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

from the “narrow” form in order to make his transcriptions intelligible.
    In the pamphlets of the British Broadcasting Company he and his colleagues use both the IPA and what they call “modified spelling,”
e.g., ǎkwáttic
for
aquatic, fayt for fête, plaak
for
plaque
, and
túrkwoyze
for
turquoise
. No doubt this is a necessary concession to crooners to whom the Greek and Runic letters, the upside-down
e
’s,
c
’s and
v
’s, and the other strange symbols of the IPA would be impenetrable, and perhaps even maddening. Most of the other British phonologists have encountered the same difficulties. Peter A. D. MacCarthy, in his “English Pronunciation,” 3 says that the symbols he uses are “in conformity with the phonetic alphabet of the International Phonetic Association,” but proceeds at once to list changes that he has made in it, some of them borrowed from Sweet. In his bibliography, 4 listing fifteen works on phonetics by himself and other British authorities, he shows that two use one modification of the IPA, one uses another, six use a third, and five use a fourth. The late H. C. Wyld, in his monumental “History of Modern Colloquial English,” already mentioned, rejected the IPA altogether, and used one of his own invention. “Books about the spoken word,” said A. Lloyd James in “The Broadcast Word,” “all suffer from a serious disadvantage: it is completely and absolutely impossible to represent on paper, by means of conventional print, the simplest facts of speech.… [Its] subtleties are such that no visual symbols can cope with them. The symbol
s
has to do duty for very many different noises that pass muster, up and down the world, for what is known as ‘the sound of the letter
s
.’ The ‘sound of the letter
l
’ has many variants in the English-speaking world, and the
l
sounds to be heard where English is spoken are legion.” 1
    With this most American phonologists agree. The late George Philip Krapp made some effort to use the IPA in both “The Pronunciation of Standard English in America,” 2 and the second volume (on pronunciation) of “The English Language in America,” 3 but in the former volume he sounded a warning to the whole faculty (including himself) that no such artificial alphabet could ever solve the problem of representing all the shades of sound in print. He said:
    The professional student of phonetics seems to find it hard to resist the fascination which the game of inventing symbols exerts. The conventional alphabet is obviously inadequate for any scientific purposes, and scores of phonetic alphabets have been invented to take its place. If a phonetic alphabet is an evil, it is a necessary evil. But moderation should be practised in the exercise of this evil, for once started, there is obviously no limit to the number of symbols one may devise as records of his observations. It may be said, moreover, that in the end not even the most elaborate phonetic alphabet can record all the shadings and nuances of speech sounds current daily in good use. For one seeking absolute completeness and precision, some device richer in possibilities than an alphabet must be discovered. 4
    John S. Kenyon, in his “American Pronunciation,” first published in 1924, used the IPA “in such ways as to adapt it to the peculiarities of American pronunciation,” but apparently found it appreciably short of satisfying, for when he undertook his larger “Pronouncing Dictionary of American English” in collaboration with the late Thomas A. Knott in 1936 5 he issued a call for suggestions from other phoneticians. 6 Whether or not this call brought them anything of value I do not know, but they finally decided to retain the IPA in their dictionary, though with the addition of about twenty-five additional symbols for “less common English sounds and the sounds of foreign languages,”
e.g., y, w
and
h
upside-down, and
?
with the dot under the hook omitted. Their explanation of this