Society for Pure English Tract 4 | Page 6

Artémidóra, gods invisible--
though I hope that they did.
* * * * *
It is not to be thought that these rules were in any way arbitrary. So
little was this so that, I believe, they were never even formulated. If
examples with the quantities marked were ever given, they must have
been for the use of foreigners settling in England. English boys did not
want rules, and their teachers could not really have given them. The
teachers did not understand that each vowel represented not two sounds
only, a long and a short, but many more. This fact was no more
understood by John Walker, the actor and lexicographer, who in 1798
published a Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek and Latin
proper names. His general rule was wrong as a general rule, and so far
as it agreed with facts it was useless. He says that when a vowel ends a
syllable it is long, and when it does not it is short. Apart from the
confusion of cause and effect there is the error of identifying for
instance the e in beatus and the e in habebat. Moreover, Walker
confounds the u in 'curfew', really long, with the short and otherwise
different u in 'but'. The rule was useless as a guide, for it did not say
whether moneo for instance was to be read as _ino-neo_ or as
_mon-eo_, and therefore whether the o was to be long or short. Even
Walker's list is no exact guide. He gives for instance _M[=o]-na_,
which is right, and _M[=o]-næses_, which is not. Now without going
into the difference between long vowels and ordinary vowels, of which
latter some are long in scansion and some short, it is clear that there is
no identity. In fact _Mona_, has the long o of 'moan' and _Monæses_
the ordinary o of 'monaster'. A boy at school was not troubled by these
matters. He had only two things to learn, first the quantity of the
penultimate unit, second the fact that a final vowel was pronounced.
When he knew these two things he gave the Latin word the sounds
which it would have if it were an English word imported from the Latin.
Thus he finds the word civilitate. I am not sure that he could find it, but

that does not matter. He would know 'civility', and he learns that the
penultima of the Latin word is long. Therefore he says
_c[)i]v[)i]l[)i]t[=a]t[)e]_. Again he knows '[)i]nf[)i]n[)i]t' (I must be
allowed to spell the word as it is pronounced except in corrupt quires).
He finds that the penultima of infinitivus is long, and he therefore says
_[)i]nf[)i]n[)i]t[=i]v[)u]s_. Again he knows 'irradiate', and finding that
the penultima of irradiabitur is short he says
_[)i]rr[=a]d[)i][)a]b[)i]t[)u]r_. It is true that some of these verb forms
under the influence of their congeners came to have an exceptional
pronunciation. Thus _irradi[=a]bit_ led at last to _irradi[=a]bitur_, but I
doubt whether this occurred before the nineteenth century. The word
_dabitur_, almost naturalized by Luther's adage of _date et dabitur_,
kept its short a down to the time when it regained it, in a slightly
different form, by its Roman right; and _am[)a]mini_ and
_mon[)e]mini_ were unwavering in their use. Old people said
_v[=a]ri[)a]bilis_ long after the true quantities had asserted themselves,
and the word as the specific name of a plant may be heard even now.
Its first syllable of course follows what I shall call the 'alias' rule. We
may still see this rule in other instances. All men say 'hippopót[)a]mus',
and even those who know that this a is short in Greek can say nothing
but 'Mesopot[=a]mia', unless indeed the word lose its blessed and
comforting powers in a disyllabic abbreviation. When a country was
named after Cecil Rhodes, where the e in the surname is mute, we all
called it 'Rhod[=e]sia'. Had it been named after a Newman, where the a
is short or rather obscure, we should all have called it 'Newm[=a]nia ',
while, named after a Davis, it would certainly have been 'Dav[)i]sia'.
The process of thought would in each case have been unconscious. A
new example is 'aviation', whose first vowel has been instinctively
lengthened.
Again, when the word 'telegram' was coined, some scholars objected to
its formation and insisted upon 'telegrapheme', but the most obdurate
Grecian did not propose to keep the long Greek vowel in the first
syllable. When only the other day 'cinematograph' made its not wholly
desirable appearance, it made no claim to a long vowel in either of its
two first syllables. Not till it was reasonably shortened into
'c[)i]n[)e]ma' did a Judge from the Bench make a lawless decree for a
long second vowel, and even he left the i short though it is long