| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 210
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pronounced differently depending on the origin of the words they appear in. Nonetheless, English sound and spelling were not all that far apart until the advent of printing in the 15th and 16th centuries, which helped to freeze English spelling while its pronunciation underwent dramatic changes, principally in the system of long vowels, which is known as the Great Vowel Shift. As a result of these changes Middle English name, pronounced (nä’m ), became Modern English name; Middle English sweete, pronounced (sw ’t), became Modern English sweet; Middle English ride, pronounced (r ’d), became Modern English ride, and so forth. It was also during this period that final e became silent. Printers, however, preserved the spellings used in medieval manuscripts, so that our modern spellings actually reflect more accurately the medieval pronunciations of words before all these changes took place. | 1 |
| Today, enormous variety in pronunciation also exists because English is so widespread, with 350 million native speakers worldwide, which makes the existence of a universal standard impossible. Traditionally, however, varieties of English have been divided into two types, British English and American English, each with its own more or less acknowledged standard. Within the United States, home to 232 million native speakers of English, there is no single perceived standard of pronunciation. There are certain norms based on the variety of English spoken in the northern United States (not including New England) that have been adopted for use by news broadcasters, but even these are subject to more regional variation than most people might suppose. Thus, generally speaking, standards in the U.S., if they exist at all, tend to be regional. And with regard to the pronunciation of vowels in particular an enormous variation is tolerated across regional boundaries. | 2 |
| The list of entries that follows is composed of words whose pronunciation has a history of variation or controversy, or for one reason or another has been problematic for speakers. A few of the entries simply address various processes of phonologic change, such as assimilation and dissimilation, which are natural processes that occur in all living languages. Other entries, as at C and G, concern aspects of pronunciation that are taken for granted or ignored by most speakers but that are interesting nevertheless from a historical point of view. | 3 |
The symbols used to render pronunciations are those that are used in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition (1992). These symbols are phonemic rather than phonetic. That is, they are designed to help you distinguish meaningful units of sound, such as the difference between cat and cad or pat and pet. They are not designed to represent the specific pronunciation of any individual or of any particular speech community. Thus they allow people from different speech communities to pronounce words correctly in their native dialect. In the discussions that follow, the term long vowel can refer to any of the following sounds: (), (), ( ), ( ), (ä), and ( ); it can also refer to the diphthongs (ou) and (oi). The term short vowel can refer to any of these sounds: ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ), and ( ). A full pronunciation key can be found on page 211. | 4 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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