Made In America - Bill Bryson [11]
War rhymed with car or care. It didn’t gain its modem pronunciation until sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century.1
Home was commonly spelled ‘whome’ and pronounced, by at least some speakers, as it was spelled, with a distinct wh- sound.
The various o and u sounds were, to put it mildly, confused and unsettled. Many people rhymed cut with put, plough with screw, book with moon, blood with load. Dryden, as late as the second half of the seventeenth century, made no distinction between flood, mood and good, though quite how he intended them to be pronounced is anybody’s guess. The vicissitudes of the wandering oo sound are evident both in its multiplicity of modern pronunciations (for example, flood, wood, mood) and the number of such words in which the pronunciation is not fixed even now, notably roof, soot and hoof.
Oi was sounded with a long i, so that coin’d sounded like kind and voice like vice. The modern oi sound was sometimes heard, but was considered a mark of vulgarity until about the time of the American Revolution.
Words that now have a short e were often pronounced and sometimes spelled with a short i. Shakespeare commonly wrote ‘bin’ for been, and as late as the tail-end of the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin was defending a short i pronunciation for get, yet, steady, chest, kettle and the second syllable of instead2 – though by this time he was fighting a losing battle.
Speech was in general much broader, with stresses and a greater rounding of rs. A word like never would have been pronounced more like ’nev-arrr’.3 Interior vowels and consonants were more frequently suppressed, so that nimbly became ‘nimly’, fault and salt became ‘faut’ and ‘saut’, somewhat was ‘summat’. Other letter combinations were pronounced in ways strikingly at variance with their modern forms. In his Special Help to Orthographie or the True-writing of English (1643), a popular book of the day, Richard Hodges listed the following pairs of words as being ‘so neer alike in sound ... that they are sometimes taken one for another’: ream and realm, shoot and suit, room and Rome, were and wear, poles and Paul’s, flea and flay, eat and ate, copies and coppice, person and parson, Easter and Hester, Pierce and parse, least and lest. The spellings – and misspellings – of names in the earliest records of towns like Plymouth and Dedham give us some idea of how much more fluid early colonial pronunciation was. These show a man named Parson sometimes referred to as Passon and sometimes as Passen; a Barsham as Barsum or Bassum; a Garfield as Garfill; a Parkhurst as Parkis; a Holmes as Holums; a Pickering as Pickram; a St John as Senchion; a Seymour as Seamer; and many others.4
Differences in idiom abounded, notably with the use of definite and indefinite articles. As Baugh and Cable note, Shakespeare commonly discarded articles where we would think them necessary – ‘creeping like snail’, ‘with as big heart as thou’ and so on – but at the same time he employed them where we would not, so that where we say ‘at length’ and ‘at last’, he wrote ‘at the length’ and ‘at the last’. The preposition of was also much more freely employed. Shakespeare used it in many places where we would require another: ‘it was well done of [by] you’, ‘I brought him up of [from] a puppy’, ‘I have no mind of [for] feasting’, ‘That did but show thee of [as] a fool’, and so on.5 One relic of this practice survives in American English in the way we tell time. Where Americans commonly say that it is ‘ten of three’ or ‘twenty of four’, the British only say ‘ten to’ or ‘twenty to’.
Er and ear combinations were frequently, if not invariably, pronounced ‘ar’, so that convert became ‘convart’, heard was ‘hard’ (though also ‘heerd’), and serve was ‘sarve’. Merchant was pronounced and often spelled ‘marchant’. The British preserve the practice in several words today – as with clerk and derby, for instance – but in America the custom was long ago abandoned