How American Was Franklin’s English?

Gary D. German’s Benjamin Franklin: Orthoepist and Phonetician has been published in open-access form (hurrah!); Vol. 1 is Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World and Vol. 2 is Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform. The latter is full of details of Hattic interest: Part III is “A Historical Phonology of Colonial New England English: ‘Probing under the Iceberg,’” Part IV “Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779), ‘English’ or ‘American’?” and Part V “Franklin’s Linguistic Legacy.” The Introduction to Part IV reads as follows:

As announced in the General Introduction (cf. Volume I), Part IV is the culmination of a long study, the objective of which was to compare the data accrued in Part III regarding the nature of New England pronunciation and, in particular, of Franklin’s native Boston, Philadelphia influenced pronunciation. Part IV assembles and discusses all the elements needed to definitively establish:

a. whether the accent represented by Franklin’s proto-phonemic alphabet is based on his colonial American accent or
b. whether it is based on what he viewed to be refined London speech.

The second option has been my working hypothesis for the reasons outlined throughout this book, starting in the General Introduction.

Thanks to the lessons learned about Franklin’s idiolect in Part III, a secondary, but very significant, objective is to identify what appear to be more conservative New England features that surface now and then in his transcriptions and which contradict the underlying patterns of his scheme. Part IV is organized as follows.

Chapter 25 introduces the fundamental elements needed to understand the background, nature and a page-by-page outline of the contents of the RMS.

Chapter 26 includes a detailed study of the original manuscript versions of the data preserved in the archives of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and Vaughan’s 1779 edition of Franklin’s RMS which appears in Chapter 5 of a collection of Franklin’s writings.

The American Philosophical Society was founded by Franklin in 1743 and these documents were donated by Polly Stevenson’s family to the Society. Her papers, preserved in the Islandora collection, include the original manuscript of his vowel and consonant table with Franklin’s descriptions of all the characters that he sent to Polly Stevenson, along with his first July 20th letter (formerly missing and never studied from a linguistic perspective previously). In it, he requests Polly’s assistance with this RMS endeavour. This is also accompanied by what I believe to be a draft of Polly Stevenson’s reply to his requests for help and her caustic opinion about his proposed spelling reform.

All this data has been gathered, compared and contrasted. The information gleaned from these two sources is systematically analyzed, character by character, proto-phoneme by proto-phoneme, and compared with New England and English sources studied in Part III.

This prepares the groundwork for Chapter 27, which continues this technical analysis, this time covering the diphthongs, consonants and miscellaneous characteristics (including palatalization and prosodic features such as word and sentence stress).

The objective of Chapter 28 is thus to identify the characteristics of Franklin’s RMS which, on the one hand, are intended to reflect London English and, on the other, which preserve unintended traces of his own Boston (or Philadelphia-influenced) idiolect. This chapter terminates with a global assessment of the scientific merits of Franklin’s RMS. I conclude that it contains numerous innovations regarding phonetics and phonemics that were far ahead of his time, contributions that have never been fully recognized on account of the sketchy and incomplete manner in which the entire RMS was presented. Unfortunately, as we shall see, this masked the value of its contents.

I think anyone interested in early American English, or of course in Franklin’s ideas about it, would find it a fascinating read. (Via Mark Liberman’s Log post.)