Chevalier
still uses. Irish, Scotch and north country readers must remember
that Drinkwater's rs are absolutely unpronounced when they follow
a vowel, though they modify the vowel very considerably. Thus,
luggage is pronounced by him as laggige, but turn is not
pronounced as tern, but as teun with the eu sounded as in French.
The London r seems thoroughly understood in America, with the
result, however, that the use of the r by Artemus Ward and other
American dialect writers causes Irish people to misread them
grotesquely. I once saw the pronunciation of malheureux
represented in a cockney handbook by mal-err-err: not at all a bad
makeshift to instruct a Londoner, but out of the question
elsewhere in the British Isles. In America, representations of
English speech dwell too derisively on the dropped or interpolated
h. American writers have apparently not noticed the fact that the
south English h is not the same as the never-dropped Irish and
American h, and that to ridicule an Englishman for dropping it is
as absurd as to ridicule the whole French and Italian nation for
doing the same. The American h, helped out by a general agreement
to pronounce wh as hw, is tempestuously audible, and cannot be
dropped without being immediately missed. The London h is so
comparatively quiet at all times, and so completely inaudible in
wh, that it probably fell out of use simply by escaping the ears
of children learning to speak.
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