Here, last but not least, comes the treatment of the pronunciation, which for several reasons I have not taken up first, although the questions which are here to be discussed necessarily play a part already from the very first lesson in a foreign language. I have now for many years advocated the use of phonetics—yes, even of phonetical transcription, in the teaching of foreign languages, and have to a large extent put my theories into practice both in dealing with children of all ages and with grown persons. New things always frighten people; they think with terror that here the pupils are to be burdened with an entirely new and difficult science and with a new kind of writing; we had trouble enough with the old kind, they say, and now we are to be bothered with this new alphabet with its barbarous letters! Every educator must see how objectionable it is; now we have learned languages for so many years without such modern inventions, and the old way ought to be good enough for us still.

That is about the run of the objections raised. This the answer: Phonetics is a science, to be sure, and, like all other sciences, it is not without its difficult and mooted points. Yet the fact that large volumes can be written about botany does not frighten us from teaching our children some botany. In mathematics there are many things which are beyond the comprehension of ordinary school-children, but yet they have to learn some mathematics. Phonetics is not a new study that we want to add to the school curriculum; we only want to take as much of the science as will really be a positive help in learning something which has to be learned anyway. We must remember what science is, and what part it plays. Of course in our days every science collects more and more material and requires more and more specialization, so that parts of it become quite inaccessible for all persons except the specialists themselves; but the whole idea of science is that it shall be unified knowledge (Spencer), a summing up of all the numerous details of reality under large, comprehensive points of view, the establishing of great, general laws, which apply to all single cases. That is also why science can be termed “Ökonomie des denkens,” and that is why science can suggest means of facilitating thought and the acquirement of knowledge. We want to have some phonetics introduced into our schools, because theory has convinced us, and experiment has proved to us, that by means of this science we can, with decidedly greater certainty, and in an essentially easier way, give an absolutely better pronunciation in a much shorter space of time than would be possible without phonetics.

And as for that hobgoblin called phonetical transcription—well, it is no “new alphabet,” not even as new as the Gothic (German) letters are, and much less so than the Greek alphabet, with which the pupils are burdened (without their being of the slightest use[38]), to say nothing of the new names for the letters. In learning Greek the pupils have to operate with thirty odd new symbols; in our phonetical transcription for school use, we do not need more than from five to eight new symbols for each language; otherwise it consists of the ordinary letters, and every letter in it retains one of its familiar values, which is used consistently everywhere, the new symbols being mostly modifications of the known letters; ? reminds us of s, ? of z, ? and ? of e, ? of n. The whole thing is no worse than that.

If you refer to your experience in opposition to these new ways of teaching, you only invite the answer: Yes, your experience shows how a poor pronunciation may be learned!

Why must we learn how to pronounce the foreign languages at all? Well, in the first place, it must be because there is the possibility that we may meet natives some time later. Otherwise we might, perhaps, be satisfied with reading the foreign words according to English principles of pronunciation, French pain like English “pain,” Werther as “worth her,” etc. I have known old parsons who have taught themselves English so as to be able to read novels, and who read English with Danish vowels, pronounced the k in knight, etc. For a superficial “getting the gist” of shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls, this is sufficient perhaps, but I maintain that for a penetrating, delicate comprehension of real works of literature this manner of reading is not enough. Language cannot be separated from sound, and that is the sum of the matter; only he who hears the foreign language within himself in exactly or approximately the same way as a native hears it can really appreciate and enjoy not only poetry, where phonetic effects must needs always play an important part, but also all the higher forms of prose. Then there is the mnemonic benefit of a correct pronunciation. It helps the pupil to keep foreign languages distinct from each other; for instance, he will never be misled to think that jeune means “pretty” on account of its resemblance to schÖn, and he will not be apt to confuse French joli, journÉe, nouvelle with English jolly, journey, novel. In the second place, Madvig is right—and this applies to the living languages too—when he writes: “Finally there is scarcely any doubt that progress in the dead languages would become more rapid if, so far as possible, for instance, through reading and pronouncing distinctly and through memorizing new expressions, the language came not only through the eye, but more through the ear than it does in most places now.”

Our pronunciation according to the old school is extremely poor, indeed, much more frightful than most people imagine. It has among others these two disadvantages, that we do not understand the natives, and that we are not understood by them.

The very first lesson in a foreign language ought to be devoted to initiating the pupils into the world of sounds; if the class has already had such an elementary course in sounds, either in connection with the study of their mother tongue (something we ought to come to in the course of time at any rate), or in connection with another foreign language, it can of course be made briefer; it is scarcely safe to omit it entirely. The conversation may be formed as simply as the following one, where all scientific terms are avoided; not even the word “organ” is necessary. (Of course the answers will not always be as prompt and decided as here, and much will need to be repeated several times with different pupils.)

Teacher: John, can you say papa? Papa.—How do you go about it? Say it once more.—Papa. First, I open my mouth, and then I open it once again.—Yes, and in the meantime you must, of course, have closed it. Look at me, all of you, and see if I too go about it in that way—Papa. What did I do, William?—First you opened your mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.—What did I close it with?—With the lips.—Now, when I say op, ap, ep, what do I do?—Close the lips every time, and then open them again.—Then I do that every time I say p. Robert, can you find any other sounds where I also close my lips? No.—Try the word mama.—Yes, in m.—Now, say baby and bib.—Also in b.—Good; then we have three sounds now where the lips are closed, p, b, m. Let us write them in a row on the blackboard. Is it necessary to close the lips in all sounds?—No.—What is your name?—John Gordon Hunter.—All of you look at him while he says it. John Gordon Hunter.—Did he close his lips at all? No.—Then all the sounds which are in the whole of his name must be said with other parts of the mouth than the lips. What else have we that we use to speak with?—The tongue.—Now, when we say n, for instance, John, Anna, what do we do?—Close with the tongue behind the teeth.—What part of the tongue?—The point.—Now try t in atta.—There we also close with the point of the tongue behind the teeth. And d in adda.—Likewise.—Then we use the point of the tongue for t, d, n. Let us write them down under p, b, m. Now k in akka?—Look into my mouth. What do I do?—You close with the tongue farther back in the mouth.—Yes, we call that the back of the tongue. Howard, look into Edward’s mouth while he says akka. Now g in agga (the sound g, of course, not the name d?i· of the letter). Then we can write them down in a third row. p, b, m were what kind of sounds?—Lip-sounds.—And t, d, n, were what kind? Point-of-the-tongue sounds.—And the third row?—Back-of-the-tongue sounds.—Yes, we might also say simply point-sounds and back-sounds. [Here some one will ask]: Why are there not three there?—Yes, there are three sounds there too, but we have no letter for the third. Say tinker, and then tin-kettle. Is there no difference? Yes, in tin-kettle we have a pure n, but not in tinker; here we have another sound before k.—Now try finger.—There we have the same before g.—And in singer?—The same without a real g.—Look into my mouth when I say (s)inger [without s]. We can make a letter for this new sound by writing an n, with the last stroke lengthened below the line and slightly curled, as in g: ?.—James, come up here and write down the four words as they sound, making use of the new letter.—(He writes first tin-kettle).—No, do you hear more than one t? and can you hear any e after l?—No.—What then? tinketl. (It is not worth while at this stage to require greater phonetical exactness than tinketl, ti?ker, fi?ger, si?er, passing over the fact that the final er in the words does not really sound like e + r). You see, if you were a Frenchman trying to learn English, you would not know that n in tin-kettle and in the other words were different sounds, and that the e was silent, and you would pronounce the words incorrectly; but if the one were written tinketl and the other ti?ker, it would be much easier for you to learn how to pronounce them. And then take fringe; it looks as if it were simply finger with the r in another place, and yet it is quite a different sound, so we see that the two letters ng may stand for three entirely different sounds. We also write knight, and say “nait”; we write busy and say “bizi.” Can you find any other words which we spell differently from the way in which we pronounce them? [Various examples are found and analyzed.] When we write the words exactly as they sound, we call it phonetical transcription. Now, in the beginning, we shall write all French words phonetically, so that you can more easily learn how to pronounce them. But you saw in the case of tinker that we occasionally need a new symbol in this transcription, which we do not use otherwise. You will learn a few more of them in the course of time.... Then we have seen that in order to say different sounds, we can use the lips and the point of the tongue and the back of the tongue. Is there nothing else that we need to speak with?—The nose? Yes, that is all right in a way, but—can you move your nose? Look at my nose; do I move it when I speak?—No.—But is it not possible to use it without moving it? Now, see if I use my nose when I say a···· [very long drawn out].[39] Now, I suddenly hold my nose with two fingers, and press the nostrils together. Does that make the sound different?—No.—But now I say m in the same way m···· and pinch the nostrils together in the same way. Did anything happen?—Yes, there was no sound.—Now you can try it yourselves. First you, George; say a···, and then the boy next to you can suddenly pinch your nose together with two fingers. And then say m···, and let Fred pinch your nose again. Can you say m while your nostrils are closed?—No, at any rate the sound soon disappears. All of you try it; say a· just as long as I do, and pinch the nose together several times with your fingers whenever you see me do it; and now likewise with m. That is because the air has to escape through the nose in order that the sound m may be made. It is the soft palate that you use in order to open the inner entrance to the nose, so that the air can escape through the nostrils. You can feel the palate behind the teeth, there it is hard; but if you pass your fingers farther back, you will soon feel that it becomes soft and flexible. See how it can go up and down in my mouth. Look in the mirror[40], and see how your own palate is. First try breathing in and out silently, and then say a; then you will see how your soft palate suddenly jumps up; that is because it has to close the entrance to the nose, so that no air can get out that way. But when you say m it remains hanging down, so that the air can come out through the nose, the passage through the mouth being closed by the lips. [At this point, you might make a rough sketch on the blackboard, showing a cross-section through the mouth, with the soft palate in the two positions.] In producing n and ?, you have the same position of the soft palate as in the case of m. [Try to pinch the nose together.]

Now we have seen how we use the nose and the mouth when we speak, but are they the only things that are necessary in speaking? [If the pupils cannot think of “voice” of their own accord, the teacher may put them on the track by saying: when someone speaks (or sings) very well, we say that he has a good...]—Voice.—Where is the voice?—In the vocal chords.—And where are they?—In Adam’s apple.—[Here it might be a good thing not to despise the anecdote about the apple which stuck in Adam’s throat.] Now we also call that the larynx. In there, there are two vocal chords stretched parallel to each other, and when they vibrate a tone is produced, and that is what we call voice. It is just as when a string of a violin is brought into vibration and gives forth a tone; or a bell or a wine-glass, which is made to quiver violently. Now do we always use the voice when we speak? You do not know; well, then we can experiment. [Whisper a sentence.] Did I use my voice then?—No.—Now try first to say an a··· quite loudly and forcibly (or sing it), and take firm hold of Adam’s apple with your thumb and forefinger; then you will feel it quiver. Have you never tried to touch a piano with your finger tips while someone was playing on it? Then you will have felt the same kind of delicate, rapid, quivering movements as you feel on touching the larynx while the voice is in activity. In both cases you can feel those movements with your fingers which you hear with your ear as a tone. But now whisper an a··· and feel your larynx; do you feel anything?—No, there are no vibrations.—And try to say s··· [by no means the name of the letter, es, but the hissing sound itself.] Is there voice in that? Do you feel any vibration?—No.—Then s is a voiceless sound, but a is a voiced sound. Now, try m··· [not em!] Is it voiced? and n···? Notice that you can sing the voiced sounds [test several of them], but not the voiceless sounds.[41] That f··· is voiceless, and that v··· (with strong buzzing!) is voiced, is easily discovered. In the same way, we have for every voiceless sound a corresponding voiced sound. Say s···, and now produce the corresponding voiced sound with the buzzing element. They are the sounds we have in so and zoo, seal and zebra. We have also a third corresponding pair ? and ?; ? is the sound in shilling, shall, etc.; ? is the sound in measure, pleasure, etc. Then we may write down:

Now pronounce each sound in chorus as I point to the letter, and continue drawing it out until I take the chalk away from the letter.[42] Thereupon the pupils may be tested singly, the teacher skipping from one sound to the other. Exercises may also be given with the consonants between two vowels: afffa, avvva, asssa, azzza; afa, ava, asa, aza.

Now the pupils have already had a little course in elementary phonetics; it interests them and contains nothing that they cannot understand, and nothing that is not useful for them. Nor does it ever really frighten the children; but the very thought of it has actually frightened a number of older teachers, who apparently live in holy terror of trespassing beyond the lines laid out for them in their childhood, and who unfailingly think that everything new must be just as useless, dry and pedantical as most of what they learned in their own schooldays, so they are not inclined to have the bother of making themselves familiar with anything new.[43] In the Danish original of this book, I reprinted as a curiosity a description of the activity of the organs of speech in the production of speech-sounds, which a boy 14 years old, who had never been told anything about the formation of sounds, had written all by himself, without the least instruction or help of any kind (which can easily be seen, among other things, from the fact that he sticks to and analyzes the names of the letters); it shows that this dreaded phonetical science is not so terribly far beyond the horizon of ordinary children after all.

The children always “follow” the teacher so well in these phonetical exercises that it is rather necessary to put a damper on their eagerness to try to produce the sounds than to spur them on. Or, in other words, the teacher has but to organize their natural impulse to imitate the sounds by saying to them, when they begin to whistle and hum: “You may say the sounds yourselves directly, just wait a moment,” and thereupon, after the explanation has been given, by allowing them ample opportunity to pronounce the sounds, both in chorus and singly. Then, both during recess and at home, they will revel to their hearts’ content in the new sounds, and the whole new and amusing world that has been opened to them.

After the introductory course which I have just sketched,[44] I immediately begin with texts in the foreign language. If the teacher will at this point read one or two pages aloud rapidly (or give a little talk) in as characteristically a French or German manner as possible, this is a very good way to give the pupils a preliminary notion of the foreignness of the new language. This impression may be further emphasized by means of a little trick which I may recommend. The teacher practises an English sentence pronounced as a Frenchman (or German respectively) would pronounce it, with French vowels, French accent, etc. He may refer to this sentence now and then in speaking of the single sounds, and it will serve to warn the students against the kind of mistakes that they themselves are to avoid. Then I take up the new sounds in the more accidental order in which they occur in the selection for reading; I repeat every word, together with its meaning, write it down on the blackboard in phonetical transcription, and explain every symbol as it occurs, at the same time articulating the corresponding sound isolated (this is of great importance! also the consonants alone without any vowel, either before or after), and drawing it out very long.[45]

In not a few cases, the pupils will be able to imitate the sound with sufficient exactness, when it has been produced isolated; at all events, they do it far better than when they only hear it among other sounds. But in many other cases their imitation is not successful, or, at least, it is not sure enough to be quite satisfactory; then it is necessary to resort to phonetics for help, on the basis of the introductory course.

Of course, it is not easy for a Dane to give detailed directions for phonetical instruction, as it is to be conducted when an English teacher is teaching English children French or German. Therefore, the following section is necessarily shorter than the corresponding section in the Danish original, where I could treat the subject exhaustively on the basis of my personal experience, as to how good results are to be obtained. But some few remarks may perhaps serve to point out the right way, and any teacher who has thoroughly mastered the first principles of phonetics theoretically, and especially practically, will himself be able to supplement my suggestions.

In the very first French or German sentence in the reader will probably be found one of the sounds [y] (Fr. sur, Ger. Über), or [Ø] (Fr. veut, Ger. hÖhe). It is best for these two sounds to be practised together, and, in the beginning, in their long form. As experience shows, it is not sufficient for the teacher merely to say these sounds; they generally cause English people much trouble, and all imitations based on the diphthong in Eng. few, etc., ought to be strictly discountenanced from the very first lesson. That it is not impossible to learn the correct sounds was brought home to me in a striking manner a few years ago. These sounds are also found in Danish; an English lady who had been in Denmark for some years had not been able, in spite of unceasing efforts, to learn them by imitation. Then I made a bet that I could teach her them in less than ten minutes, and I won the bet through five minutes’ theoretical explanation of rounded and unrounded vowels, and two minutes’ practical exercises. The directions were about as follows: say [u·] (or [uw]) in too very loudly, and hold it as long as you can without taking breath. Once more: observe in the hand-mirror the position of the lips. Then say tea [ti·, tij] in the same way; draw the vowel out until you can hold it no longer; continue all the time to observe the position of the lips in the mirror. Now [u···] again; then [i···]. The lips are rounded for some vowels, slit-shaped for others. Try to pout them rather more than you do usually. Pronounce [u···] a couple of times with the lips as rounded and close to each other as possible, and concentrate your attention on the lips. Then say [i···] a couple of times, paying attention to the position of the tongue; you will feel that the sides of the tongue touch the roof of the mouth or the teeth. Now look in the mirror; say [i···] again, and now suddenly, taking care to keep the tongue in the same position, let your lips take the rounded, pouted position they had before. It may be that the pupil is still unable to produce any [y], because, despite the teacher’s warning, he involuntarily shifts his tongue-position back again to the familiar [u] position. In that case, however, the teacher must not be discouraged, but pass on to the second part of the experiment, which is surer, and which might therefore have been taken first: place your lips in this pouted [u] position, without producing any sound, look in the mirror, and be very careful that the position of the lips remains unchanged, and then try to say [i···]. If the tongue is placed in the correct [i···]-position, the result cannot be anything but an [y]. This sound is retained and repeated until the pupil is perfectly sure of both the articulation and acoustic effect. Then the sound [Ø] may be taken up. It may be produced with [y] as a starting-point, the lower jaw being lowered so that both the underlip and the tongue follow it, while the teacher takes care to stop the downward movement in the right place. The result may be controlled by starting with [e] and rounding the lips, that is, by going through a process corresponding to the transition from [i···] to [y···].

One of the most unbecoming mistakes which Englishmen make in their pronunciation of foreign languages is their diphthongizing of long vowels, since long vowels,[46] in ordinary English, are pronounced with an upward glide, so that the jaw and the tongue are raised higher in the last part of the vowels in see, two, hay, know, for instance, than in the first part. In vulgar London pronunciation, this English peculiarity is carried further, the beginning of the sound being lowered, at all events in the last two sounds mentioned, so that lace sounds like lice, and pay like pie. But even if the best pronunciation does not go to this extreme, yet the glide is there, and this glide is for the native Frenchman or German one of the most striking faults in the Englishman’s pronunciation of the respective languages, so the Englishman had best be on his guard in this particular. If the teacher, after a little theoretical explanation, says the English [ei] and the German [e] alternately a number of times, even the dullest pupils cannot help but get their ears trained to detect this difference, but long and patient training is certainly necessary, both with the class in chorus and with the pupils singly, before this deeply rooted tendency to diphthongize can be checked.

Another difficulty is met with in the short (narrow) vowels. French ÉtÉ must be pronounced with two short closed e’s; Englishmen have a tendency to pronounce two long or half-long glide-sounds, which begin with a greater distance between the jaws than they ought to, and close with a smaller distance between the jaws than the genuine French sounds have. Anyone who has become accustomed to the undiphthongized long [e], however, can use this as a starting-point for learning the correct short sound, the best way being the frequent repetition of tÉtÉtÉ··· Likewise the short sounds in fini, dodo, froufrou, etc.

Nor do the French nasal vowels occur in English; in phonetical transcription, they are indicated by means of ~ over the vowel-symbol, for instance [?~] in son, etc. Here the teacher must immediately make every effort to check the tendency to say [??] as in Eng. long, and my experience with Danish pupils has been that it is not sufficient for this purpose merely to let the pupils repeat the sound after me. It is necessary to make it perfectly clear to them wherein the difference consists. First the teacher draws out his [?~] and establishes (by means of questions) that it is only one sound, the same from first to last. Then one of the pupils is to try to draw out the sound [??], and it thus becomes clear that it is only the last of the two sounds that is prolonged. On the basis of what has been previously learned (p. 149), the teacher shows the difference of effect caused in closing the nostrils with the fingers, and explains that it is due to the fact that in [??] we have first a sound where the air escapes only through the mouth, then another sound where the air only passes out through the nose; but in [?~], both passages are open at the same time. If a pencil is laid in the mouth so that it rests on the tongue (tolerably far back), it will remain lying quietly when [?~] is pronounced, but not in the case of [??]. In connection with [?~], the pupils may practise the [?~] sound in tant, [?~] or, more correctly, [Æ~], the sound in teint and the rounded sound in [oe~], un. The sound [?] in tuer [t?e], lui [l?i] is easily learned with sufficient exactness as a [y] which is quickly passed over so that the main stress is allowed to fall on the following sound, the relation between [w] and [u] being brought in by way of comparison.

With respect to the consonants, care must be taken to pronounce [t, d, n] in such a way that the point of the tongue touches the upper teeth; it must, at all events, not be held as far back as in English; the same applies to [l], where this difference is still more important; the hollow sound of the English l is also to be avoided by keeping the whole tongue more flat and not hollowing it out like a spoon. The voiceless sounds [r?] and [l?] in [f?n?·tr?] fenÊtre and [tabl?] table can easily be deduced from what has been learned about the voice (p. 150–151); it is necessary to guard against making [r?] into the vowel found at the end of English words like mister, etc. The pupils will easily understand that with the correct unvoiced pronunciation, these sounds are apt to disappear in rapid speech. Finally we take up the sound ? in [kÃpa?] campagne; it is explained as lying between [nj] and [?]; it is best pronounced with the point of the tongue resting in the lower part of the mouth behind the lower teeth, but in using the word “best” I intend to hint that it is not strictly necessary to require this method of formation; there are also Frenchmen who (at all events before a vowel) pronounce it like English [nj] in onion.

With respect to [p, t, k], it is well known that in French they have not the aspiration that they have in English; since the difference is not so great, however, the English sounds may perhaps be used unchanged in the beginning. Then if one of the pupils notices the difference, which he perhaps will express by saying that the teacher pronounces [b] when there stands [p] in the book, or possibly by merely trying to imitate the teacher’s sound by means of his own English [b], his attention may be called to the little breath which there always is between the opening of the English [p] and the vowel itself; this is not found in French, where the vowel after [p, t, k] comes exactly at the same moment as the opening takes place (either by the lips or the tongue), and therefore they sound to us like [b, d, g] (capitaine as if it were gabid?n). Try a [p] without a vowel after it, first with a strong breath (somewhat like when you pooh-pooh something, but without any voice), then without any breath like a man puffing at his pipe (about the same sound as when soap bubbles burst); and then try to place a vowel after it[47]; it must come immediately, just as quickly as the movements of a soldier after the drill-master’s command. Then [t] and [k] may be taken up in the same manner.

The French division into syllables (il a =i " la, chaque Écolier = ?a " ke " k? " lje, " etc.) is best learned by pure imitation, likewise the distribution of stress (accent); by reciting or reading connectedly to the pupils and by always requiring them to say the whole sentence together without any pause, the teacher can counteract their tendency to pronounce each word separately in that monotone which is intolerable. Thus il a ÉtÉ ici is said all together in one with the vowels gliding over into each other, a + É sounding somewhat similar to [ai] in lie, and É + i to [ei] in lay.

German sounds are somewhat easier for Englishmen than French sounds, but yet there are several points to be noticed. In the case of some sounds, any skilled teacher will be able to follow the suggestions given for French, mutatis mutandis; in the case of others, like the two ch- sounds, he must in an analogous manner adapt his theoretical knowledge in phonetics to the practical needs of teaching.

Some people have found it inconsistent that I have no partiality for didactic theorizing in questions of grammar, but myself employ theoretical explanations in questions of phonetics. The explanation is not far to seek. Theoretical grammar, as it is generally studied, is more abstract, it is difficult, it is very comprehensive, and still it does not lead to the desired goal, which is grammatical correctness; the theory of sound which we want introduced is more concrete and it is easy, it is more limited, and it actually leads to the desired goal, which is a good pronunciation. This last assertion is proved by the experiences of numerous teachers in various lands.

Of late years, it has become more and more usual in schools to use a sound-chart in connection with the instruction in languages. On this chart, all the sounds of the language which is being studied are arranged in systematic order, and are indicated with such large letters that they can be seen by the whole class; various finesses are often used, as for instance to give the voiced and voiceless sounds different colours.[48] I myself have not used this contrivance, but I have heard from several foreign teachers, and now from a couple of Danish teachers too, that they are very well satisfied with it. The teacher points to a letter and gets either the whole class or one of the pupils to say the corresponding sound; or the teacher may let A mention some sound or other, and B, who is standing at the blackboard, shows that he has caught it by repeating it and at the same time pointing at the symbol; or if C makes a mistake in the pronunciation of a word which he is reading (or saying) D is to point, first to the symbol for the wrong sound, and then to the right one, etc. In this way, much writing on the blackboard, which would otherwise be necessary, is saved; and besides, it may be of great benefit for the pupils always to have all the sounds in a connected system before their eyes (even if the teacher of course never intends to examine them in the whole phonetical system of the language as such).

The elements of phonetical transcription are learned, as we have seen, together with the corresponding sounds themselves. Now what is the use of the phonetical transcription itself? It seems to be commonly supposed that its votaries claim by its help to have “given the pupils a better comprehension of the single sounds and to have taught them more easily to produce them;” its opponents attack this assertion and strike it down with true Quixotic zeal without stopping to think that it has never been set up by the advocates of phonetical transcription at all. These advocates themselves know as well as anyone what is but natural, namely, that a boy does not of his own accord pronounce a French nasal correctly merely because he has been shown the symbol [?~]. The pronunciation of the single sounds must be learned in other ways, as has been shown above, and for that purpose alone, all writing could very well be entirely dispensed with without resulting in any essential change in the character of the instruction. When, however, we use phonetical transcription already at the first stage, it is partly on account of the excellent help which it will afford later for quite a different purpose, which I shall come to immediately, partly because it really is of some help in the teaching of the sound-formation proper. It saves the teacher a great deal of repetition, since instead of always saying the sound himself, he can point to the symbol and get one of the clever pupils to say it for the others; it makes the pupils see more clearly how many different sounds there are for them to pay attention to (while in exclusively oral instruction, perhaps one pupil will be inclined to hear [?~] and [?~] as one sound, another pupil, [?~] and [?~] as one sound); finally, the homogeneousness of the symbols will help the pupils more easily to comprehend the nature of the sounds themselves; when they have learned to pronounce [?~], they will get the run of all the other nasal vowels more quickly when they see the same flourish over them all; the double parallelism in the four symbols

will aid them in learning the corresponding relations between the sounds themselves.

However, in order to understand the greatest and the proper value of phonetical transcription, it is necessary to have well in mind the fact that there are two essentially different kinds of mistakes in pronunciation—

A. Mistakes in the formation of the sounds, and

B. Mistakes in the employment of the sounds.

We have mistakes belonging to Class A, for instance, when Englishmen use the ng combination in place of the French nasals, or when they diphthongize the French long, pure vowels, when they pronounce ? or k instead of German ch, or [z] or [s] for German z [ts], [?·], as in cur, instead of [oe·r] in French coeur, when they pronounce French dÛ like the English due, etc.

Mistakes belonging to Class B arise if you pronounce French gent like gant, peut like put, or vice vers eut like [Ø], German frass or fuss with a short, or nass or nuss with a long vowel, bischen with [?], etc.

Both kinds of mistakes may occur in the same word, as when MÜnchen is pronounced [mink?n] or [mju?k?n] instead of [mynÇen].

The mistakes belonging to class A are not due to the orthography; those mistakes we can also make in languages whose spelling corresponds to the pronunciation; they are largely due to our native habits of articulation, and they are to be counteracted by means of the phonetical training which has been described above. If the foreign sounds have once been well learned in the introductory course, this kind of mistakes can only occur through carelessness or through the lack of continued practice.

Mistakes in the employment of the sounds (class B) however, are as a rule due to disagreement between the pronunciation and the orthography of each language; they are not caused by our native habits of articulation, and even those that have learned all the foreign sounds perfectly (indeed even the natives themselves) are liable to make them in every new word which they see written, but have never heard.

It is this last kind of mistake that phonetical transcription helps us to avoid, it protects us against the mistakes which the different national orthographies actually seduce us to make. Phonetical transcription is necessary in the teaching of all languages, but of course, it may deviate from the ordinary orthography in greater or less degree in the different languages. In Finnish and Spanish, the orthography is so nearly phonetical that only relatively few changes are necessary in order to indicate the pronunciation; in Italian, almost all that is needed is to indicate if e and o are open or closed, if s and z are voiced [z, dz] or voiceless [s, ts], and which single consonants are to be pronounced double (long). In German, the orthography is already much more capricious, but in languages like French, Danish, and English, the number of conflicting rules with all their exceptions is so great that the phonetical transcription necessarily has quite a different appearance from the traditional spelling.

Max MÜller once said that the English orthography is a national misfortune, and ViËtor has improved upon this observation by declaring that it is an international misfortune, since it is not only Englishmen but also all educated persons in other lands who have to be bothered with it. Now, by means of phonetical transcription the words of the foreign language are presented to us in a kind of normal or ideal orthography, where every letter always signifies the same sound, and every sound is always indicated in the same manner.

Some persons urge the objection against the use of phonetical transcription that it can never be made so perfect that it can show all the shades of intonation, etc., in the spoken language, so that it cannot take the place of a teacher’s oral instruction. But we have never maintained that it could; aside from private study without a teacher, which must needs always be more or less imperfect, we have always emphasized the exceedingly great importance of the teacher pronouncing the words for the pupils, and we have not recommended phonetical transcription as something to replace, but as something to support, the teacher’s oral instruction in pronunciation. Even if it misses some of the very finest shades, it may still be of benefit, just as a table of logarithms can be very useful even if the numbers are not carried out farther than to the fourth decimal place.

Other opponents again have exactly the reverse objection to make, that our system of sound-symbols is too delicately detailed for school use. Even if many people only say this because they confuse the phonetical transcription which is used in scientific works with the far simpler transcription which we want to introduce for school use, and which is by no means beyond the powers of comprehension of an ordinary pupil, still we have an answer right at hand. We are aiming at (and attaining) greater exactness than our predecessors cared for, but this is very necessary too, for the old school pronunciation was too unintelligible to the native. Besides, our system is constructed on such simple principles, that we attain to a higher degree of exactness with less trouble than you do with far more difficult means. When mathematicians began to designate the value of p in decimal form (3·1416) instead of the fractional form 22/7, they not only attained greater exactness but also greater ease in using the quantity in long calculations, since the decimal is easier to handle than the fraction. Our phonetical transcription may pride itself on exactly corresponding advantages.

It has already been tried in many old readers (to say nothing of the dictionaries) to counteract the injurious influence of the orthography on the pronunciation by means of different systems of designating the pronunciation, such as numbers over the vowels, strokes denoting length and curves denoting shortness, italicizing of the s’s which ought to be voiced, or in other places italicizing of the silent letters, dots and flourishes above and under the letters. All such systems, just because they try to deviate as little as possible from the orthography, necessarily adopt a number of its caprices and thus become too complicated to be of any real benefit to the pupils. But the phoneticians, by starting out from rational principles, have succeeded in creating systems of phonetical transcription which really meet all reasonable demands in the way of exactness and simplicity.[49] That they really are simple and easy to learn has been proved to me more than once in striking ways; in several schools where my books are used but where the teacher has been afraid of the phonetical transcription, the children have resorted to it of their own accord, when they came to a word that they did not know how to pronounce; several parents have also told me that they have familiarized themselves with the phonetical transcription in the books which their children used and they did not find it at all difficult.

Perhaps it is worth while here to consider the four ways in which it is possible to communicate the material of a foreign language to pupils. Either (1) the teacher may not let them use any writing at all, but give them everything orally; or (2) he may give them the orthography alone; or (3) he may give them orthography and phonetical transcription together; or finally (4) he may give them phonetical transcription alone.

(1) The first way obviously has the advantage that there is no sound-symbol whatever to confuse the clear apprehension of the pupils; it resembles the manner in which a child learns its mother tongue. It will also be the more in place the more the instruction can be brought to resemble the way in which a child first acquires language, that is, where there is only one pupil, or at least very few; where the pupil (pupils) is (are) not very old, and especially not yet quite familiar with the secrets of writing; where the teacher is a native; and above all, where there is ample time. For we must not shut our eyes to the fact that this exclusively oral instruction in languages takes exceedingly much time; much repetition is necessary, and the teacher has to have great patience. In schools it is only possible to have purely oral instruction as a short preliminary course of a couple of months at the most, before passing over to the use of writing in some form or other. Walter, who has tried both, is emphatically of the opinion that in class instruction phonetical transcription is much to be preferred to purely oral instruction, because the latter wastes an enormous amount of time, and the teacher cannot feel nearly so sure that the whole class is able to follow.

(2) The pupils are immediately allowed to see the traditional orthography, and the teacher gives them the pronunciation orally. The eternal repetition and the painful small corrections which this method craves make the lessons bothersome for both the teacher and the pupils, who almost always become slovenly out of sheer discouragement over the prodigious task before them. Of course there are some rules for the relations between orthography and pronunciation, but unfortunately there are so few without exceptions that certainty cannot be attained by their means.

(3) The pupils are taught the traditional spelling from the very beginning, but at the same time they are given an antidote in the shape of phonetical transcription, either in the form that every new word is phonetically transcribed in the glossary, or that (in addition) the reading selections themselves are transcribed. To be sure the advantages of phonetical transcription are made use of by this method; several teachers have expressed their satisfaction at the results thus obtained, and I have no doubt that they are better than when phonetical transcription is dispensed with. However, I am convinced that by this method it is difficult sometimes to prevent the less intelligent pupils from confusing the two systems of spelling, so that they neither learn the pronunciation nor the orthography very well.

(4) Therefore I have always (like the majority of the advocates of phonetical transcription) preferred to let beginners be employed only with phonetical transcription for some time, so that they may become quite familiar not only with the system of sound-symbols, but also with a good deal of the material of the language before they pass on to seeing the words in their orthographical shape too. The principle to be followed here is that of not allowing the difficulties to pile up, but overcoming them one by one. When the pupils know the symbols after the first few lessons, it causes them no difficulty whatever to read the texts; these themselves (together with the meaning of the words, the grammatical forms, etc.) are therefore far more easy to learn than if the caprices of the orthography had to be mastered at the same time.

For this method, connected texts in phonetical transcription are of course necessary, but such texts are also to be recommended to those who follow method No. 3, since there are many points of pronunciation which cannot come up at all in the transcriptions of the single words in the glossary, such points as appear only in combinations of words, in connected discourse. There is, for instance, French [?] in le, de, demande, devenir, quatre, etc., etc., which is sometimes pronounced and sometimes omitted, according to the number of consonants coming immediately before or after the [?]: À devenir [adv?ni·r], pour devenir [purd?vni·r], etc.; there is the varying treatment of the English r; there are double forms due to the influence of sentence-stress, such as [kÆn] and [k?n] (= can), and many other phenomena of that kind, which it is really necessary to pay attention to, since no sentence can be pronounced naturally without consideration for these points, and since we cannot understand the natives without being familiar with them[50]—for we cannot require the French to make their language stiff and do violence to all their natural habits of speech to suit us. Only by using connected texts in phonetical transcription can the teacher require the pupils from the very beginning to read the foreign language connectedly, intelligently, and with some expression.

In conversations on the subject, I have so often had to answer the question as to whether I also want the pupils to learn to write phonetical transcription, that I must devote a few lines to that question here too. Of course they must write phonetical transcription, but learn it—well, that is scarcely necessary, for it will not entail the least bit of extra work or trouble for them. They learn the symbols, and when they know them they can write any word whatever in phonetical transcription, if they only know how to pronounce it; this is a thing which follows of its own accord from the very nature of phonetical transcription. Dictation, in which the pupils are to write in phonetical transcription what the teacher says to them, presupposes only a correct apprehension of the sounds, and is a very good test as to whether they have heard accurately (cf. p. 95).

How long is a teacher to continue to use exclusively phonetical transcription? That is one of the most difficult questions, and I cannot venture to give a decided answer. The answer will surely always depend partly upon the age and maturity of the pupils and upon how much time can be spent upon the language on the whole. I myself have even dared to go so far that in teaching a class in English, when I only had two hours a week for two years before the final examination, I spent the whole of the first year on phonetical transcription (Sweet’s Elementarbuch), and I did not regret it. In French in the lower classes, I once at least used phonetical transcription more than a year, and the only difficulty arose when some boys came in in the course of the year from other schools. At other times, again, I have made the course in phonetical transcription shorter, and on the whole I have experimented in various ways without coming to any certain result—except this: continue with phonetical transcription as long as possible. For there is relatively so much more of the language itself learned in this way, that I have not the slightest doubt that the pupil who, with the same number of lessons a week, and at the same age, has read phonetical transcription for two years and orthography for half a year knows more of the language (not only of the pronunciation!) than the pupil who has used phonetical transcription for half a year and thereupon orthography for two and a half years (in all half a year more than the first boy). And then the phonetical transcription itself is such a fine means of training the pupils to minute exactness, because they really have to be constantly on the lookout in order to read neither more nor less than each symbol indicates; therefore I attach great educational significance to phonetical transcription.

But of course we have to begin to learn the orthography some time; and I suppose it is this transition more than anything else that has frightened people away from using phonetical transcription, because they imagine that it must be extremely difficult. But now all those who have dared to try phonetical transcription unanimously declare that they were surprised at the ease with which the transition took place; there was no trouble worth mentioning either for the teacher or the pupils; and they were surprised at the accuracy in orthography displayed by pupils who had been taught in this way. The psychological reason for this is probably to be found in the sharper perception which these pupils necessarily get of the difference between sound and writing, together with the fact that they are not compelled like the others to learn many things at a time (spelling, pronunciation, meaning, inflection), but the orthography is separated out as something which is to be learned by itself about words with whose pronunciation and meaning they have already become quite familiar.

The best way of making the transition seems to be in going over some of the selections which have already been read and learned. First, the teacher says a few words about orthography in general, basing his remarks on English spelling; he may call attention to the silent letters in night, know, the ambiguity of the vowels in home, honest, etc. Then a French piece the pupils know already is shown to them in orthographical dress; it is gone through word by word in such a way that the pupils themselves may be guided to find out the most important relations between the letters and their sound-values. Here they for the first time have something to do with the accents and the cedilla, whose name they learn.[51]

In the following lessons the comparison between spelling and sound is conducted in the same manner as indicated above for grammatical observations; sometimes starting from a certain sound, the students may point out all the words in which it occurs on a page or so; sometimes starting from the orthography, they may note and classify all the phonetical values of a certain letter. A few lessons will be sufficient for these preliminaries.

Ought the teacher to require the pupils to learn the orthography from the very beginning, that is, ought he to examine them in spelling or let them write dictation? No—that is not generally the practice according to the non-phonetical method either. First let them become accustomed to seeing the spelling, and in the exercises just suggested let them copy out of the book; later on they may be required to learn how to spell the words in the first line of every lesson, and in the course of a few months the pupils will be just as much at home in their French and German orthography as any pedant could require—and much more at home than they generally are now after a long time.[52]

Phonetical transcription ought by no means to be given up on beginning with the orthography: it is too good an aid to be dispensed with at this point. Not only ought whole pieces to be read, occasionally at least, in phonetical transcription, but it ought to be used in connection with all new words (thus especially in the glossary) in order to prevent all guesswork. Thereby is also obtained another important result at a later stage, namely, the teacher may be just as strict in requiring the pronunciation to be learned as the meaning, whereas without phonetical transcription he cannot expect the pronunciation to be prepared at home. By steadily keeping up their practice in transposing phonetical transcription into practical pronunciation the pupils have something of value for their whole life, for, when they no longer have a teacher to ask about the pronunciation of a new word, they can obtain information about it themselves. That which was only a few years ago a possibility reserved for the distant future, namely, that all French and English dictionaries should give the pronunciation according to rational principles, is now, as we know, well under way to become a reality at any time.[53]

The use of phonetics and phonetical transcription in the teaching of modern languages must be considered as one of the most important advances in modern pedagogy, because it ensures both considerable facilitation and an exceedingly large gain in exactness. But these means must be employed immediately from the very beginning; just as easy as it is to get a good pronunciation in this way, just as difficult is it to root out the bad habits which may become inveterate during a very short period of instruction according to a wrong or antiquated method. Timotheus, an old well-known music-teacher, used to demand double payment of all those pupils who had taken instruction with other teachers before they came to him; the reason that he gave was that he had much more trouble in teaching these pupils than those who had not already acquired bad habits for him to break them of. Go ye and do likewise, ye teachers of languages!

I shall add a few words on the use of the phonograph. The apparatus has been very much perfected of late years and renders beautifully most vowels and all the general features of stress, intonation, etc. But the rendering of most consonants is still far from perfect; you cannot always tell whether you hear a p or an f, etc., and it is impossible to rely on a phonographic record for minute shades of s-sounds and the like. It is clear, too, that even if the apparatus were nearer the ideal than it is now, it could not replace the teacher. But in the hands of an able teacher I have no doubt that it will prove a valuable help: it is patient and will repeat the same sentences scores of times, if required, without tiring or changing a single sound or intonation; you may also have different records of the same short piece as pronounced by one man from Berlin, another man from Hanover, a third from Munich, and a fourth from Vienna, which may be very useful for comparisons, even if, as a matter of course, in your ordinary teaching you stick to one particular standard of pronunciation—and in various other ways phonographic records may be used to stimulate the pupils. But everything they hear in this way should at the same time be presented to them in phonetic writing—either in their readers or on the blackboard. Perhaps, at some future day, the “telegraphone” invented by my countryman V. Poulsen will supplant Edison’s phonograph in this as well as in other respects.