THE CHANGE IN PRONUNCIATION. [re TEE EDIT011 OF TRH "
OPFOTATOIL"j with your kind permission, a word or two further might be said upon this interesting subject,—does not a con- sideration of the spelling of words in old English legal and State documents (of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example)—written in the Norman-French language—and in French works also of the same period, and a comparison of the " French " in those works with that of more modern French authors, make it seem probable that England has, in her words of French origin, by her insularity and remoteness from the French mainland, proved a conservatory not only of much of the spelling, but even of much of the sound, of the "old French" tongue, just in the same way as the Virginian and Irish "plantations," in their insularity, and the Scottish Lowlands in their remoteness from the English mainland of speech, have made those countries conservatories of the "Earlier English" spelling and speech P And, as said in a previous letter, is it not in the vowel sounds —and especially in the " a " and the "e," perhaps—that the conservation is most apparent P The word " regaird " (to be found in a quotation from the Scotch work criticised on p. 164 of the Spectator for February 4th) will suffice as an indication of what is here referred to. That is not a " Scotch " word. It is simply an Eaglish word in its old English dress, with the "name-sound" to the vowel "a." In fact, as Dr. Charles Mackay demonstrates in his recently published "Dictionary of Lowland Scotch," the vigorous dialect of the Pentlands, Tweedside, and all the land south of the Forth, is, broadly speaking, "classic old English ; " and this treatment of the vowels is one of its characteristics.—I am, Sir, &c., W. H. B. P.5.—With regard to "0. C. T.'s " example (from Pope) of " tea " rhyming with "decree," may it not be that " decree " was sounded by Pope's generation as decret is sounded in that French tongue from which the word was known by them most directly to have been derived P (Bailey.)—" J. R." shows "oblige" to have been sounded by our grandfathers as " obleege " (a fact I myself can well remember), being from the French oblige evidently, as "J. R." points out, as to pro- nunciation. Might not "decree," therefore, in sound, be affected by the same fact as to most direct origin P I can recollect the same people who said " obleege" saying " goold " for "gold," perhaps as being directly derived from "geld," Dan. (Bailey.)—As to "C. C. T.'s " main contention, it may be remarked that George Herbert has " back " rhyming with "lake," "have" with " brave," " cloth" with " sloth "; "are " with "spare," "care," &c.; "regard" with "heard," " was " with "pass," " were " with "fear," " verse " with "pierce," and so on, without stint; and the like examples could be pro- duced from many other sources.
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