American Language Supplement 2 by H.L. Mencken

To which an American testimony may be added: “Many as the differences of word and usage are, the vital difference which is dividing English and American speech far more rapidly than any change of vocabulary is the divergence in enunciation, pronunciation, and quality of voice. The same words sound quite different on English and American tongues.” 2 There are Englishmen who, in their more reflective moments, admit that something is to be said for the superior clarity of American pronunciation, but they seldom hold to that line long. The general tune of American speech affects them as unpleasantly as the cockney whine of the Australians, and their discomfort relights in them the old passionate conviction of their nation that everything American is not only inferior, but also villainous and ignoble. Thus their typical attitude to the gabble of Americans, says Allen Walker Read, is “one of utter loathing.” 3 It should be added at once that when they give voice to that loathing they fill the Americano with sentiments which match it precisely. 4
    The study of pronunciation, as I have hitherto noted, is of comparatively recent growth, and it was not until a time within thememory of persons still relatively young that anything resembling scientific method was applied to it. Even so late as 1926 Dr. Kemp Malone could say in a professional paper, and with perfect truth, that “intonation, or pitch variation in speech,” though “probably the most important constituent in the sum total of speech peculiarities that give one an accent,” was “yet but little studied.” 1 To be sure, the individual constituent sounds of English had been investigated with more or less diligence, and various attempts had been made to devise an alphabet that would represent them better than the conventional alphabet, but there was but little study of the traits of the spoken language as a whole. The pioneer in this field was Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905), father of the inventor of the telephone, whose “Visible Speech” was published in 1867. But his ideas got much more attention in Europe than in the United States, and it was not until 1901, when Dr. E. W. Scripture, who was not a philologian but a medical man, brought out a volume called “Elements of Experimental Phonetics,” that the new method of approach began to attract any considerable number of Americans. 2 It was given a vigorous impulse when Dr. C. E. Seashore, the Swedishborn professor of psychology at the State University of Iowa, began to apply its devices to the investigation of music, and since the time of Malone’s lament it has flourished in a way that must delight him. Its practitioners have got together a really formidable armamentarium of instruments for detecting and recording precisely what goes on during the speaking of a sentence, and some of their discoveries, though rather beyond the comprehension of the layman, are of considerable importance.
    Perhaps typical of their work is an investigation of accent undertaken by Dr. Wilbur L. Schramm, of the University of Iowa in 1935 and 1936. 3 He made use of “the microphone, high-quality amplification, the oscillograph, the high-speed output-level recorder and the recording phonograph,” 4 and came to the conclusion thataccent is a far more complicated phenomenon than the old-time lexicographers ever suspected. “There may be,” he said, “more than one kind of emphasis in speech; a dictionary accent is one thing, an accent which beats the drum for rhythm is another, and a logical emphasis which determines the meaning of the sentence is a third.” One of his associates, Dr. Ruth Ortleb, found that stress itself is by no means an isolated phenomenon, measurable wholly in terms of intensity. It also drags out the duration of a syllable, raises its pitch, and augments its tonal range. And as with syllables, so with words. “In 98% of the cases the emphasized words were of longer duration, in 84% they moved