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MADE IN AMERICA BECOMING AMERICANS the second syllable of instead-though by this time he was fighting a losing battle. Speech was in general much broader, with more emphatic stresses and a greater rounding of r's. A word like never would have been pro- nounced more like "nev-arrr." 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 combi- nations were pronounced in ways strikingly at variance with their mod- ern 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 some- times 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. • Differences in idiom abounded, notably with the use of definite and indefinite articles. As Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable note in their classic History of the English Language, 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 em- much of their spoken language would be to us. Though it would be clearly identifiable as English, it would be a variety of English unlike any we had heard before. Among the differences that would most immedi- ately strike us: • Kn-, which was always sounded in Middle English, was at the time of the Pilgrims going through a transitional phase in which it was com- monly pronounced tn. Where the Pilgrims' parents or grandparents would have pronounced knee as "kuh-nee," they themselves would have been more likely to say "t'nee." • The interior gh in words like night and light had been silent for about a generation, but on or near the end of words-in laugh, nought, enough, plough it was still sometimes pronounced, sometimes left silent, and sometimes given an f sound. • There was no sound equivalent to the ah in the modern father and calm. Father would have rhymed with the present-day lather and calm with ram • Was was pronounced not "wuz" but "wass," and remained so, in some circles at least, long enough for Byron to rhyme it with pass in "“To Lucasta." Conversely, kiss was often rhymed with is. • War rhymed with car or care. It didn't gain its modern pronunciation until about the turn of the nineteenth century.' • 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 un- settled. Many people rhymed cut with put, plough with screu, book with moon, blood with load. As late as the second half of the seventeenth cen- tury, the poet John Dryden made no distinction between flood, mood and good, though quite how he intended them to be pronounced is any- body's guess. The vicissitudes of the wandering oo are still evident both in its multiplicity of modern pronunciations (e.g., flood, mood, good) and the number of such words in which the pronunciation is not fixed even ployed 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."s One relic of this practice sur- vives in American English in the way we tell time. Where we com- monly say that it is "ten of three" or "twenty of four," the British only ever say "ten to" or "twenty to." · Er and ear combinations were frequently, if not invariably, pro- nounced "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 sev- eral words, saying "clark" and "darby" for clerk and derby. In America the custom was long ago abandoned but for a few well-established excep- 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 con- sidered a mark of vulgarity until about the time of the American Revolution. • Words that now have a short e were often pronounced and some- times 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