ny as teacher of English
unless he spoke the English vowels according to the standard of
Mr. Jones' dictionary; and it was a recognized device, when such an
appointment was being considered, to request the applicant to speak
into a machine and send the record by post to the Continent; whereupon
he was approved or not on that head by the agreement of the record
with the standard which I am about to illustrate from the dictionary.

All these considerations make a strong case for the truth of Mr.
Jones' representation of our 'standard English', and his book is the
most trustworthy evidence at my disposal: but before exhibiting it
I would premise that our present fashionable dialect is not to be
considered as the wanton local creator of all the faults that Mr.
Jones can parade before the eye. Its qualities have come together in
various ways, nor are the leading characteristics of recent origin.
I am convinced that our so-called standard English sprang actively
to the fore in Shakespeare's time, that in the Commonwealth years
our speech was in as perilous a condition as it is to-day, and at the
Restoration made a self-conscious recovery, under an impulse very like
that which is moving me at the present moment; for I do not look upon
myself as expressing a personal conviction so much as interpreting
a general feeling, shared I know by almost all who speak our tongue,
Americans, Australians, Canadians, Irish, New Zealanders, and Scotch,
whom I range alphabetically lest I should be thought to show prejudice
or bias in any direction. But this is beyond the present purpose,
which is merely to exhibit the tendency which this so-called
degradation has to create homophones.

[Sidenote: Mauling of words.]

As no one will deny that homophones are to be made by mauling words, I
will begin by a selection of words from Mr. Jones' dictionary showing
what our Southern English is doing with the language. I shall give in
the first column the word with its literary spelling, in the second
Mr. Jones' phonetic representation of it, and in the third column an
attempt to represent that sound to the eye of those who cannot read
the phonetic script, using such makeshift spellings as may be found
in any novel where the pronunciation of the different speakers is
differentiated.

_Examples from Mr. Jones' Pronouncing Dictionary._[19]

parsonage. p[a]:s[n.]i[dz] [-sn-] pahs'nidge _or_