ion, and stoutly declared that he was a champion for
historic English sounds as opposed to the innovations offered by
Sheridan, Walker, and Jamieson. "The language of a nation," he says in
his Introduction, "is the common property of the people, and no
individual has a right to make in-roads upon its principles. As it is
the medium of communication between men, it is important that the same
written words and the same oral sounds to express the same ideas should
be used by the whole nation. When any man, therefore, attempts to change
the established orthography or pronunciation, except to correct palpable
errors and produce uniformity by recalling wanderers into the pale of
regular analogies, he offers an indignity to the nation. No local
practice, however respectable, will justify the attempt. There is great
dignity, as well as propriety, in respecting the universal and
long-established usages of a nation. With these views of the subject, I
feel myself bound to reject all modern innovations which violate the
established principles and analogies of the language, and destroy or
impair the value of alphabetical writing. I have therefore endeavored to
present to my fellow-citizens the English language in its genuine
purity, as we have received the inheritance from our ancestors, without
removing a landmark. If the language is fatally destined to be
corrupted, I will not be an instrument of the mischief."

These are certainly brave words, and there are even people who would
doubt if Webster had the courage of such convictions. In his Dictionary
he seems to have somewhat underestimated the importance of noting the
pronunciation. He devotes a number of pages, it is true, in the
Introduction, to a discussion of the principles involved, but in marking
the words he used only the simplest method, and disregarded refinements
of speech. The word culture, for instance, is marked by him [c-]ul'ture,
while in the latest edition it appears as [c-][)u]lt'[=u]re
(k[)u]lt'y[u:]r). He had a few antipathies, as to the _tsh_ sound then
fashionable in such words as _tumult_, and with a certain native
pugnacity he attacked the orthoepists who at that time had elaborated
their system more than had the orthographists; he did not believe that
nice shades of sound could be represented to the eye by characters, and
he appears to have been somewhat impatient of the whole subject. He
maintained that the speech which generally prevailed in New England i