to follow. Two of the characteristics of the pronunciation referred to—if such it may be called-are the obscuring of the initial "h" and the clipping of the final "g"characteristics which would never have been indulged had the persons concerned been taught correct pronunciation.

It is a well-known fact that there is a tendency to obscure the unstressed vowels in colloquial English conversation, and this is due chiefly to rapidity of speech; but this tendency is largely overcome when the speaker takes time to express his thought. Professor Walter Rippman, an expert on phonetic values, believes that clearer and better speech is a matter of articulation and not of the stressing of unstressed syllables, while Dr. Daniel Jones, who is lecturer on phonetics at the University College, London, is of the opinion that the best pronunciation is that which is not obstrusive. In his judgment affected speech is bad. Just exactly what is meant by "affected speech" is not explained, but if this means assumed or unnatural speech, then one must agree with the dictum. If it be an affectation of speech to ignore the "h" in such words as which, what, when, and whither, then one must write down the great mass of the English people as affected. Of the two methods considered at the Kings College conference there can be no question that the first is to be preferred, for teach a child the correct, formal pronunciation of words as units and you teach it at the same time to observe not only the vowel values of their contents but the accentuation and the syllabic division also, thereby producing far better spellers than by the wordpicture method of sight-reading.

No one should expect to make over an adult who has devoted twenty years of his life to acquiring a slovenly enunciation. No amount of teaching can uproot all the

evils of mispronunciation in the grown man; but these evils can be checked, corrected, and even eradicated in the young. None but a Liverpool professor would expect a grown man to cure himself of habits of mispronunciation acquired through years of contact with fellow men equally as careless with their diction. The purpose of that London Conference was evidently to determine whether or not teachers of English should instruct their charges in the correct way to speak English-giving full utterance to all sounds in every spoken word; that is, teach them the formal pronunciation of words. Time and tide of public affairs will take care of the unstressed vowel, the silent letters, etc. We are all in a hurry, and never more so than when we speak. We suffer from a chronic disease that of trying to say what we have to say before the other fellow gets a chance to say it for us, and so correct pronunciation goes by the board. Have you ever heard anything more utterly absurd than the variant pronunciations of our little word "yes"? Would that the public discard it altogether and revert to the "yea" of our Puritan forebears.

Realizing the necessity for removing the stumbling-block that has impeded the advance of both pupil and teacher, the National Education Association appointed a committee for the purpose of considering the adoption of a uniform and consistent system by which all the sounds in the English language could be correctly indicated. But this Association was not the first to recognize this need, for in the third decade of the closing half of last century it had received the attention of a committee of the foremost scholars of the time, some of whom are living to-day. Until this committee began its work the means of indicating pronunciation accurately had not received such attention from educators as

the importance of the subject required. Even after the labors of this committee had been completed educators were slow to adopt the recommendations of the committee, notwithstanding the fact that it had devised the most logical and consistent method for indicating sounds.

Prior to this period, and for some years afterward, none but motley methods for indicating pronunciation had been used-used not only in the dictionaries, but also in the text-books. Then (and even now) pronunciation was expressed by the same chaotic aggregations of dots and dashes above or below the letters, together with curves and curlicues, until it became necessary for the student of orthoepy to commit to memory no less than 85 sound-signs in order to study the subject intelligently. These soundsigns varied with the successive revisions of the different works presenting them, to suit the fancy of the author or the editor-in-charge. That such a method would ultimately be condemned is not to be wondered at, yet while it was tolerated at large it was discountenanced by the leading philologists of this country and by many eminent scholars abroad.

On this subject Dr. Charles P. G. Scott, who was a prominent member of the editorial staff of the Century Dictionary, having been editor-in-chief of the department of etymology of that work, and who comparatively recently was editor of the new Worcester Dictionary in course of revision, once said:

"In my opinion, long held, and confirmed in the most positive manner by a somewhat extensive lexicographic experience and philologic study, the so-called 'system' of notation used in the current American and English dictionaries (except the Oxford and the Standard) is thoroughly bad-unhistoric, unscientific, unliterary, unscholarly, inconsistent, irrational, ineffective, ut

terly senseless in itself. There is not only no redeeming merit in it—it is a serious obstacle to the understanding and teaching of the simplest facts concerning the pronunciation of English and its true historical position, and its relation with other languages."

While, as has been said above, such a condition is still tolerated at large, great strides have been made during the

last decade by some of the expert orthoepists of the coun try toward securing the establishment of a standard system for indicating pronunciation; and these efforts have re sulted in the adoption of the Scientific Alphabet. This system has been successfully applied, and because of its

successful application has met with some opposition from the very sources which it was designed to assist.

The first step in teaching English pronunciation is to train in the ability to detect and produce each of the sounds that make up the spoken language; let this be done thoroughly, and the pupil has taken a long step toward becoming a good reader, a good speller, and, incidentally, a good talker.

As there is no definite relation between the name of a letter and its sound in the ordinary spelling, the common alphabet name should not be the first taught to a child learning to read, as this leads to confusion, for a letter in the common alphabet often represents many sounds. This confusion of symbols and sounds in the common alphabet is an appalling difficulty for children. At the very best, to learn to read is an enormous draft on the energy of the child. For simplicity, exactness, and thoroughness in training the pupils to pronounce the sounds of the language, no system of diacritics compares for a moment with the Scientific Alphabet.

There are many advantages in letting a pupil learn first the fixed symbols that represent the sounds in spoken English. After the pupil has mastered the sounds of the Scientific Alphabet, and fixed their unvarying symbols in his mind, he can then without confusion proceed to master the hundreds of equivalents of these symbols which are to be found in the common spelling. For example, in the Scientific Alphabet ō is the unvarying symbol for the sound of the vowel o in "no"; in the common spelling the sound is expressed by many symbols and combinations of symbols.

The variations and vagaries of the common spellings are so confusing even to grown people that a child should not