the English nobility, for instance, with the English of Lord Chesterfield. On the other hand, those who already belonged to the established classes turned to recognised literary writers for guidance on form and usage, as can be seen with Lowth who in this matter held Swift in high esteem.
Books on the English language
Among the salient features of the eighteenth century is the sheer number of books on language which appeared (see Late Modern English language studies, this volume). This situation was the result of an expansion in a tradition of linguistic commentary which had begun earlier. The seventeenth century had seen many publications on language, chiefly concerned with (i) the difficulties in English vocabulary caused by the many creations and borrowings from classical languages, (ii) the pronunciation and orthography of English and (iii) the nature of English grammar compared to classical languages, above all Latin. One or two of these works actually date from the late sixteenth century, for instance John Hart’s An Orthographie of English (). However, it would be incorrect to see the works of eighteenth-century authors as a mere extension of the linguistic concerns of the previous century. There was also a change in orientation. To set this in context, the motivations for publishing works on language hitherto are outlined briefly below. .
Religious background
Before the eighteenth century studies of the English language frequently displayed a distinctly religious bias. It is a truism to say that before the advent of modern linguistics in the nineteenth century, much ‘linguistic’ work was produced in the belief that all languages can be traced to Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, via Classical Greek, the language of the New Testament. Latin took its place after Greek and the result was a triad of classical languages which were continually referred to. For instance, in Robert Robinson’s The Art of Pronunciation () there is no mention of the social aspects of pronunciation but in the preface there are references to the derivation of words from Hebrew, Greek and Latin and many grateful references
4 Eighteenth-century English
to God from whom speech comes. This religious slant is in evidence in later works of the seventeenth century, for example Thomas Lye’s A New Spelling Book () which specifies in the subtitle that all the Words of our English Bible are set down in an Alphabetical order, and divided into their distinct Syllables Together with the Ground of the English Tongue laid in Verse, wherein are couch’d many Moral Precepts. .
Explaining ‘hard words’
The label ‘hard words’ is a technical term referring to those words which were either borrowed from Latin or Greek or which, more often than not, were created on the basis of stems whose origins lay in the classical languages. Already by the early seventeenth century, these words were perceived as a source of difficulty for speakers of English and the necessity was felt to produce books in which hard words were defined. For instance, The New World of English Words by Edward Phillips () specifies in the subtitle that it contains the Interpretations of such hard words as are derived from other Languages … Together with … All those Terms that relate to the Arts and Sciences … A Work very necessary for Strangers, as well as our own Countrymen, for all Persons that would rightly understand what they discourse, write, or read. Clearly the author felt called upon to supply such information as was necessary for both foreigners and natives alike to understand and use these words correctly. It might be imagined that one such definitive work would be sufficient to satisfy the needs of the reading public. However, already in the sixteenth century one finds in this area a degree of repetition, a duplication of effort, which was to mushroom in the eighteenth century. For instance, Elisha Coles mentions in the long subtitle to his English Dictionary () that it explains Many Thousands of Hard Words (and proper names of Places) more than are in any other English Dictionary or Expositor, together with The Etymological Derivation of them from their Fountains, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, or any other Language. In a Method more comprehensive, than any that is extant. Here one can see a confident assessment of one’s own efforts. And what better way of justifying one’s own work than to point to the putative shortcomings of one’s predecessors? This tack can be recognised in the titles of other works. Not only that but a blunt tone is found in the references to the work of colleagues. Already by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Richard Johnson () had published a book entitled Grammatical Commentaries which in the subtitle included the following: by way of animadversion [= severe criticism, RH] upon the falsities, obscurities, redundancies and defects of Lilly’s (sic!) system now in use. It may well be that in the interaction of the classes, for instance in both public and private correspondence, polite modes of address were prevalent during the eighteenth century (Nevala : –). However, one should not assume that the regulations
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 5
of etiquette meant that modern notions of politeness applied on all levels and in all areas of society. In the realm of academic discourse authors had little trepidation when it came to criticising one another. .
The divergence of sound and spelling
It was not only the results of the Great Vowel Shift (Pyles and Algeo []: –) that led to a divergence between the pronunciation and spelling of English. There are a number of other developments of the early modern period which contributed to this divergence. The lowering and unrounding of short [ʊ] to [ʌ] in the STRUT lexical set (Wells : f.) and the vowel lengthening in the BATH lexical set can also be mentioned in this context. Many changes of this period gave rise to homophony and hence to distinctions in spelling which did not correspond to differences in pronunciation, for instance the TERN/tεrn/ and TURN/tʊrn/ lexical sets which merged to a rhotacised schwa /tɚːn/ which was then simplified solely to schwa /təːn, tɜːn/ (in south-eastern English). There is no formal distinction between stressed [Λ] and unstressed [ə] in the transcription systems used by eighteenth-century prescriptivists. In his scheme of vowels (: ) Sheridan refers to the former as the sound in but, calls it u and uses it in transcriptions of unstressed short vowels. Walker also has this sound, but represents it in different ways. For instance, he distinguishes six types of o-sound and contrasts his scheme with that devised by Sheridan. However, Walker’s fourth o-sound is Sheridan’s first u-sound, only written differently: ‘For a fourth, I have added the o in love, dove, &c.;’ (Walker : ). Hence the transcription he offers for a word like horizon is ‘ho-ri´zon’ which can be interpreted as [hoˈraizən] with a close mid back vowel in the first syllable and a schwa in the last syllable. The phonetic nature of unstressed vowels in eighteenth-century English has been a matter of some debate (see the comments in Beal a: –). While some scholars, such as Roger Lass (: ), see little evidence for the existence of schwa before the late modern period, Joan Beal is more cautious. She points out that the prescriptivists refer to what is later schwa as an ‘obscure u-vowel’ which suggests that it was indeed already a schwa in the eighteenth century. Spelling variations and not least the loss of inflectional syllables already in the early Middle English period would also seem to indicate that short unstressed vowels have had a centralised pronunciation in English for something like a thousand years.
I am grateful to Erik Smitterberg, Uppsala University, for a discussion about unstressed vowels and for suggesting that I deal with this matter in the current chapter. In the transcription used by the eighteenth-century prescriptivists, including Sheridan and Walker, the numbers are actually placed over the vowel symbols.
6 Eighteenth-century English
Walker further noted that there were two variants of short unstressed vowels which in IPA transcriptions would be [ə] and [ɪ]: [ə]: ‘there is a certain transient indistinct pronunciation of some of them [vowels] when they are not accented … when the accent is not upon it, no vowel is more apt to run into this imperfect sound than the a; thus the particle a before participlers, in the phrases a-going, a-walking, a-shooting, &c.…’ (Walker : ). [ɪ]: ‘The a goes into a sound approaching a short i, in the numerous termination [sic!] in age, when the accent is not on it, as cabbage, village, courage &c. and are pronounced nearly as if written cabbige, villige, courige, &c.’ (Walker : ). The increasingly divergent nature of writing and pronunciation was a concern which was dealt with openly. At the beginning of the eighteenth century one has works like John Jones Practical Phonography: Or, the New Art of Rightly Speling [sic!] and Writing Words by the Sound thereof and of Rightly Sounding and Reading Words by the Sight thereof. Applied to the English Tongue (). Lists of words which were spelt one way and pronounced another were published, for example Richard Brown The English School Reformed () which in the long subtitle specifies that the book contains A Collection of Words that are writ one way and sounded another. This concern is a common motif in many works on phonetics throughout the century, for example that by Abraham Tucker () which contains a section ‘English not spelt as spoken’ (Tucker : –). The phonological changes in English at the time led many authors to publicly campaign for a fixed form of the language in which these changes would no longer disrupt the relationship of spelling and sound. For example, Rice () closes his treatise on education with an appendix in which he offers ‘the sketch of a plan for establishing a Criterion, by which the Pronunciation of Languages may be ascertained; and, in particular that of the English Tongue, reduced to a Certain fixt Standard ’ (: ) [emphasis mine]. This notion of fixing the language is different in motivation from that put forward by Jonathan Swift in his famous Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language (). While Swift wished to have the language fixed so that works of literature would be accessible to later generations, later non-literary authors, such as Rice just quoted, were concerned with the practical implications of not having a fixed standard. The divergence of the written and spoken language did occasionally lead to radically new proposals for English spelling. One such proposal is James Elphinston’s Inglish Orthoggraphy Epittomized: And Propriety’s PocketDictionary, containing Dhe Inglish Roots arrainged and explained () which in its title already shows the type of semi-phonetic spelling which he favoured. For other authors, notably the lexicographers and grammarians
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 7
of the latter half of the eighteenth century (Johnson, Kenrick, Sheridan, Walker), tampering with English spelling was not an option. .
An educational dilemma
Both the expansion in vocabulary and the changes in phonology posed a dilemma for teachers of English. Of these two aspects of the language, it is probably the phonology which was the focus of eighteenth-century scholarship. The ‘hard words’ which caused such difficulty in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been largely assimilated into the language, the less used among these words had disappeared again and the remainder were there to stay and so were conveyed to following generations who mastered them more easily than when they were still fresh in the language. English phonology in the eighteenth century shows a number of instances of change where co-variation existed for some time and where it was not certain which variants would be preferred in a ‘fixed standard’ of the language. Syllable-final /-r/ was being lost in the south-east of England and those writers who favoured a more conservative pronunciation or one where there was the greatest degree of correspondence between spelling and sound were uncertain about what to recommend. John Walker was one of these. He espoused the notion of ‘analogy’ (< Latin analogia ‘proportion’), by which was meant regularity and conformity to general patterns and a correlation or correspondence between components of a whole. When applied to language, analogy was understood to be a one-to-one relationship between spelling and sound. For this reason Walker supported the use of syllable-final /-r/ while recognising that it was being lost across a broad front in the English society of his day. .. Target groups for educational works A particular concern of the time was the education of children. Works intended to offer assistance in this field had already appeared in the late seventeenth century. In Thomas Osborn published A Rational Way of Teaching. Whereby Children and others may be introduced in True Reading, Pronouncing and Writing of the English Tongue; in an Easier and Speedier Method, than any hitherto Published. Shortly after this Edward Cocker’s Cockers Accomplished Schoolmaster: Containing Sure and Easie Directions for Spelling, Reading and Writing English () appeared. This established a line among language studies which continued throughout the eighteenth century; consider, for instance, Henry Dixon’s The English Instructor; or, the Art of Spelling improved. Being a more Plain, Easy and Regular Method of Teaching Young Children, than any Extant () and John Hornsey’s A Short English Grammar in Two Parts: Simplified to the Capacities of Children (). An author who directed her particular attention to the education of children is Ellenor Fenn (, a, b). She was also concerned with
8 Eighteenth-century English
providing an instrument to those women who might not have had the opportunity to learn grammar during their own education. This concern is reflected in the title of her book The Child’s Grammar. Designed to Enable Ladies Who May Not Have Attended to the Subject Themselves to Instruct Their Children (b). In the long titles of language studies, eighteenth-century authors readily named their target group. Among the many grammars of this time there is a clear subset intended for the education of young ladies (see Percy and Tieken-Boon van Ostade [], both this volume). Most of these grammars were written by women, for example Devis (), Eves (), Gardiner (), Mercy (), though not always, see Ussher (), or the target group is mixed as is the case with Newbery (). The concern of women for the education of their children is a natural one, but there may have been additional motivation which lay in the social conditions and mores of the eighteenth century. In his study of women and the family, Ramsbottom (: ) notes that ‘domestic harmony, as portrayed by commentators such as Addison and Steele at the beginning of the century and by Evangelicals at the end, depended upon the wife’s exclusive devotion to her husband’s comfort and welfare.’ Given this situation, the scope for personal intellectual development was limited and so it is understandable that women often turned to the education of their children to attain fulfilment, if only vicariously. .
The question of class
Language use was an issue of relevance to a social group which was increasing steadily in numbers throughout the eighteenth century: the middle classes. Referred to as the ‘middling orders’ at this time (Earle , Rogers ), this was a group which obviously sought acceptance by the established elite who were above them on the social scale. In this context it is worth considering who formed the market for the very many books on language in the eighteenth century. For the poorer segments of English society – servants, artisans, agricultural workers, small farmers – books were beyond their financial reach, even if they were interested in acquiring them. It is also doubtful whether the landed aristocracy were the buyers of the language studies produced by their social inferiors. The all too often futile pleas of the latter for patronage would suggest that the interest of the nobility in matters linguistic was limited to say the least. This leaves a middle section which, by exclusion of the others, must have formed the bulk of book buyers in eighteenth-century England. An issue in research into the strata of eighteenth-century society concerns the relative weight of the ‘middling orders’. Rogers (: ) points out that ‘only a small cohort of merchants and lawyers consistently achieved parliamentary status, comprising at best per cent of the House; and some of these men
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 9
were entangled in the patronage of the greater landlords’. Statements like these are a reminder that the middle class was still small, but also that it was striving upwards. In this search for social acceptance, the right pronunciation and grammar of English was essential. The middle classes in any society are an essentially urban phenomenon. If the middle classes were increasing numerically, then this must have been true of the cities in Britain at the same time. Indeed this is the case: there is a growing urban population in the eighteenth century (Borsay ). In about per cent of the population lived in centres of more than ,. By this figure was per cent in Britain (Borsay : f.). London had increased from half a million to over a million in the course of the eighteenth century. Edinburgh and Glasgow had similar growth rates, with Glasgow the faster-growing of the two. By the close of the eighteenth century both cities had reached populations of some , each. The population of Dublin went through a similar increase in size: from , to , at the outset of the eighteenth century, it grew to about , by the close of the century (Dickson ). While much of this population growth was at the end of the century and was due to in-migration of people from the surrounding countryside in search of work in the sites of mechanical production, it was also due to a growth in the urban ‘middling orders’ who would have been in charge of enterprises into which labour from the countryside was drawn. .
Grammars for the nation
The union of England and Scotland in led to the dissolution of the Scottish parliament and the transfer of all parliamentary powers to Westminster. The Treaty of Union was greeted in London but was the cause of anti-English riots in Scotland despite the large degree of autonomy which it bestowed on the church and legal system in Scotland. The union with Ireland was not to follow until almost a century later, coming into force on January . However, the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the eighteenth century made a single nation of the entire island of Britain and one of the spin-offs of this single nation was an increased desire to have a single form of English across Britain. An anonymous publication from makes this point in its title: The Many Advantages of a Good Language to any Nation with an Examination of the present State of our own: And also, an Essay towards correcting some Things that are wrong in it. At once there is the view that a single nation requires a single language and that what was available at the time was insufficient. This language should be rational and clearly structured: without something of a regular Grammatical Way of joining Words together, there can be no such thing as an intelligible Language. For a Language is not bare Words and Names put together without Art
10 Eighteenth-century English
and Reason; but words in such Construction, that Persons, and common Things, and their Qualities, Actions, States, Agreements and Disagreements, may be understood according to their Number and Times. Words spoken without the Benefit of the rational Construction, are not Sense, or the Voice of Reason, but Confusion. (Anon. : f.) The deficiencies of English are repeatedly emphasised in the many language studies of the eighteenth century; indeed it is this view which usually offered justification for each new book on the English language. The disarray in which English was at the time was to some a reflection of a general social malaise (or so they would have others see it). Thomas Sheridan, the selfappointed Irish authority on the English language, took this stance early on in his publishing career and in sought to put himself in a position to offer remedies for the then dire situation. Sheridan was not someone to mince words and in his British Education or, the Sources of the Disorders of Great Britain () he spells out in no uncertain terms what he feels is wrong and needs to be done; just consider the long subtitle to this work: Being an Essay Towards Proving, that the Immorality, Ignorance, and False Taste, which so Generally Prevail, are the Natural and Necessary Consequences of the Present Defective System of Education with an Attempt to Shew, that a Revival of the Art of Speaking, and the Study of our own Language, Might Contribute, in a Great Measure, to the Cure of those Evils. The notion that a grammar should serve the political entity of Great Britain and Ireland is evident in the eighteenth century. Richard Johnson () talked of his Grammatical Commentaries as ‘being an Apparatus to a new National Grammar’. A special place in this field must be accorded to Scottish and Irish authors. Growing up in the Celtic regions would have put them at a social disadvantage compared to their writer contemporaries from England. Thus many of them were more than anxious to gain acceptance from the centre of power in the south-east of England. On occasions the Celtic writers in fact recommend themselves as more linguistically aware than those in England. Here is the Scotsman William Kenrick commenting on this issue: It has been remarked as a phenomenon in the literary world, that, while our learned fellow subjects of Scotland and Ireland are making frequent attempts to ascertain, and fix a standard, to the pronunciation of the English tongue, the natives of England themselves seem to be little anxious either for the honour or improvement of their own language: for such the investigation and establishment of a rational criterion of English orthoepy, must certainly be considered. (Kenrick : i) By ‘rational criterion of English orthoepy’ Kenrick would seem to have meant a consistent and unambiguous means of indicating the pronunciation of English. As a Scot and fellow Celt, Kenrick supported the linguistic efforts
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 11
of Thomas Sheridan. When considering how to indicate pronunciation using the spelling of English, he remarks that ‘The celebrated Mr Sheridan has avoided falling into this erroneous practice [of not having a consistent orthography], and very judiciously proposes to distinguish the sound of words by certain typographical marks to be placed over particular syllables (Kenrick : iv). Kenrick is not alone among Scottish authors in advocating uniformity and consistency in the use of English throughout Great Britain. His fellow Scot, James Buchanan, was equally zealous in his efforts (Emsley ). The title of his book shows this unequivocally: An Essay Towards Establishing a Standard for an Elegant and Uniform Pronunciation of the English Language Through the British Dominions. .
Training for public speaking
The idea of a single nation and a single form of language emanating from its centre is a predominant theme in eighteenth-century writings. These are public matters and the use of language in public was an integral part of the national language complex. Hence, training for speaking in public was a concern which was addressed in print; consider, for example, the title of John Mason’s An Essay on Elocution, Or, Pronunciation intended chiefly for the Assistance of those who instruct others in the Art of Reading. And of those who are often called to speak in Publick (). The major language commentators of the time were concerned with elocution and some of them published dedicated books on the subject. Notable among these is Thomas Sheridan’s Course of Lectures on Elocution () and John Walker’s Elements of Elocution (). The tradition continued across the threshold to the nineteenth century with Samuel Whyte’s An Introductory Essay on the Art of Reading, and Speaking in Public () and William Graham’s Principles of Elocution (). Indeed one can note that in Benjamin Smart’s The Practice of Elocution was already in its fourth edition. .
What is publicly acceptable?
It is only a small step from the effectiveness of public speech to the acceptance of its pronunciation and with this step one reaches that concern of eighteenth-century authors which has had the most enduring effect in English society, namely a concentration more on the form of speech than on its content. First and foremost, the form of speech encompassed pronunciation with grammar a good second. The shift in emphasis can be recognised by considering what authors highlight in their discussions. For instance, it is significant that Mason (: –) in his list of points about what constitutes a bad and what a good pronunciation does not mention any social factors, such as acceptance
12 Eighteenth-century English
of one’s accent in public. This changes with Sheridan who a little more than a decade later in his A Course of Lectures on Elocution () is concerned with specifying a standard for English, a lasting concern of this author; consider his General Dictionary of the English Language (), published towards the end of his life, of which Sheridan says that ‘one main object of [the dictionary] is to establish a plain and permanent standard of pronunciation’. .
Appropriation or plagiarism
To do something better than one’s predecessors was motivation enough for publishing in the seventeenth century. In the following century it was not necessary to have recourse to this justification. Indeed many books dealing with more or less the same subject matter were simply published, perhaps with the expectation of the authors that the reading public would see their efforts as an improvement on those of their predecessors, but it was not necessary to specify this in the title of a book or in a preface to it. However, there are cases where the desire to improve on the works on one’s predecessors was openly declared. By the tenth anniversary of Thomas Sheridan’s death in , Stephen Jones’s Sheridan Improved: A General Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language was already in its third edition. Similar works continued well into the nineteenth century; consider for instance, Benjamin Smart’s Walker Remodelled: A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language which was published in . This practice perhaps goes to show that the authors quoted in the titles of such works were household names and the mention of their names would evoke a feeling of both familiarity and authority in readers. It is true that certain authors had become well known as authorities in their fields and were acknowledged as such by others. For instance, Sedger (: v) stated, some years after Lowth’s grammar had first appeared, that ‘Dr. Lowth […] contributed more to promote the knowledge of English Grammar than any other’. Using precisely the same title of an already published work was not taboo either. In William Johnston brought out A Pronouncing and Spelling Dictionary of the English Language. In John Burn published a book with a very similar title. Only three years after Sheridan produced his Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language, William Kenrick published a book with precisely the same title (Kenrick ). It is true that this was originally prefaced to his dictionary of , but so was Sheridan’s grammar which was published in , one year after the dictionary. Does this practice count as plagiarism? It is difficult to be certain in this period. Generally, authors acknowledge the sources of data which they replicate in a wholesale manner. For instance, the anonymous Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language () gives explicit recognition of sources
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 13
and predecessors in specifying that ‘the accentuation [is] adjusted according to SHERIDAN and WALKER and the orthography [is] chiefly taken from JOHNSON ’. It may well be that the mention of established authors was a guarantee of quality and hence helped book sales.
Variation in language
The linguistic study of dialectal variation is generally associated with the rise of historical linguistics in the nineteenth century and with the activities of such scholars as Henry Sweet (–) and somewhat later Joseph Wright (–). The lack of academic concern with dialects could be put down to the absence of a scientific framework for the study of language in general. But there is more to this issue than meets the eye. Looking at the eighteenth century one recognises a deliberate neglect of regional features in English (Beal, this volume), indeed of severe condemnation of all traits of language which do not correspond to ‘standard’ usage, whatever the latter might mean exactly. An awareness of dialect differences in England goes back at least to the Middle Ages: Geoffrey Chaucer used Northern English for the purpose of character portrayal in The Reeve’s Tale (Wales : ). The dichotomy between north and south is referred to by later authors on language, notably George Puttenham (d.) who, in his The Arte of English Poesie (), states his preference for ‘our Southerne English’ which is the ‘usual speech at court and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles and not much aboue’ (Mugglestone [] a: ). Somewhat earlier John Hart (d.) in An Orthographie of English () had offered a reformed spelling of English so that ‘the rude countrie Englishman’ can speak the language ‘as the best sort use to speak it’. Furthermore, there was an awareness of the kinds of English spoken in the Celtic regions. Indeed Shakespeare in the ‘Four Nations Scene’ in Henry V uses eye dialect to characterise the speech of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish characters. Given this awareness of dialects one might imagine that a concern with them would be obvious in works of the seventeenth century. There would seem to be two attitudes here. One is neutral with regard to dialect and the other decidedly in favour of southern speech. John Hart spoke of ‘the flower of the English tongue’, referring to the language of the court in London. About a century later, Christopher Cooper in his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae () stated that he regarded London speech as ‘the best dialect’, the ‘most pure and correct’. But, significantly, he was liberal towards variation: ‘Everyone pronounceth them [= words] as himself pleases’. Another study worth mentioning here is by John Ray (, A Collection of English Words not Generally Used ) in which he mentions regional pronunciation, but without evaluative comments.
14 Eighteenth-century English
The more neutral attitude can be recognised in the detailed entries which some authors offer in dictionaries of English of the seventeenth century. Here is William Bullokar on dialect: Dialect, a difference of some words, or pronunciation in any language as in England the Dialect or manner of speech of the North, is different from that in the South, and the Western dialect differing from them both. The Grecians had five especiall Dialects: as in The property of speech in Athens: . in Ionia; . In Doris; . In Eolia: and . that manner of speech which was generally used of them all. So every country hath commonly in divers parts thereof some difference of language, which is called the Dialect of that place. (Bullokar, , entry for Dialect, [no pagination]) His entry is echoed later in the century by Thomas Blount who has an even more comprehensive definition: Dialect. is a manner of speech peculiar to some part of a Country or people, and differing from the manner used by other parts or people, yet all using the same Radical Language, for the main or substance of it. In England, the Dialect, or manner of speech in the North, is different from that in the South; and the Western differs from both. As in this example: At London we say, I would eat more cheese if I had it, the Northern man saith, Ay sud eat mare cheese gin ay hader, and the Western man saith, Chud ee’at more chiese on chad it: Chud ee’at more cheese un ich had it. The Grecians had five especial Dialects … So every Country commonly hath in diverse parts of it some difference of language, which is called the Dialect or Subdialect of that place. In Italy, there are above eight several dialects or Subdialects as … (Blount, , entry for Dialect, [no pagination]). Blount is remarkable in that he gives examples to illustrate different dialects of English. However, he was not followed by others. Some time later (), Elisha Coles published An English Dictionary in which he sees dialects as ‘Logick, speech; also a particular Propriety or Idiom in the same speech’ with no reference to regions whatever. Some authors do at least specify that dialects are found in different parts of a country, for example John Kersey who in his Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum () defines dialect as ‘a Propriety of manner of Speech in any Language, peculiar to each several Province or Country’. This reference to region is also found in Thomas Spence () who says of dialect that it is ‘A polite manner of speaking, or diversity made in any language by the inhabitants in any part of the country where it is spoken; stile; speech’ (The Grand Repository of the English Language, entry for Dialect, [no pagination]). But the great lexicographers of the eighteenth century pay no attention to the regional essence of dialect, at most referring to dialects of classical Greek. Instead they concentrate on its meaning as a manner of expression. Here is the definition offered by Johnson in his authoritative Dictionary of the English Language ():
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 15
DIALECT .
The subdivision of a language; as the Attic, Doric, Ionic, Æolic dialects. . Stile; manner of expression. When themselves do practise that whereof they write, they change their dialect; and those words they shun, as if there were in them some secret sting. Hooker, b. v. s. . . Language; speech. Both Thomas Sheridan and John Walker are content to adopt this definition and repeat it, for instance ‘Dialect. The subdivision of a language; stile, manner of expression; language, speech’ (Sheridan, , A General Dictionary of the English Language, entry for Dialect, [no pagination]). Both Sheridan and Walker had no time for dialectal variation in speech as this was in direct conflict with their ideology of a standard in English, hence their derisory comments on regional speech in Britain and Ireland. But if one leaves aside the prescriptivism of both Sheridan and Walker then another motivation is recognisable in the neglect of dialect in the eighteenth century. To see this, one can return briefly to Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie where one finds the following: ‘After a speach is fully fashioned to the common vnderstanding, & accepted by consent of a whole countrey & nation, it is called a language’. This is again the view of language as a unifying factor, in this case among the different regions of Britain. Here we have a very early reference to a ‘national language’, a notion which was picked up by later authors, see section . above. Attention to dialects would not be reconcilable with the desire for a ‘national language’. In the course of the eighteenth century notions of national language and standard language would seem to have merged, at least for many authors. The variation which was to be suppressed was regional (Beal, this volume) with the parallel valorisation of English in the south-east. As the variation was first and foremost phonetic, especially for speakers whose speech was otherwise non-local, one’s accent became an indicator of one’s relative standardness as a speaker (Beal a, b), something which has remained the case to the present day (Beal ). Standard pronunciation was identified with the pronunciation of the socially higher classes in London and its surroundings. In speech, as in other matters, it was deemed natural to ‘approve as elegant what is customary among our superiors’ (James Beattie in Mugglestone [] a: ). However, standard pronunciation was a fluid entity in itself. Nonetheless, it could be specified sufficiently to delimit speakers with this pronunciation from those without it. Thus the standard became a yardstick with which to measure others and very quickly became a prerequisite for social advancement. The view that mastering the standard improves one’s lot in life becomes increasingly apparent during the eighteenth century. Some of the
16 Eighteenth-century English
authors of this era explicitly recognise this, for example female grammarians such as Anne Fisher, Ellin Devis and Ellenor Fenn, as well as male authors such as Thomas Spence and William Cobbett. The prescription of the standard meant that the regional accents were condemned accordingly: ‘a strong provincial accent … destroys all idea of elegance’ (Roscoe in Mugglestone [] a: ). Indeed the more the standard became an instrument of social inclusion or exclusion, the more it lost its geographical basis in the south-east. By the early nineteenth century the standard was being defined as a form of speech which is characterised by the lack of just this regional basis. Consider the remarks of Benjamin Smart in Walker Remodelled (): ‘The common standard dialect is that in which all marks of a particular place and residence are lost, and nothing appears to indicate any other habit of intercourse than with the well-bred and wellinformed, wherever they be found’. This is not far from what contemporary sociolinguists regard a ‘standard’ to be: ‘an idea in the mind rather than a reality – a set of abstract norms to which actual usage will conform to a greater or lesser extent’ (Milroy and Milroy : ).
Linguistic insecurity: intention or side-effect?
Beal (this volume) rightly remarks that there was a change during the first half of the eighteenth century in the assessment of pronunciation. While Defoe in the s could remark non-judgementally on the attitude of the Northumbrians to features of their pronunciation, after the mid eighteenth century comments are far more critical. A vocabulary was adopted by authors on language which was quite censorious. Some usages were praised but more were condemned as not part of received southern English usage. Although ‘vulgarisms’ and ‘provincialisms’ are lampooned by commentators such as Sheridan and Walker, there is little attempt to specify just what is meant by the standard pronunciation. The standard would seem to have arisen not through an explicit specification of what it entailed, but rather by a process of exclusion. In a way, the standard pronunciation arose by default: it was what remained after all the ‘unacceptable’ features had been weeded out. One could ask why the late eighteenth-century commentators did not attempt a specification of the standard rather than an exclusion of features
This kind of language was to continue through the nineteenth century; consider the titles of such works as W. H. Savage, The Vulgarisms and Improprieties of the English Language, London (). Attitude to language use outside the British Isles could be notably different. For instance, Noah Webster complained about the self-appointed persons ‘who dictate to a nation the rules of speaking, with the same imperiousness as a tyrant gives orders to his vassals’. Webster also notes that ‘even well-bred people and scholars, often surrender their right of private judgement to these literary governors’.
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 17 Table .. Expressions of praise (positive) and condemnation (negative) in eighteenth-century language studies Positive
elegant, polite, refined, cultivated
Negative
vulgar, ignorant, inaccurate, uneducated, shameful, disgraceful, glaring error, monstrous pronunciation
they disapproved of. One of the difficulties lay in the variation which existed with speakers whom these authors would have approved of. Walker not infrequently sees himself in a quandary given that the established classes of English society used pronunciations which he would not have favoured himself, for example the variation in the pronunciation of great – with [eː] or [iː]: . Ea is pronounced like long slender a in bare, in the following words: bear, bearer, break, forbear, forswear, great, pear, steak, swear, to tear, wear. . The word great is sometimes pronounced as if written greet, generally by people of education, and almost universally in Ireland; but this is contrary to the fixed and settled practice in England. That this is an affected pronunciation, will be perceived in a moment by pronouncing this word in the phrase, Alexander the great; for those who pronounce the word greet, in other cases, will generally in this rhyme it with fate. It is true the ee is the regular sound of this diphthong; but this slender sound of e has, in all probability, given way to that of a as deeper and more expressive of the epithet great. (Walker : , A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language) When compared to Sheridan one can see that Walker is more systematic: he insists on the value of ‘analogy’ (the one-to-one relationship of sound and spelling) in determining what item in a situation of variation should be preferred. This can be seen with syllable-final /-r/ which was disappearing in south-east English in the eighteenth century. In general, both Sheridan and Walker condemn loss of phonetic substance which is indicated orthographically and see this as a clear sign of vulgarity and slovenliness. ‘Vulgar’ is one of the key labels used by the eighteenth-century prescriptivists (Beal, this volume). Walker is particularly keen to point out what he thinks merits this label. For instance, given that provincial speakers are required to look to the capital for phonetic guidance, any ‘vulgarisms’ used by the inhabitants are especially to be condemned. In his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary a list of ‘faults of the Londoners’ is given, faults of people, who, he argues, ‘as they are the models of pronunciation to the distant provinces, ought to be the more scrupulously correct’ (: xii). Three
18 Eighteenth-century English
of these ‘faults’ are interesting with regard to the history of London English in the last two centuries: SECOND FAULT – Pronouncing w for v, and inversely. The pronunciation of v for w, and more frequently of w for v, among the inhabitants of London, and those not always of the lower order, is a blemish of the first magnitude. THIRD FAULT – Not sounding h after w. The aspirate h is often sunk, particularly in the capital, where we do not find the least distinction of sound between while and wile, whet and wet, where and were, &c. FOURTH FAULT – Not sounding h where it ought to be sounded, and inversely. A still worse habit than the last prevails, chiefly among the people of London, that of sinking the h at the beginning of words where it ought to be sounded, and of sounding it, either where it is not seen, or where it ought to be sunk. The ‘second fault’ listed above is no longer present, nor is the ‘third fault’, though it is found in conservative varieties of English in Scotland and Ireland. The ‘fourth fault’ has since become a prominent marker of urban vernaculars in Britain. By the mid eighteenth century ‘h’-dropping had been singled out as a particularly ‘vulgar’ trait of English pronunciation. Thomas Sheridan in his Course of Lectures on Elocution (: –) offers the following advice to those seeking to reinstate initial /h/ in their speech: ‘The best method of curing this [‘h’-dropping, RH] will be to read over frequently all the words beginning with the letter H and those beginning with Wh in the dictionary, and push them out with the full force of the breath, “till an habit is obtained of aspirating strongly”. ’ Apart from the features, the ‘types’, the phonetic instances, the ‘tokens’, are of interest because many of them reflect usages which failed to establish themselves in standard British English. For instance, contrary to presentday usage, Walker suggests that hospital and humble are properly pronounced without initial /h-/ (Walker [] : ). The upshot of all this criticism and brow-beating of the public was to create an atmosphere of linguistic insecurity. The message from the prescriptivists was clear: English as spoken by nearly everyone was in a perilous state and people needed to act to improve their language. But Sheridan, Walker and other authors like them do not offer a clear solution to what they see as a serious problem. Instead they are content to criticise at every turn without offering an overall remedy. However deficient this stance, it did ensure them continuing attention from an audience plagued by linguistic doubt. Of the two authorities discussed here, it is Walker who was to
Attitudes and concerns in eighteenth-century English 19
become the authority on English usage throughout the entire nineteenth century. It is difficult now to imagine the esteem in which Walker’s dictionary was held, but the very many editions during the nineteenth century testify clearly to this. At the outset of the nineteenth century it was claimed to be ‘a glorious monument of human genius’ (Russel in Mugglestone [] a: ) and by the last third of the nineteenth century it could still be claimed that ‘the name of WALKER, as one of our earliest orthoepists, is known and duly appreciated wherever the English language is spoken’ (Peter Nuttall in Mugglestone [] a: ). Disputed grammatical features When it comes to grammar one cannot find quite the same tenor of condemnation which characterises the comments on English pronunciation. It is true that of all eighteenth-century grammarians, Robert Lowth has the greatest reputation for prescriptivism in the popular imagination, and all too often in the academic imagination as well. But it is to Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s merit to have shown that this view of Lowth is two-dimensional. In her contribution to this volume (Tieken-Boon van Ostade []) she has demonstrated that a more nuanced view of Lowth is called for. Posterity has readily seen him as the embodiment of eighteenth-century prescriptivism; whether this assessment is justified or not is a moot point. Notwithstanding the historical accuracy of later views of Lowth, prescriptivism clearly has had a grip on English grammar since the eighteenth century. There are many prohibitions which can be traced to this time. Among these are the following three which are discussed in detail in Tieken-Boon van Ostade [], this volume. (i) Double negation They do not want no support. (ii) Preposition stranding Something I am delighted about. (iii) Split infinitives He advised them to seriously consider the matter. The second and third of the above features have had a precarious existence down to the present day. Preposition stranding (Yáñez-Bouza a, b, Percy, this volume) is more or less the rule today though it can still be avoided in formal styles, as can split infinitives (Fischer ). Double negation disappeared entirely from standard English in the nineteenth century
Just why Walker won out over Sheridan in this respect cannot be determined with certainty. But Sheridan’s Irishness was clearly a disadvantage. Samuel Johnson was annoyed at an Irishman pronouncing on the English language and Victorian England would certainly have favoured an Englishman over an Irishman as a guide to correct usage in language.
20 Eighteenth-century English
and is now seen as a purely dialectal feature. The relegation to non-standard English is a fate which many grammatical features experienced. For instance, double comparatives are no longer found in standard English (Schlüter ; González-Díaz , , ) though they are amply attested dialectally. Change among grammatical constructions continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, structures involving nonfinite verb forms (Molencki ) and sentential complements (Fanego, this volume) underwent subtle shifts in the past two centuries, but were not the object of prescriptive comment in the eighteenth century.
Conclusion
In general one can say that during the codification of English in the eighteenth century one variant was given preference and the others suppressed. This applied in nearly all cases in phonetics, though the variants given preference were not necessarily those which are found today, for instance the CLOTH lexical set (Wells : f.) now has a short vowel in Received Pronunciation. In grammar, codification led to strictures being applied which in many but not all cases led to the demise (in the standard) of one structure in favour of another, for example double negation. In other cases there is variation, for example with preposition stranding, and this has in turn led to insecurity among many speakers about which structure is to be preferred in standard speech and writing. Indeed on the whole one can point to linguistic insecurity as a lasting, if unintended, legacy of the eighteenth century and one which still characterises the relationship between vernacular and formal forms of English.
2
Prescriptivism and the suppression of variation JOA N C . BEA L University of Sheffield
Towards a standard of pronunciation
It is generally agreed that Received Pronunciation as a distinct and widely recognised sociolect did not exist before the nineteenth century and was not named as such until Ellis used the phrase to describe a pronunciation used ‘all over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality’ (– : ). However, as Raymond Hickey has reminded us in the introduction, the notion that one type of pronunciation was superior to others had been around at least since the sixteenth century, when most commentators broadly agreed with Puttenham () that the ‘best’ pronunciation is ‘the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles’. What is lacking from these early accounts is any prescription or proscription of specific features: readers are told where and from whom the most prestigious pronunciation can be heard, but are not advised to adopt or avoid any particular sequence of phonemes. In the early seventeenth century Alexander Gil provides what Dobson acknowledges to be ‘the best account of seventeenth-century dialectal pronunciation’ (: ), giving examples of Northern, Western and Eastern pronunciations, but recommending that only the ‘Common Dialect’ should be used, at least in prose. He uses terms such as ‘barbarous’ to refer to regional pronunciations, and reserves his strongest condemnation for a social group which he calls the ‘Mopsae’, who appear to be advanced speakers carrying forward changes ‘from below’ which have their geographical origin to the East of London. However, even Gil allowed a certain licence to poets and, in setting out his recommendations for reformed spelling, suggested that this may vary according to dialect. Towards the end of the century Christopher Cooper, considered by Dobson (: ) to be the ‘greatest’ of the seventeenth-century phoneticians, included a two-page section on ‘Barbarous Dialect’ in which he uses semi-phonetic spelling to indicate pronunciations ‘not sounded after the best dialect’ (Sundby : ). These include chimley for ‘chimney’ and sarvice for ‘service’: pronunciations which would be proscribed in the eighteenth century. However, Cooper’s list is not long and it is aimed at the reader who ‘would write more exactly’: the list is there primarily 21
22 Eighteenth-century English
to warn against being misled by ‘Barbarous Pronunciation’ into misspelling the words, which is perhaps why Cooper here uses semi-phonetic spelling rather than describing the ‘barbarous’ sounds. This lack of explicit prescription or proscription in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century accounts of English pronunciation is not surprising if we consider, on the one hand, the main objective of these texts and, on the other, the stage that standardisation of English had reached by this time. Orthoepists of this period were mainly concerned with spelling reform and wrote about the ‘best’ English mainly because a more ‘phonetic’ spelling would need to represent a particular set of pronunciations. In choosing to represent the speech of the Court and the London area, they were reflecting an existing consensus as to what was the most prestigious sociolect. There had been, as yet, no real attempt to specify what features of pronunciation made up this ‘best’ speech. This is exactly what could be expected of a period when, in Haugen’s terms, selection of a norm had taken place, and that norm had been accepted throughout the country, but as yet there had been no codification of the forms that characterised it (Haugen : –). Haugen defines codification as a process that leads to ‘minimal variation in form’ (: ), and it is generally agreed that, while the selection and acceptance of a spoken norm took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, codification began in the eighteenth century, a period often referred to in histories of English as ‘the age of correctness’. Milroy and Milroy point out that ‘the eighteenth century was the successful culmination of a long process. Its achievement was to establish, through codification, a much more widespread consciousness of a relatively uniform “correct” English than had been possible before’ (: ). They argue that access to the grammars and dictionaries which embody and transmit codification intensifies prescription as these books come to be regarded as authorities. While the idea of standardisation had been around at least since Caxton’s () lament against ‘dyuersite and change of langage’, the implementation of a standard was a long process which gathered momentum in the eighteenth century. Although ‘prescriptive’ grammars of English, such as Greenwood’s An Essay Towards a Practical English Grammar () were being published throughout the eighteenth century, the codification of pronunciation was not a primary concern until quite late in the century. As Charles Jones (: ) points out, Greenwood includes a section on ‘Orthoepy’, defined as ‘the Art of true Speaking’, but his proscriptions are on the same level as Cooper‘s ‘Barbarous Pronunciations’, scanty and concentrated on those that suggest divergence from the ‘true’ spelling: ‘we must not pronounce stomp, shet, sarvice, tunder, gove, eend, ommost but stamp, shut, service, tinder, gave, end, almost’ (: ). Elsewhere in his Essay, he warns against pronunciations of specific letters that he considers incorrect, thus under ‘O’: It is sometimes sounded like obscure U, as when we carelessly pronounce Condition, London, Compasse, as if they were written Cundition, Lundon,
Prescriptivism and the suppression of variation 23
Cumpasse, &c. And so likewise some pronounce come, done, some, Son, Love, Dove, as if written cume, dune, sume &c.’ (: ) The ‘obscure u’, probably something similar to schwa, was to be a particular bugbear for eighteenth-century commentators because its use contravened the principle articulated by Johnson that ‘for pronunciation, the best general rule is, to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written word’ (). In the early eighteenth century, as in the seventeenth, ‘deviation from the written word’ seemed to be the principal reason for proscribing pronunciations, and comments of this kind are scattered among works whose primary focus is elsewhere. Referring to the period –, Jones notes that ‘one has to trawl through the many and various spelling books, grammars and treatises of the period to find statements which can be interpreted as commenting on the social value of pronunciation’ (: ). .
Codification of a ‘good’ pronunciation, – A change in attitude: the ‘snob value of a good pronunciation’
In his monograph on the history of Standard English pronunciation, Holmberg wrote that ‘it is in the eighteenth century that the snob value of a good pronunciation began to be recognised’ (: ). However, close examination of a wider range of eighteenth-century texts than was available to Holmberg reveals that precise prescription of a ‘good’ pronunciation, and, by implication, proscription of ‘bad’ ones, really begins in the second half of the century. Lynda Mugglestone tells us that ‘five times as many works on elocution appeared between and than had done so in the years before ’ ([] a: ). Likewise, Jones refers to the occurrence between and of ‘a sea-change in the way linguistic usage is perceived to relate to criteria such as social status and place of geographical origin’ (: ). Most commentators have attributed this change to social and economic factors in a period when greater social mobility created a class of upwardly mobile speakers prone to what Labov (: –) terms ‘linguistic insecurity’. Many late eighteenth-century authors acknowledge this, advertising their work as suitable for those engaged in ‘business’ or ‘trade’. Withers writes that ‘the importance of a correct Mode of Expression in Business is sufficiently obvious’ and recommends his work to ‘Shopmen, Clerks and all who are engaged in the Transactions of commercial Life’ (: ), noting on the same page that Britain is ‘a Country where the Industrious may become affluent, and the Affluent ascend to the chief Employments of the State’. It was precisely the newly affluent, now able to ‘ascend to the chief Employments of the State’, who both felt the need for and could afford the elocution lessons and printed guides which were to proliferate in the last few decades of the eighteenth century.
24 Eighteenth-century English
One of the keywords used by late-eighteenth-century commentators on language is ‘vulgar’, which appears ninety-six times in John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (), almost always with reference to the pronunciation of the lower classes. The upwardly mobile would be conscious of their ‘vulgar’ origins and anxious to avoid being mistaken for members of the class below them, from which they had risen. The elocutionist Thomas Sheridan recognises this when he writes that ‘pronunciation … is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people, or members of the beau monde’ (: ). On the other hand, linguistic signs of ‘vulgarity’ might create a bar to social mobility. Thomas Spence, an autodidact of humble origin who dedicated his life to schemes for improving the lot of ‘the laborious part of the people’ (: Sig Br), asks: Why should People be laughed at all their lives for betraying their vulgar education, when the Evil is so easily remedied. How ridiculous it is to hear People that can read saying ‘Any Think – A Horange – Idear – Noar.’ (The Giant Killer, or Anti-Landlord No. , August ) Spence thought that this ‘evil’ could be ‘remedied’ simply by teaching the lower classes to read by means of a phonetic alphabet. It is worth noting that the pronunciations singled out here are precisely those that depart from the pronunciation suggested by the orthography:
pronounced [ɪŋk] rather than [ɪŋ], possibly as a hypercorrection of [ɪn]; /h/ added to a word beginning with a vowel, again a hypercorrection, this time of ‘h-dropping’; and intrusive /r/. Spence seems less aware of regional variation, but is concerned that the literate poor should not be perceived as uneducated because of their speech. As a notorious Radical, Spence was on the side of the poor, but others were less charitable. Charles Coote writes: Persons of vulgar breeding, instead of exhibiting any traces of improvement derived from the frequent hearing of such as excel in this respect, invariably pursue the same routine of barbarism and inaccuracy in their expression, neglectful of every opportunity of rectifying their taste in that particular. (: iii) In other words, the lower classes are to blame for their speech being ‘incorrect’ because they could easily emulate their betters, if only they took the trouble. Walker (: xii) considered his ‘countrymen, the cockneys’ particularly reprehensible because, living in London, they had access to the ‘best’ speakers, and so had no excuse for their ‘vulgar’ pronunciation. in e.g. cup. Before the seventeenth century, reflexes of Middle English (ME) short u and ‘shortened’ ME ō as in cup, put, good, blood would all have been pronounced with something like [Ʊ] throughout England. The development which Wells describes as ‘the FOOT-STRUT split’ (: ) is first noticed by seventeenth-century orthoepists who ‘distinguish the ŭ of cut from that of put’ (Dobson : ). These orthoepists were presumably reporting developments in the South of England, for the lack of a FOOT-STRUT split is one of the most salient markers of northern English speech today. However, the ‘northernness’ of this feature (not, note, the ‘southernness’ of the split) was not remarked on until the eighteenth century, when the earliest evidence comes from John Kirkby, a native of Cumbria, who notes that his ‘seventh vowel’, found in skull, gun, supper, figure, nature, ‘is scarce known to the Inhabitants of the North, who always use the short sound of the eighth vowel’ (as in good, stood, foot)’ (: ). Apart from the assumption that the southern pronunciation is the norm, Kirkby has nothing derogatory to say about this, but at the end of a section in which he has outlined the faults of the Irish, Scots, Welsh and Cockneys, Walker singles this feature out for particular opprobrium: [T]hose at a considerable distance from the capital do not only mispronounce many words taken separately, but they scarcely pronounce with purity a single word, syllable or letter. If the short sound of the letter u in trunk, sunk etc., differ from the sound of that letter in the northern parts of England, where they sound it like the u in bull, and nearly as if the words were written troonk, soonk, etc., it necessarily follows that every word where that letter occurs must by these provincials be mispronounced. (: xiii) Several northern orthoepists show no evidence of a FOOT-STRUT split, confirming Kirkby’s observation that the equivalent of RP /Λ/ was ‘scarce known to Inhabitants of the North’. Thomas Spence, a native of Newcastle, has only one ‘short’ symbol, which he uses in cup, cut, trunk, and so on as well as bull, put, and so on. Likewise William Ward, from Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, tells us that ‘U is commonly short before two or more Consonants; as in stubble, rust, percussion; and before single Consonants at the end of Words, as put, thus, rub’ (: ). Kenrick misinterprets Ward’s remark as evidence of what looks like hypercorrection: It is further observable of this sound, that the people of Ireland, Yorkshire, and many other provincials mistake its use; applying it to words which in London are pronounced with the u full as in no. of the Dictionary: as bull, wool, put, push, all of which they pronounce as the inhabitants of should be silent: Heir, heiress, herb, herbage, honest, honesty, honestly, honour, honorable, honorably, hospital, hostler, hour, hourly, humble, humbly, humbles, humour, humourist, humorous, humorously, humoursome (). Neither Walker nor Sheridan describe ‘h-dropping’ as ‘vulgar’: their chief objection seems to be that it does not accord with the spelling, and so can only be allowed in a closed set of words of French or Latin origin. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (: –), late eighteenth-century authorities such as Sheridan, Walker and Elphinston disagree as to the exact membership of this set, Walker’s list being the most extensive. It is noticeable, though, that a list compiled with reference to twenty-first-century RP would be much shorter: herb, humble, humour and their derivatives are all now pronounced with initial /h/ in this variety. It would appear that Sheridan and Walker are providing very early evidence for the salience of /h/-dropping in the late eighteenth century, and that the stigmatisation of this feature as the most reprehensible of vulgarisms really belongs to the nineteenth century. . should be pronounced with /аi/ and which with /ɔi/, Kenrick warns his reader to steer between the Scylla of vulgarity and the Charybdis of affectation: A vicious custom indeed prevails, in common conversation, of sinking the first broad sound intirely, or rather of converting both into the sound of i or y … marked … XVI in the Dictionary, thus oil, toil are frequently pronounced exactly like isle, tile. This is a fault which the Poets are inexcusable for promoting, by making such words rhime to each other. And yet there are some words so written, which by long use, have almost lost their true sound, such are boil, join and many others; which it would now appear affectation to pronounce otherwise than bile, jine. We find, indeed, that this mode of pronunciation becomes every day more general. (: ) In most cases where a choice is made between variant pronunciations, as with grammatical and orthographical variants, principles of regularity and analogy tended to be invoked by late eighteenth-century authorities. An example of this is Walker’s explanation for his recommendation of the pronunciation /su:t/ for soot in defiance of the recommendations of several of his fellow orthoepists and elocutionists and the chimney-sweeps themselves: Notwithstanding I have Mr Sheridan, Mr Nares, Dr Kenrick, W. Johnston, Mr Perry and the professors of the Black Art themselves, against me in the pronunciation of this word, I have ventured to prefer the regular pronunciation to the irregular. The adjective sooty has its regular sound among the correctest speakers; which has induced Mr Sheridan to mark it so; but nothing can be more absurd than to mark the substantive in one manner and the adjective deriving from it by adding y, in another. The other Orthoepists, therefore, who pronounce both these words with the oo like ŭ, are more consistent than Mr Sheridan, though, upon the whole, not so right. (: no pagination) Walker believes the ‘regular’ pronunciation of the digraph to be /uː/ and sets out the allowable exceptions in one of the ‘rules’ which appear at the beginning of his dictionary: ‘the sound of this diphthong [sic] is regular, except in a few words. It is pronounced long in moon, soon, fool, rood, food, mood &c. This is its regular sound’ (: ). He goes on to specify that it is pronounced with ‘a shorter sound corresponding to the u in bull [= /Ʊ/] in the words wool, wood, good, hood, foot, stood, understood: and these are the only words where this diphthong has this middle sound’ and that ‘it has the sound of the short u [= /Λ/] in the two words blood and flood, rhyming with mud’ (). Here we see how Walker balances the demands of ‘custom’ and ‘analogy’: if a pronunciation is established in the usage of the ‘correctest’ in nasty so high that it sounded almost like nehsti and his comment that this was in order to avoid the ‘vulgar’ [ɑː]. Here, as elsewhere, Walker is describing the ‘received pronunciation’ of his day, even though, in this case, it was not to be included in the repertoire of Received Pronunciation in the following centuries. What, then, is the legacy of the eighteenth-century orthoepists and elocutionists? Their detailed prescriptions and proscriptions certainly give us probably represents [æ] or even a lowered [ɛ]), while Elphinston’s (: ) record of Scots mak, tak, brak, mappel, apel, craddel and sadel forms against English make, take, mapel, appel, cradle and saddel, also seems to point to some kind of low/mid vowel alternation, as do his garden/gairden, yard/yaird, dazzel/dazel, stag/staig and nag/naig contrasts. On the other hand, while Douglas observes that in an item like cradle, speakers are ‘apt to pronounce the a short as in bad, addle, paddle. But it should be pronounced as in shade, glade. Or as ladle’, it is important to note his caveat they will only do this when they are ‘endeavouring to speak properly’. A similar discrepancy arises in the observations of Scot and Douglas concerning the raising to [e] of both etymologically front low mid and low segments. Douglas is careful to suggest that it is only when speakers ‘try to catch the right pronunciation’, ‘aim at propriety’, or are ‘aiming at the improvement of their pronunciation’ that they will give a high mid [e] pronunciation to stressed vowel in items such as dragon, famine, camel, talent and several others (Jones : ). Scot shows nothing of this tendency, nor does he exemplify the commonly attested contemporary Scots characteristic of [ɛ, e] raising, most cogently witnessed under Douglas’s Clemency entry, where it is accorded considerable salience as a Scots feature: The e is short, and as in pen, hen, Pembroke. The Scotch pronounce it long, and like their sound to the Greek E; or like the English pronounciation of ay, in pay, say, a in phrase, and eigh in weigh. In delicate, delicacy, indelicacy, &c there is the same difference between the Scotch and English pronunciations of the e. This particularity, like the Scotch manner of pronouncing bought, sought, &c, is among the things which are most striking to an English ear, and are generally laid hold of in ‘taking off the Scotch dialect’, as the phrase is. The fact that Douglas sets aside such a long entry for this word itself attests to the ‘Scotchness’ of the stressed high mid vowel in this item, as does the, noo <ee>, lee , faash , cloaths , tauke , wor <ar>, sarve , jist <e>, fet , yis, spake , folly , ould fen vent <x>, ax <sh>, shelf , chister , dhrop , noting in Camden’s and , and equally and <j>, to be treated as discrete alphabetical symbols and given their own sections within the dictionary? Or were they, as tradition demanded, to function as variant forms of the ‘same’ grapheme? Cawdrey’s implementation of the latter system had, in the early seventeenth century, been matched by the self-evident realities of usage. At this date, and (and and <j>) were indeed positional variants within contemporary textual practice (as in vpon, loue). Though this positional variation was resolved in printed texts after c., eighteenth-century dictionaries could reveal a steadfast inertia in this respect. In Johnson’s dictionary, uttermost and uveous (a word without definition though with an illustrative citation) are followed by volcano and vulgar; vulturine (which possesses a definition but no citation) is followed by uvula. Earlier in the dictionary inwreathe is followed by job, a word of which Johnson was evidently suspicious (‘a low word now much in use’). Ann Fisher drew attention to the anomalies which could result, noting that ‘though the I and J, and also the U and V, are four distinct and different letters, both in name, shape, and sound; yet they have been ever blended and confounded in Dictionaries, to the great entanglement of youth’ (: ii). While Martin provided a clear dictum for better practice (‘a Person should be always able, by means of his Dictionary, to see how every Word is wrote or spelt, according to the current usage of the most approved and polite Writers of the Age’ (: v–vi)), even he failed to follow his own recommendations in this particular context. U and V hence appear as a single alphabetic division in spite of their divergence from that ‘current usage’ Martin formally advocates. Fisher, in contrast, chose to implement a system more reflective of contemporary language practice. ‘In this book’, she wrote of her Accurate New Spelling Dictionary (in its sixth edition by ), ‘they are classed in separate and distinct tables, under each respective letter, occurring in alphabetical order’. If Fisher stresses her ‘originality’ (‘without censuring the performance of others, I shall only point out the originality of my own’ (: ii)), tradition nevertheless continued to inform the positioning of relevant words in many dictionaries. Even in the final decades of the century, Walker () and Browne () provided twenty-four rather than twenty-six alphabetic divisions, thereby continuing – in their headwords – to conflate words beginning with and <j>, and and (even if, in the text itself, the principles of modern spelling were consistently adopted). Orthographical conservatism on other matters could attract widespread criticism. Principle was, for instance, matched by appropriate practice in Martin’s intended reform of ‘the old Way of writing technical Words with the redundant final k, after c’. This has been ‘justly discarded’ by ‘later Writers’, he argued, advocating logic rather than logick, and music rather than musick as reference models (: vi). Johnson, however, in line with his expressed ‘scholar’s reverence for … antiquity’ (: Av), maintained the older patterns intact. The resulting conflict between modern practice and traditional or such as phancy or fancy, phrenzy or frenzy. For Martin the distinction was a matter of register and style (‘Orthography has appointed one Way of spelling a Word in common Language, and another in the learned and polite Diction; thus in ordinary we say and write Fancy, Fantasm, Frensy or Frenzy, &c. for Phantasy, Phantom, Phrenzy &c. according to the original Stile’ (: vi). Variability between public and private norms of spelling compounded these problems. As Osselton () has demonstrated, Johnson’s spelling in his letters did not agree with that he prescribed in his dictionary. Likewise Fisher’s correspondence reveals a range of forms such as ‘Scrutiney’, ‘simular’ (for similar), or indeed ‘Difinition’ which differ from those formally sanctioned by the authority – and headwords – of her lexicographical work. for /θ/, and for /ð/. Principles of semi-phonetic respelling were adopted by other writers such as Buchanan. Kenrick, however, provided a particularly critical review of practice in this respect. He retranscribed a passage from Johnson’s Idler to demonstrate – as (ironically) Johnson’s words here confirmed – the ways in which ‘Langwidsh suffers violins by harsh or by dairing figures, by unshootibl transpozeeshun’ [Language suffers violence by daring figures, by unsuitable transposition]. This was, Kenrick contended, ‘so horribly metamorphosised as to be unintelligible to both the eye and ear’. Indeed, Kenrick argued further, ‘this method of disfiguring the orthography is very prejudicial to the learner; who, in thus being taught how to speak and read, will forget, or never learn, how to write’ (: ii). Kenrick preferred instead numerical diacritics which, linked to individual sounds, provided a less ambiguous system for the requisite indication of sound. Sheridan had already indicated the utility of such a system as his own preferred method, though his dictionary would not appear for another seven years. Kenrick, however, presented a fully-fledged system of numerical notation by which ‘to ascertain the pronunciation’. Headwords were presented with the marking of stress-position and an accompanying transcription not only separated syllables but superimposed on each syllable a number (from one to sixteen) by which the precise quality of vowel-sounds was indicated with reference to a system of keywords (see : v). As in Johnston, consonants were also italicised if voiceless; voiced sounds remained in ordinary script. ‘The speaker who, observing these rules, should to due observation of the sound of syllables, add the true force of the different accents, would necessarily pronounce all English words with propriety’, Kenrick confidently concluded. Given his expressed interests in ‘ascertainment’ (and the inculcation of a ‘standard’ and non-localised speech), he emphasised too the remedial efficacy of this method for ‘the native of Scotland and Ireland, and the provincials of Wales, Yorkshire, and Cornwall’ (: viii). By the end of the eighteenth century – and indeed into the nineteenth – a notation based on numerical diacritics, often accompanied by respelling – had become the most popular system of lexicographical transcription, used by Sheridan and Walker (even if structured rather differently from Kenrick’s sixteen-point system), adopted in Jones (), Browne (), 
