In such a word as _please_. It is the frequent failure of foreigners,

who have acquired a practical mastery of English and who have eliminated

all the cruder phonetic shortcomings of their less careful brethren, to

observe such minor distinctions that helps to give their English

pronunciation the curiously elusive "accent" that we all vaguely feel.

We do not diagnose the "accent" as the total acoustic effect produced by

a series of slight but specific phonetic errors for the very good reason

that we have never made clear to ourselves our own phonetic stock in

trade. If two languages taken at random, say English and Russian, are

compared as to their phonetic systems, we are more apt than not to find

that very few of the phonetic elements of the one find an exact analogue

in the other. Thus, the _t_ of a Russian word like _tam_ "there" is

neither the English _t_ of _sting_ nor the English _t_ of _teem_. It

differs from both in its "dental" articulation, in other words, in being

produced by contact of the tip of the tongue with the upper teeth, not,

as in English, by contact of the tongue back of the tip with the gum

ridge above the teeth; moreover, it differs from the _t_ of _teem_ also

in the absence of a marked "breath release" before the following vowel

is attached, so that its acoustic effect is of a more precise,

"metallic" nature than in English. Again, the English _l_ is unknown in

Russian, which possesses, on the other hand, two distinct _l_-sounds

that the normal English speaker would find it difficult exactly to

reproduce--a "hollow," guttural-like _l_ and a "soft," palatalized

_l_-sound that is only very approximately rendered, in English terms, as

_ly_. Even so simple and, one would imagine, so invariable a sound as

_m_ differs in the two languages. In a Russian word like _most_ "bridge"

the _m_ is not the same as the _m_ of the English word _most_; the lips

are more fully rounded during its articulation, so that it makes a

heavier, more resonant impression on the ear. The vowels, needless to

say, differ completely in English and Russian, hardly any two of them

being quite the same.

I have gone into these illustrative details, which are of little or no

specific interest for us, merely in order to provide something of an

experimental basis to convince ourselves of the tremendous variability

of speech sounds. Yet a complete inventory of the acoustic resources of

all the European languages, the languages nearer home, while

unexpectedly large, would still fall far short of conveying a just idea

of the true range of human articulation. In many of the languages of

Asia, Africa, and aboriginal America there are whole classes of sounds

that most of us have no knowledge of. They are not necessarily more

difficult of enunciation than sounds more familiar to our ears; they

merely involve such muscular adjustments of the organs of speech as we

have never habituated ourselves to. It may be safely said that the total

number of possible sounds is greatly in excess of those actually in

use. Indeed, an experienced phonetician should have no difficulty in

inventing sounds that are unknown to objective investigation. One reason

why we find it difficult to believe that the range of possible speech

sounds is indefinitely large is our habit of conceiving the sound as a

simple, unanalyzable impression instead of as the resultant of a number

of distinct muscular adjustments that take place simultaneously. A

slight change in any one of these adjustments gives us a new sound which

is akin to the old one, because of the continuance of the other

adjustments, but which is acoustically distinct from it, so sensitive

has the human ear become to the nuanced play of the vocal mechanism.

Another reason for our lack of phonetic imagination is the fact that,

while our ear is delicately responsive to the sounds of speech, the

muscles of our speech organs have early in life become exclusively

accustomed to the particular adjustments and systems of adjustment that

are required to produce the traditional sounds of the language. All or

nearly all other adjustments have become permanently inhibited, whether

through inexperience or through gradual elimination. Of course the power

to produce these inhibited adjustments is not entirely lost, but the

extreme difficulty we experience in learning the new sounds of foreign

languages is sufficient evidence of the strange rigidity that has set in

for most people in the voluntary control of the speech organs. The point

may be brought home by contrasting the comparative lack of freedom of