Inventing English by Seth Lerer

Author:Seth Lerer [Lerer, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

only listening to hubbub? Such were the questions not just of our time but of theirs, and we will see in the work of grammarians and orthoepists an attempt, throughout this early Modern period, to tame the beasts of words, to find right ways of writing and pronouncing, to control the new world English had become.

152 A Universal Hubbub Wild

chapter 11

Visible Speech

The Orthoepists and the Origins of Standard English

as a young man, Isaac Newton became fascinated by phonetics. In a few pages in a notebook dating from his eighteenth or nineteenth year, Newton came up with a system of presenting English sounds. He arranged the vowels and consonants by means of their articulation; tried to describe the workings of the mouth and throat; and speculated, somewhat obliquely, on whether there could be something like a universal language for hu-mankind. In these sparse jottings, Newton illustrated the features of mid-seventeenth-century English pronunciation. Some of the idiosyncrasies of his transcriptions may be because of his own regional dialect. Some may be caused by his attempts to describe certain sounds in what may seem to us to be odd ways. For example, he described the pronunciation of the f sound (what we would call a bilabial continuant) as “caused by shutting the lips and then forcing the breath through them.” He comments on sounds produced in the back of the throat as sounding like the Welsh “jarring of the throte as when wee force up flegme” may seem skin-crawlingly clinical.

His closing sample letter to a “loving friend,” presented in both regular spelling and in the special system of phonetic symbols he devised, seems almost delightfully naïve.

Newton was but the best known of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectuals who turned their attentions to the study of English pronunciation and spelling. Though his remarks are brief, they bear witness to the profound impact that the study of language had on English scientific culture. For over a century and a half, from John Hart in the 1550s until Jonathan Swift in the 1710s, English scholars, teachers, poets, and public figures weighed in on the pressing language matters of the day. Should there be a standard English, and should its mark be one of region, class, or 153

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