[To THE EDITOR OF THE ' 4 SPECTATOR...1 am somewhat surprised
that in the discussions of "The Change in Pronunciation," which have lately appeared in the Spectator, no one has cited Cowper's familiar hymn :— "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform ; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.“ This is the example by which, in my younger days, "every schoolboy" was taught that in the last century the letter "e" (or its equivalent "ea ") retained its Italian sound, and that the present style was a modern innovation, I suppose that our pronunciation of such words as " there," " where," "bear," " reign " (cf. Ital. " reina "), is but a, survival of the old prac- tice; and traces of it are to be found also in "clerk," "Derby," &o. In America, these words are universally pro- nounced " clurk," "Darby."
The sound of " i" has undergone a similar transformation. The former pronunciation survives in words like "niece," "liege," "grief," and the numerous words ending in "me," e.g., "magazine." "Pique," though completely naturalised, is, perhaps, hardly a fair example, because we adopted it bodily from the French; but it is not many years since all "gentle- men of the old school" used to say " obleege" (v, "Webster," ad verb.), and it is still allowable to pronounce " oblique " in a similar way. The very general retention of the Italian sound of " e " by the Anglo-Irish, and of " i" by the Anglo-Scotch, is perhaps the beet evidence that it was formerly prevalent in England also.—I am, Sir, IsLc.,
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