American Language Supplement 2 by H.L. Mencken Page A

through a wider pattern of inflection, in 75% they reached a higher pitch, and in 71% they reached a lower pitch.” “It is apparent,” concluded Dr. Schramm, “that our old explanations of accent are perhaps too simple,” and that “a complete acoustical description would probably have to take into account at least seven elements: duration of phonation (plus pause, in some cases), magnitude of inflection, highest pitch level, lowest pitch level, average pitch level, average intensity level, and type of inflection.” 1 Many other American phonologists now devote themselves to the precise measurements of speech sounds and speech tunes, and the literature of the subject is growing rapidly. 2
    For many years past philologians have been struggling with the difficulties of representing the gradations of speech in print. No alphabet of any actual language has enough letters to achieve the business, and no artificial alphabet so far contrived has done much more than complicate and obfuscate it. It is, in fact, full of downright impossibilities, as Robert Southey was saying more than a hundred years ago. “Sounds,” he observed, “are to us infinite and variable, and we cannot transmit by one sense the ideas and objects of another. We shall be convinced of this when we recollect the innumerable qualities of tone in human voices, so as to enable usto distinguish all our acquaintances, though the number should amount to many hundreds, or perhaps thousands. With attention we might discover a different quality of tone in every instrument; for all these there never can be a sufficient number of adequate terms in any written language; and when that variety comes to be compounded with a like variety of articulations it becomes infinite to us.” 1 Nevertheless, hopeful if imprudent men began to grapple with the problem soon after Southey wrote, and during the 60s of the last century Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813–1891), a nephew of Napoleon and an amateur philologian of no mean attainments, proposed an alphabet which, at the hands of Alexander J. Ellis, an English phonetician (1814–90), eventually reached 390 characters − 77 for vowels and the rest for consonants and their combinations. 2 In 1877 Henry Sweet (1845–1912), another Englishman, reduced the number to 125, but this abbreviated alphabet was quickly found to be inadequate, and improvements upon it were undertaken during the 80s by Paul Passy, a French phonetician. The result was the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) of the Association Phonétique Internationale, the latter being Passy’s artifact also.
    This alphabet, which includes many new characters hitherto unknown on land or sea, has come into wide use, but its deficiencies are innumerable, and there have been constant changes in it. When, for example, the Practical Phonetics Group of the Modern Language Association adopted it in 1927, it was necessary to add a number of new symbols to indicate peculiarities of American speech, 3 and other additions have been since proposed by various other authorities. In 1926 it was given a drastic overhauling by a conference of philologians at Copenhagen, chiefly with the aim of making it more useful for the transcription of non-European languages. 4 In 1939 the editors of
American Speech
petitioned the council of the Association Phonétique Internationale for approval oftwo new symbols for American sounds devised by John S. Kenyon, 1 and at various other times, unless my eyes deceive me, they have slipped in other changes without waiting for a directive from GHQ. Very few practical phonologists have ever attempted to use the IPA without modification. It has become divided into a “broad” form and a “close” or “narrow” form, the former needing fewer symbols than the latter, but suffering a corresponding loss in precision. Daniel Jones used the “broad” form in “An English Pronouncing Dictionary,” 2 but he had to borrow four extra vowel symbols