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Bridges Robert
On English Homophones

In deciding whether any obsolete homophone has been lost by its homophony, I should make much of the consideration whether the word had supplied a real need, by naming a conception that no other word so fitly represented; hence its survival in a proverb is of special value, because the words of proverbs are both apt and popular; so that for the disuse of such a word there would seem to be no other cause so likely and sufficient as damage to its signification.

The glossary is relied on to contain, besides its other items, all the obsolete words: the homophones separated out from these will show various grades of obsolescence, and very different values as examples bearing on the question at issue.

Table of homophones taken from among the obsolete words in Cunliffe's 'A New Shakespearean Dictionary,' Blackie, 1910.

ancient: replaced by ensign.

bate = remit.

beck = a bow of the head: preserved in 'becks and nods', mutual loss with beck = rivulet.

boot = to profit: Sh. puns on it, showing that its absurdity was recognized.

bottle (of hay): preserved in proverb.

bourne = streamlet: preserved in sense of limit by the line of Sh. which perhaps destroyed it.

breeze = gadfly.

brief (subs.): now only as a lawyer's brief.

brook (verb).

buck = to steep (linen) in lye.

cote: as in sheepcote.

dole = portion, and dole = sorrow: probably active mutual destruction; we still retain 'to dole out'.

dout.

dun (adj.): now only in combination as dun-coloured.

ear = to plough.

fain and feign: prob. mutual loss due to undefined sense of fain. n.b. fane also obsolete.

feat (adj.) and featly: well lost.

fere.

fit = section of a poem.

flaw: now confined to a flaw in metal, &c.

fleet (verb) and fleeting, as in the sun-dial motto, 'Time like this shade doth fleet and fade.'

foil: common verb, obsolete.

gest: lost in jest.

gird = to scoff: an old well-established word.

gout = a drop of liquor.

gust = taste (well lost).

hale = haul (well lost).

hight = named.

hoar: only kept in combination, hoar-frost, hoar hairs.

hose: lost, though hosier remains, but specialized in garden-hose, &c.

hue: not now used of colour.

imbrued (with blood): prob. lost in brewed.

jade: almost confined to jaded(?).

keel = cool.

list: as in 'as you list'.

mail: now only in combination, coat of mail, &c.

marry!

mated = confused in mind (well lost).

meed: lost in mead = meadow (also obs.) and mead=metheglin.

mete and metely = fitting, also mete in 'mete it out', both lost in meet and meat.

mere (subs.).

mouse (verb): to bite and tear.

mow = a grimace.

muse = to wonder: lost in amuse and Muse.

neat = ox.

ounce = pard.

pall = to fail.

peak: survives only in 'peak and pine' and in peaky.

pelting = paltry, also pelt = a skin, lost.

pill = to plunder.

pink = ornamental slashing of dress.

poke = pocket.

poll = to cut the hair.

quarry (as used in sport).

quean = a woman.

rack (of clouds).

raze (to the ground). The meaning being the very opposite of raise, the word raze is intolerable.

rede = counsel, n.b. change of meaning.

rheum: survives in rheumatic, &c.

scald = scurvy (adj.).

sleave = a skein of silk, 'The ravelled sleave of care', usually misinterpreted, the equivocal alternative making excellent sense.

souse (verb): of a bird of prey swooping.

speed: as in 'St. Francis be thy speed' = help, aid.

stale = bait or decoy (well lost).

tarre: to 'tarre a dog on' = incite.

tickle = unstable.

tire = to dress (the hair, &c.).

vail = to let fall.

wreak.

Besides the above may be noted

wont (sub.): lost in won't = will not.

fair: Though we still speak of 'a fair complexion' the word has lost much of its old use: and the verb to fare has suffered; we still say 'Farewell', but scarcely 'he fares ill'; also to fare forth is obsolete.

bolt = to sift, has gone out, also bolt in the sense of a missile weapon; but the weapon may have gone first; we still preserve it in 'a bolt from the blue', a thunder-bolt, and 'a fool's bolt is soon shot', and we shoot the bolt of a door.

barm: this being the name of an object which would be familiar only to brewers and bakers, probably suffered from the discontinuance of family brewing and baking. It would no longer be familiar, and may possibly have felt the blurring effect of the ill-defined balm, which word also seems rarely used. In the South of England few persons now know what barm is.

arch: adj., probably obsolescent.

There are also examples of words with the affix a-, or initials simulating that affix, thus:

aby: lost in abide, with which it was confused.

abode = bode (? whether ever in common use).

accite: lost in excite.

assay: quite a common word, lost in say (?)

atone: lost in tone.

and thus attempt, attaint, attest, avail, all suffered from tempt, taint, test, veil, whereas attend seems to have destroyed tend.

Table of homophones that may seem to be presently falling out of use. ¹⁵

ail.

alms.

ascent.

augur (v.).

barren.

bate.

bier.

bray (pound).

bridal.

broach.

casque.

cede.

cession.

cite.

clime.

corse.

cruse.

dene.

dun (colour).

desert.

fain.

fallow.

feign.

fell (skin).

flue (velu).

fray (sub.).

fry (small-).

gait.

gambol.

gin (snare).

gird (abuse).

gore (blood).

hart.

horde.

hue (colour).

isle.

lea.

lessen.

let (hinder).

lief.

main.

march (boundary).

meed.

mien.

mote.

mourn.

mute (of birds).

neat (animal).

ore.

pale (enclosure).

pall (v.).

pen (enclose).

pelt (skin).

pile (hair).

pink (v.).

pulse (pease).

quean.

rail (chide).

raze.

reave.

reck.

repair (resort).

rheum.

rood.

rue.

sack (v.).

sage (adj.).

sallow (willow).

sere.

soar.

spray (sprig).

still (adj. n.b. keep still).

stoup.

surge.

swift.

teem.

toil (snare).

vane.

van (fan).

vail (v.).

wage (war).

wain.

ween.

whit.

wight.

wile.

wrack.

wreak.

wot.

aught.

4. That the loss due to homophony threatens to impoverish the language

New words are being added to the dictionary much faster than old words are passing out of use, but it is not a question of numbers nor of dictionaries. A chemist told me that if the world were packed all over with bottles as close as they could stand, he could put a different substance into each one and label it. And science is active in all her laboratories and will print her labels. If one should admit that as many as ninety-nine per cent. of these artificial names are neither literary nor social words, yet some of them are, since everything that comes into common use must have a name that is frequently spoken. Thus baik, sackereen, and mahjereen are truly new English word-sounds; and it may be, if we succumb to anarchical communism, that margarine and saccharine will be lauded by its dissolute mumpers as enthusiastically as men have hitherto praised and are still praising butter and honey. 'Bike' certainly would have already won a decent place in poetry had it been christened more gracefully and not nicknamed off to live in backyards with cab and bus. The whole subject of new terms is too vast to be parenthetically handled, and I hope that some one will deal with it competently in an early publication of the S.P.E. The question must here remain to be determined by the evidence of the words in the table of obsoletes, which I think is convincing; my overruling contention being that, however successful we may be in the coinage of new words (and we have no reason to boast of success) and however desirable it is to get rid of some of the bad useless homophones, yet we cannot afford to part with any old term that can conveniently be saved.

We have the best Bible in the world, and in Shakespeare the greatest poet; we have been suckled on those twin breasts, and our children must have degenerated if they need asses' milk. Nor is it only because the old is better than the new that we think thus. If we speak more proudly of Trafalgar than of Zeebrugge, it is not because Trafalgar is so far finer a sounding word than Zeebrugge, as indeed it is, nor because we believe that the men of Nelson's time were better than our men of to-day, we know they were not, but because the spirit that lives on ideals will honour its parents; and it is thinking in this way that makes noble action instinctive and easy. Nelson was present at Zeebrugge leading our sailors, as Shakespeare is with us leading our writers, and no one who neglects the rich inheritance to which Englishmen are born is likely ever to do any credit to himself or his country.

5. That the South English dialect is a direct and chief cause of homophones

Evidence of Jones' dictionary.

Evidence of the present condition of our ruling educated speech in the South of England I shall take from Mr. Daniel Jones' dictionary,¹⁶ the authority of which cannot, I think, be disputed. It is true that it represents a pronunciation so bad that its slovenliness is likely to be thought overdone, but there is no more exaggeration than any economical system of phonetic spelling is bound to show. It is indeed a strong and proper objection to all such simplifications that they are unable to exhibit the finer distinctions; but this must not imply that Mr. Jones' ear is lacking in delicate perception, or that he is an incompetent observer. If he says, as he does say, that the second syllable in the words obloquy and parasite are spoken by educated Londoners with the same vowel-sound (which he denotes by ə, that is the sound of er in the word danger), then it is true that they are so pronounced, or at least so similarly that a trained ear refuses to distinguish them [óblerquy, párersite].

To this an objector might fairly reply that Mr. Jones could distinguish the two sounds very well if it suited him to do so; but that, as it is impossible for him to note them in his defective phonetic script, he prefers to confuse them. I shall not lose sight of this point,¹⁷ but here I will only say that, if there really is a difference between these two vowels in common talk, then if Mr. Jones can afford to disregard it it must be practically negligible, and other phoneticians will equally disregard it, as the Oxford Press has in its smaller dictionary.

Its trustworthiness.

I suppose that thirty years ago it would have been almost impossible to find any German who could speak English so well as to pass for a native: they spoke as Du Maurier delighted to represent them in Punch. During the late war, however, it has been no uncommon thing for a German soldier to disguise himself in English uniform and enter our trenches, relying on his mastery of our tongue to escape suspicion; and it was generally observed how many German prisoners spoke English like a native. Now this was wholly due to their having been taught Southern English on Mr. Jones' model and method.

Again, those who would repudiate the facts that I am about to reveal, and who will not believe that in their own careless talk they themselves actually pronounce the words very much as Mr. Jones prints them,¹⁸ should remember that the sounds of speech are now mechanically recorded and reproduced, and the records can be compared; so that it would betray incompetence for any one in Mr. Jones' position to misrepresent the facts, as it would be folly in him to go to the trouble and expense of making such a bogus book as his would be were it untrue; nor could he have attained his expert reputation had he committed such a folly.

Again, and in support of the trustworthiness of the records, I am told by those concerned in the business that for some years past no Englishman could obtain employment in Germany as teacher of English unless he spoke the English vowels according to the standard of Mr. Jones' dictionary; and it was a recognized device, when such an appointment was being considered, to request the applicant to speak into a machine and send the record by post to the Continent; whereupon he was approved or not on that head by the agreement of the record with the standard which I am about to illustrate from the dictionary.

All these considerations make a strong case for the truth of Mr. Jones' representation of our 'standard English', and his book is the most trustworthy evidence at my disposal: but before exhibiting it I would premise that our present fashionable dialect is not to be considered as the wanton local creator of all the faults that Mr. Jones can parade before the eye. Its qualities have come together in various ways, nor are the leading characteristics of recent origin. I am convinced that our so-called standard English sprang actively to the fore in Shakespeare's time, that in the Commonwealth years our speech was in as perilous a condition as it is to-day, and at the Restoration made a self-conscious recovery, under an impulse very like that which is moving me at the present moment; for I do not look upon myself as expressing a personal conviction so much as interpreting a general feeling, shared I know by almost all who speak our tongue, Americans, Australians, Canadians, Irish, New Zealanders, and Scotch, whom I range alphabetically lest I should be thought to show prejudice or bias in any direction. But this is beyond the present purpose, which is merely to exhibit the tendency which this so-called degradation has to create homophones.

Mauling of words.

As no one will deny that homophones are to be made by mauling words, I will begin by a selection of words from Mr. Jones' dictionary showing what our Southern English is doing with the language. I shall give in the first column the word with its literary spelling, in the second Mr. Jones' phonetic representation of it, and in the third column an attempt to represent that sound to the eye of those who cannot read the phonetic script, using such makeshift spellings as may be found in any novel where the pronunciation of the different speakers is differentiated.

¹⁹The dictionary allows mitigated variants of some of these words.

In culling these flowers of speech I was not blind to their great picturesque merits, but they must not be taken for jokes, at least they must not be thought of as conjuring smiles on the faces of Messrs. Jones, Michaelis and Rippmann: they are deadly products of honest study and method, and serious evidence whereby any one should be convinced that such a standard of English pronunciation is likely to create homophones: and yet in searching the dictionary I have not found it guilty of many new ones.¹⁹ For examples of homophones due to our 'standard' speech one might take first the 20 wh– words (given on page 14) which have lost their aspirate, and with them the 9 wr– words: next the 36 words in table iv and note, which have lost their trilled R: and then the 41 words from table vi on page 15; and that would start us with some 100 words, the confusion of which is due to our Southern English pronunciation, since the differentiation of all these words is still preserved in other dialects. The differentiation of these 100 words would of course liberate their twins, so the total number of gains should be doubled.

Example of one class.

 

But number is not so important as the quality and frequency of the words involved, so I will instance one class in detail, namely the words in which aw and or are confused. Here are a dozen of them:

core = caw.

door = daw*.

floor = flaw*.

hoar* = haw.

lore* = law.

more = maw*.

oar, ore = awe*.

pore = paw.

roar = raw.

soar, sore = saw, saw.

tore = taw.

yore* = yaw.

Of these 12 words, 6 exhibit stages or symptoms of obsolescence. I should think it extremely unlikely that yore has been in any way incommoded by yaw; and flaw, which is now more or less cornered to one of its various meanings, was probably affected more by its own ambiguities than by floor; but others seem to be probable examples: shaw and lore, and I think maw, are truly obsoletes, while hoar and daw are heard only in combination. Awe is heard only in awful, and has there lost its significance. I should guess that this accident has strengthened its severity in literature, where it asserts its aloofness sometimes with a full spelling [aweful] as in speech two pronunciations are recognized, awful and awf'l.

Now how do these words appear in Jones' dictionary? If there is to be any difference between the aw and ore sounds either the R must be trilled as it still is in the north, or some vestige of it must be indicated, and such indication would be a lengthening of the o (=aw) sound by the vestigial voicing of the lost trill, such as is indicated in the word o'er, and might be roughly shown to the eye by such a spelling as shawer for shore [thus shaw would be ʃɔ: and shore would be ʃɔ:ə] and such distinction is still made by our more careful Southern English speakers, and is recognized as an existent variant by Jones.

Since the circumflex accent properly indicates a rise and fall of voice-pitch on a vowel-sound such as almost makes a disyllable of a monosyllable (e.g. in Milton's verse the word power may fill either one or two places in the line) I will adopt it here to denote this fuller and differentiating pronunciation of ore.

Now to all these words, and to the finals of such words as ad[ore], impl[ore], ign[ore], Jones gives the diphthongal aw as the normal South English pronunciation, and he allows the longer [ore] sound only as a variant, putting this variant in the second place.

Hence, all these [ore] words are being encouraged to cast off the last remnant of their differentiation, which it is admitted that they have not yet quite lost.²⁰

6. That the mischief is being propagated by phoneticians

The use of phonetics in education.

The phoneticians are doing useful work in supplying an educational need. By the phonetic system any spoken language can now be learned quickly and easily, just as by the sol-fa system the teaching of music was made easy and simple. If a clergyman who had no practical knowledge of music were offered the post of minor canon in a cathedral, he would find it very difficult to qualify himself passably, whereas any village schoolboy could learn all the music necessary for such an office, and learn that solidly too and soundly and durably, in a few lessons, truly in a few hours, by the sol-fa method. The principle is the same in music and in speech, namely to have a distinct symbol for every separate sound; in music it is a name, the idea of which quickly becomes indissociable from the note of the scale which it indicates; in phonetics it is a written letter, which differs from the units of our literary alphabet only in this, that it has but one meaning and interpretation, and really is what all letters were originally intended to be. When you see it you know what it means.

Its general adoption certain.

The principle is but common sense, and practice confirms its validity. I am persuaded that as soon as competition has exposed the advantages which it ensures, not only in the saving of time, but in the rescuing of English children from the blighting fog through which their tender minds are now forced to struggle on the first threshold of life,²¹ then all spoken languages will be taught on that method. What now chiefly hinders its immediate introduction is not so much the real difficulty of providing a good simple system, as the false fear that all our literature may take on the phonetic dress; and this imagination is frightful enough to be a bugbear to reasonable people, although, so far as one can see, there is no more danger of this result than there is of all music appearing in sol-fa notation.

Demand of the market.

Now here is a promising field for adventure. Not only is the creation of a new fount of type an elaborate and expensive process, but the elaboration of a good system and its public recognition when produced involve much time; so that any industrial company that is early in the market with a complete apparatus and a sufficient reputation will carry all before it, and be in a position to command and secure great monetary profit.

There is no doubt that the field is now strongly held by the Anglo-Prussian society which Mr. Jones represents.²²

In the preceding section Mr. Jones' dictionary was taken as authority for the actual condition of Southern English pronunciation. It must now be considered in its other aspect, namely as the authoritative phonetic interpretation of our speech; my contention being that it is a wrong and mischievous interpretation.

It is difficult to keep these two questions quite apart. The first, which was dealt with in Section 5, was that Southern English is actively productive of homophones. This present Section 6 is contending that the mischief is being encouraged and propagated by the phoneticians, and Mr. Jones' books are taken as an example of their method.

Fault of Mr. Jones' method.

The reason why the work of these phoneticians is so mischievous is that they have chosen too low a standard of pronunciation.

The defence that they would make would be something like this.

They might argue with some confidence, and not without a good show of reason, that the actual 'vernacular' talk of the people is the living language of any country: they would allege that a spoken language is always changing, and always will change; that the actual condition of it is the only scientific, and indeed the only possible basis for any system of tuition; and that it is better to be rather in advance of change than behind it, since the changes proceed inevitably by laws which education has no power to resist, nay, so inevitably that science can in some measure foresee the future.

This would, I suppose, fairly represent Mr. Jones' contention. Indeed, he plainly asserts that his work is merely a record of existing facts, and he even says that he chose Southern English because it is most familiar and observable, and therefore capable of providing him with sufficient phenomena: and he might say that what I call 'low' in his standard is only the record of a stage of progression which I happen to dislike or have not nearly observed. And yet the argument is full of fallacies: and the very position that he assumes appears to me to be unsound. It is well enough to record a dialect, nor will any one grudge him credit for his observation and diligence, but to reduce a dialect to theoretic laws and then impose those laws upon the speakers of it is surely a monstrous step. And in this particular instance the matter is complicated by the fact that Southern English is not truly a natural dialect; Mr. Jones himself denotes it as P.S.P.=Public School Pronunciation, and that we know to be very largely a social convention dependent on fashion and education, and inasmuch as it is a product of fashion and education it is not bound by the theoretical laws which Mr. Jones would attribute to it; while for the same reason it is unfortunately susceptible of being affected by them, if they should be taught with authority. These phoneticians would abuse a false position which they have unwarrantably created. This Southern English, this P.S.P., is a 'fashionable' speech, fashionable that is in two senses; and Mr. Jones would fashion it.