Evening Star Newspaper, February 2, 1930, Page 83

. | Fiction PART SEVEN. The Sunday Star Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1929. Features | 24 PAGES. Recording America’s Dialects From Slurred “R” of the South to the Nasal Tewang of New England, America’s Linguistic Peculiarities, Now Disappearing Before the Universal Language of the Radio and the Talkies, Are Being Recorded for Posterity by Scientists at Columbia. N the decade since the war America has been outgrowing her past with the dis- / concerting speed of an adolescent child. In every direction she is bursting the buttons of old traditions and discarding manners and habits in which she once felt eomfortable, but for which she no longer has any use. These changes have been greatly accelerated by our modern inventions, particularly the talkies and the radio, which are influencing American life to an extent just beginning to be realized. Especially are they giving us a common, universal American speech in place of a medley of local dialects. While this standardization, from most points of view, would be desirable, students of phonetics feel that it would be a tragedy to let our present speech variations, which cast so much light on our history, pass out of existence without leaving any record. For this reason Columbia University has made during the last year a collection of permanent phonographic records of the typical speech of more than 150 representative Amer- ican communities, with a description of the peculiar characteristics of each. This work, which is being carried on by Prof. Harry Morgan Ayres and Prof. Cabell Greet, with the technical assistance of Prof. S. L. Quimby of the physics department was undertaken at the suggestion of the Modern Language Asso- ciation of America, and the first report on it will shortly be published. The findings of Columbia will probably be turned over later to a committee of the Amer- ican Council of Learned Soclieties. This body, in conjunction with the Linguistic Scciety of America, held a conference last August at Yale, to which scholars from all parts ¢f the United States and Canada came to perfect plans for making a complete dialect atlas of the United States and later, perhaps, of the whole English-speaking world. The under- taking, toward which Prof. Ayres and Dr. Greet have done pioneer field work, will, it is thought, require 10 years to finish. The business of collecting many sample packages of speech which are really true to the localities they are supposed to represent has its difficulties. It has been shown, for instance, that even a person born and brought up in Virginia cannot be trusted to speak pure- “Virginian” if his parents or any one else with whom he was closely associated in child- hood came from another section of the coun- try. The peculiarities of the speech he hears when he is learning to talk will stick to him, to a certain degree, all his life, becoming more pronounced in moments of excitement. This discovery, together with their detailed study of local idiosyncrasies, has given Prof. Ayres and Prof. Greet an eerie knack of sometimes 2 SIS N, By Mary‘Day Winn, reading a subject’s past after a few moments of casual conversation. The professors themselves modestly deplore a tendency to credit them with any such gift, saying that it is easy to exaggerate the results of a little luck combined with a little ex- perience. They say that a hotel clerk with a good ear and a good memory would be still better fitted to play the role of the phonetic expert in Shaw's “Pygmalion.” But the writer, who is from Virginia and is a stranger to the two, asked them if they could tell from what State she had come, and was considerably taken aback when they replied that although her pronunciation showed a variety of in- fluences it smacked most strongly of Georgia! This seeming contradiction was cleared up when she explained that her mother was a Georgian. THE experience of one of the instructors at Columbia was even more remarkable. His two fellow professors had been engaged in con- versation with him on a good many occasions, but knew practically nothing of his training or background. He asked them to analyze his speech. After listening to him attentively once more, Dr. Greet said: “You were probably born or taken as an infant to a suburb of New York City. You were closely associated, at that time, with some one from the vicinity of Louisville, Ky., but who had ancestors from both Maryland and South Carolina. Another person close to you when you were a child, possibly your father, had lived in or been influenced by the speech of California and Boston. You studied Latin or the Latin languages when you were quite young.” m‘hfidhlnuhmukedotblwkmm may be realized when the facts in the case are given. The young instructor was born and lived as a baby in New Rochelle, 14 miles from New York City. His mother was from Bardstown, Ky., 28 miles from Louisville, while her father was from Maryland and her mother from South Carolina. His father was from California and his father’s father from Boston. He had been taught French by his grandmother when he was a very little boy! But the foregoing illustrates only one of the difficulties faced by the experimenters in their efforts to round up representatives of “pure” dialect types. They were also hampered by limited means and time. Just as they were wondering how these problems could be met, chance solved the riddle expeditiously. The Columbia Summer School draws together each year about 14,000 persons from every section of the United States. Profs. Ayres and Greet recalled that this fortuitous collection of speech samples is then accidentally sorted out, phoneti- cally, by the director of the Summer session, who assigns one tree on the campus to each of the States as a place where students can congregate in their leisure and meet and talk with fellow countrymen. To these tree gatherings the two collectors of speech therefore sent out scouts, to listen % the conversations. When the scouts heard what sounded to them like good sample speci- mens of the spcech of a given State they would corroborate or refute their judgment by asking the other students from that locality “Is this man’s talk typical of South Carolina?”—or Indiana, or Maine? If those who were ques- tioned agreed that the one singled out was a representative speech specimen, and if his own history corroborated it, he or she was offered a chance to earn $10 and immortality by mak- ing a record. Even with the tremendous simplification of Men of London assume, with Britisk. hauteur, that English is the language spoken by Englishmen. the work by the chance arrangements of the Summer session the collecting of speech samples might still have progressed very slowly nad not another unexpected aid come in the invention of a new kind of phonographic re- cording machine, Up to that time the making of a permanent record was an elaborate and. expensive business, costing about $60 per record - and requiring a good many steps in the operae tion. The new device permits recording by variations in electrical current through a mi= crophone, directly onto an aluminum disc, ab a cost of considerably less than a dollar per record. - This device is the acme of simplicity. The speaker says one or two sample sentences into" a microphone, so that the proper adjustments can be made. When this has been done he: starts making the record proper. The minute’ he is through it is taken off the machine, com= plete and ready to be played. . As all students of the history of the phono- ’ graph know, the first historic words spoken by Edison into that instrument many years ago, ' although world shaking in their significance, . were as silly and inconsequential in their mean= ing as it would be possible to imagine. The first thing that it occurred to the great in- ventor to shout into his instrument, and the first words which the new electrical voice sent ' back to him were the immortal adventures of Mary antl her little lamb., Equally profound are the words chosen for the permanent speech records being made for the laboratory at Colume bia. They recount over and over again, i) the drawl of the South and the nasal twang of New England, in the dialect of the coast and the mountains, the cotton country and the cattle plains and the sidewalks of New York, the sad story of “The Rat Who Couldn’'t Make Up His Mind:” ONCE there was a young rat who couldn't make up his mind. Whenever the other rats asked him if he would like to come out with them he would answer, “I don't know”; and when they said, “Would you like to stay at home?” he wouldn't say “Yes” or “No” either. . He would always shirk making a choice. One day his aunt sald to him, “Now look * here! No one will ever care for you if you ° carry on like this. You have no more mind than a blade of grass. The young rat coughed and looked wise, as usual, but said nothing, “Don’t you think so0?” saild his aunt s with her foot, for she couldn’t bear to see the young rat so cold-blooded. “I don’t know,® -