his voice will find an inexhaustible supply of these combinations to work on.

4. Make a list of all such combinations as your own difficulties make advisable; print it on a large card and hang it on the wall where you can see it and work from it.

E. ENRICHING THE RESONANCE

There are many ways of describing the effects of good resonance. Desirable resonance for conversation and especially for public address, seems to have these qualities:

Volume.

Penetration.

Smoothness.

Brightness.

Flexibility.

Richness.

Volume. When we speak of a voice with volume we mean that the tone seems big, vast, filling the room; or seems small, wee, tiny, of little mass. In either case it is only a figure of speech, a matter of seeming rather than of reality. The impression of bigness is accomplished entirely by placing the tone in a wide area of mouth, cheeks, and chest, and by using much intensity; the impression of smallness, on the other hand, is gained by limiting the area of reverberation and the intensity, making the sound seem small.

A good way to explain the idea of volume is to say that it is a matter of filling a room with sound without making a louder noise. This seems like a paradox, but it is easily done and readily detected. What is more, it is very impressive to listeners. Most auditors do not care for noise, but they respond heartily to a room full of resonant sound that is, after all, quiet.

Penetration.-Some voices also penetrate better than others; not by loudness, but by some peculiarity of resonance complexity. There are people whose voices are of such quality that they can converse with partially deaf people. without shouting; or they can be heard for greater distances than other people without equal exertion. Part of this is the structure of the sinuses and resonating chambers, solely a

gift of fate; but part of it is practice and care in bringing the tone forward and not letting it get smothered in the mouth. Part of it, too, is from accurate use of consonants.

Smoothness is a normal quality with some voices, and a quality that can be developed by practice; in fact the exercises for vocal purity and the open throat are entirely in the interests of smoothness. The opposite of it is roughness, got by tightening in the wrong resonating places for good speech. Brightness seems to mean about the same as penetrationa shaping of the resonance near the oral outlet, with no muffling or hollowness. It is valuable for public address, and for conversation too-an excellent thing as a part of any normal tone.

Flexibility shows in a person who can reveal his passing mood immediately by the tone of his voice. One defect in youthful orators is lack of flexibility; the capacity for it seems to grow with age and experience. Also a certain factor of courage and abandon is involved; a willingness to let go and show by the quality of the voice, not only what one thinks, but how one feels.

Richness. Possibly the most valuable of all these figures of speech is that of richness. There is no special way of describing it except to say that the rich voice has all the resonance virtues and brings home almost all the prizes! It uses every resonating substance and cavity to the limit-throat, mouth, jaws, teeth, cheeks, forehead, and chest-and uses them with ease, sense, and sensitiveness. If people feel that your voice is rich, you have wealth indeed!

Let it be remembered that these are all merely psychological impressions; the essence of the thing is in the way the resonance cavities make the tone. Make them aright and your speech will give your auditors the impression of possessing all the virtues of charm, carrying power, clearness, and mastery.

EXERCISES

1. Select poetry or oratory that contains many nasal consonants and open vowels; read or deliver in a way to get a maximum of resonance from all the vibrating parts of head, neck, and chest. This will give the effect of large volume.

2. Select passages that call for light, airy, penetrating resonance. This will give small volume.

3. Observe the difference in normal quality in people you hear talk, especially those who speak in public. Learn to differentiate the different qualities speakers use when expressing different sentiments.

4. Cultivate a responsiveness to inner feelings; let these express themselves in speech through appropriate qualities of the voice. Get over the habit of using just one quality for all kinds of attitudes; let your voice go as far as it is judicious in expressing feeling.

5. Select passages from standard literature and read them with the appropriate kind of voice. You will have difficulty in doing this well unless you thoroughly understand the meaning of the words involved and appreciate the author's sentiments. Aim to get a good coordination between what is going on in your thought mechanisms and in those of voice only. Do not make it simply a matter of vocal gymnastics.

CHAPTER IX

PRONUNCIATION AND ENUNCIATION

Argument of the Chapter. The problem of satisfactory pronunciation is a problem in reading the dictionary successfully. To do this effectively it is necessary to resort to established phonetic symbols. By means of such symbols sounds can be recorded on paper and then read as intended. This, however, does not establish a standard or universal pronunciation; such can come only by agreement of those who use the language. No such accepted standard exists today; nor is a fixed standard likely or even desirable beyond the advisability of emphasizing agreements among the various dialects and the wisdom of using a pronunciation that does not attract undue attention. Such a "standard" we now have, but it is as flexible as local tastes and habits throughout the English-speaking world.

THE PHONETIC APPROACH

How do you read your dictionary? When you see there that grass is to be pronounced with a "short Italian a," do you know much more than you did when you began to look? A man from England and a man from Nebraska would interpret the dictionary in two quite different ways, each thoroughly convinced that he had done as he was told. Besides, they would likely enough use different dictionaries, which are far from being in agreement. The word servant is to be pronounced with a "waved e" and divides into syllables as ser-vant the "r" being pronounced as the "r" in door, so the dictionary may declare. But let a man from Boston read this in the dictionary, another from Indiana, and a third from Alabama, and you will get three quite different pronunciations. Yet each has pronounced what he thought

the dictionary told him to. Now how can this be possible among cultured and intelligent people?

The answer is this: exact pronunciation is not found in the dictionary; only hints as to what pronunciation is in the mind of the man or men who wrote that dictionary. The actual pronunciation is to be found in speech, and in speech only; one positively accurate "dictionary" would be a set of phonograph records that would play off the words as wanted. Pronunciation cannot be accomplished on a printed page; the page can only give directions, suggestions, hints.

For a long time in America we have been disturbed over our way of pronouncing the language and have been trying to get our pronunciation from dictionaries that we have felt give insufficient and often ambiguous directions. But our actual pronunciation has been accomplished and taught through word of mouth, by parents, school-teachers, neighbors, and such agencies as pulpit and rostrum. The result is that, though we all use the same dictionaries and yield them a certain lip-allegiance, still throughout the United States, and in fact throughout the whole English-speaking world, exist all sorts of dialects and brogues calling themselves English, some of them so far apart in actual sounds employed that the users of them cannot understand one another. Yet we all think that we come pretty near to what the dictionary asks us to use; for the reason that we adopt our sounds first and then afterward translate the dictionary into our own pet notions.

But of late has sprung up the conviction among scholars and students of language that there is a better way. This way has been found in shifting from an alphabet of letters to an alphabet of sounds. What this means is that, instead of saying that there are many ways of writing the sound of a as in ate as in the words ail, eight, fête, the thing to do is to say that there is this sound with several ways of spelling the words that contain it, and then to employ a character that means this sound and this only. Then there is the reverse situation found in such a combination as ough, which is pronounced differently in ought, trough, through, bough, tough, hiccough, though. Manifestly there is no sense in calling ough a sound; it is only a way of spelling.