Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 3. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers
Remarks on English Pronunciation

Monosyllables and Dissyllables [4]

I am sincerely sorry for mistaking you on an important point. But before my argumentative wooden-headedness gives up the ghost under your sledge-hammer it is bursting to cry a Themistoclean “Strike, but hear”. Please try to understand my misunderstanding. What you wrote was: “‘Treason’, of course, is pronounced ‘trez’n’, but that does not make it a monosyllable in scansion because there is in these words a very perceptible slurred vowel sound in pronunciation which I represent by the ’ — in ‘poison’ also.” I think it must have been the word “scansion” which led me astray — as if you had meant that these words were non-monosyllabic in poetry only. But am I really misjudging Chambers as well as the Fowlers when I draw the logical inference that, since a dictionary is no dictionary if it does not follow a coherent system and since these people absolutely omit to make any distinction between the indicated scansion of “prism”, “realm”, “rhythm” etc., and that of “treason” and “poison”, they definitely mean us to take all these words as monosyllables? If Chambers who writes “vizhun” but “trezn” and “poizn” just as he writes “relm” and “rithm”, intends us to understand that there is some difference between the scansions of the latter pairs he, in my opinion, completely de-dictionaries his work by so illogical an expectation. He and the Fowlers may not say in cold blood and so many set words that “treason” and “poison” are monosyllables but it is their design, in most freezing blood and more eloquently than words can express, that they fall into the same category as “realm” and “rhythm”. Else, what could have prevented them from inventing some such sign as your ’ to mark the dissimilarity? My sin was to have loved logic not wisely but too well where logicality had been obstreperously announced in flaring capitals on the title page and throughout the whole book by a fixed system of spelling and pronunciation. My Othello-like extremity of love plunged me into abysmal errors, but oh the Iagoistic “motiveless malignity” of lexicographers!

It seemed to me impossible that even the reckless Fowler — reckless in the excess of his learning — should be so audacious as to announce that this large class of words accepted as dissyllables from the beginning of (English) time were really monosyllables. After all the lexicographers do not set out to give the number of syllables in a word. Pronunciation is a different matter. “Realm” cannot be a dissyllable unless you violently make it so, because “l” is a liquid like “r” and you cannot make a dissyllable of words like “charm”, unless you Scotchify the English language and make it “char’r’r’m” or vulgarise it and make it “charrum” — and even “char’r’r’m” is after all a monosyllable. “Prism”, the “ism” in “Socialism”, “pessimism”, “rhythm” can be made dissyllabic, but by convention (convention has much to do with these things) the “ism”, “rhythm” are treated as a single syllable, because of the etymology. But there is absolutely no reason to bring in this convention with “treason”, “poison”, “garden” or “maiden” (coming from French trahison, poison and some O.E. equivalent of the German Garten, Mädchen). The dictionaries give the same mark of pronunciation for “thm”, “sm” and the “den” (dn) of maiden and son (sn) of treason because they are practically the same. The French pronounce “rhythme” = “reethm” (I use the English sound indications) without anything to help them out in passing from “th” to “m”, but the English tongue can’t do that, there is a very perceptible quarter vowel sound or one-eighth vowel sound between “th” and “m” — if it were not so the plural “rhythms” would be unpronounceable. I remember in my French class at St. Paul’s our teacher (a Frenchman) insisted on our pronouncing ordre in the French way — in his mouth “orrdrr”; I was the only one who succeeded, the others all made it auder, orrder, audrer, or some such variation. There is the same difference of habit with words like “rhythm”, and yet conventionally the French treatment is accepted so far as to impose rhythm as a monosyllable. Realm on the other hand is pronounced truly as a monosyllable without the help of any fraction of a vowel.

30 September 1934