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The American Language Study Guide

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by H. L. Mencken
About 122 pages (36,652 words)
The American Language Summary

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Chapter 7.1 Summary

Introducing standard American punctuation, Mencken quotes Archibald Sayce, who says, "Language does not consist of letters but of sounds...." He adds that the history of phonology includes grammarians and etymologists neglecting this notion and staying too close to the deductive studies of words themselves. He discourages this approach, saying that people of a given race might write alike, but no two pronounce alike and might even have different styles. This results in the difficulty of determining an exact pronunciation for a given set or combination of letters. Moreover, the difficulty lies not in pronunciation but in intonation, and further in accent.

Mencken recounts the characteristics of the American voice. It is higher pitched than the British, although it is not altogether high-pitched but is rather consistently low-pitched and invested in a nasal twang. He.....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 739 words. This study guide contains 36,652 words (approx. 122 pages at 300 words per page).

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The American Language from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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