The foreign word, or the word of a district, or class of people, passes
into the general vernacular; but it is long before the specially learned
will acknowledge the right of those with whom they come in contact to
follow general usage. The rule is simple: so long as a word is technical or
local, those who know its technical or local pronunciation may reasonably
employ it. But when the word has become general, the specialist is not very
wise if he refuse to follow {331} the mass, and perfectly foolish if he
insist on others following him. There have been a few who demanded that
Euler should be pronounced in the German fashion:[611] Euler has long been
the property of the world at large; what does it matter how his own
countrymen pronounce the letters? Shall we insist on the French pronouncing
_Newton_ without that final _tong_ which they never fail to give him? They
would be wise enough to laugh at us if we did. We remember that a pedant
who was insisting on all the pronunciations being retained, was met by a
maxim in contradiction, invented at the moment, and fathered upon
Kaen-foo-tzee,[612] an authority which he was challenged to dispute. Whom
did you speak of? said the bewildered man of accuracy. Learn your own
system, was the answer, before you impose it on others; Confucius says that
too.[613]
The old English has _fote_, _fode_, _loke_, _coke_, _roke_, etc., for
_foot_, etc. And _above_ rhymes in Chaucer to _remove_. Suspecting that the
broader sounds are the older, we may surmise that _remove_ and _food_ have
retained their old sounds, and that _cook_, once _coke_, would have rhymed
to our _Luke_, the vowel being brought a little nearer, perhaps, to the _o_
in our present _coke_, the fuel, probably so called as used by cooks. If
this be so, the Chief Justice _Cook_[614] of our lawyers, and the _Coke_
(pronounced like the fuel) of the greater part of the world, are equally
wrong. The lawyer has no right whatever to fasten his pronunciation upon
us: even leaving aside the general custom, he cannot prove himself right,
and is probably wrong. Those who {332} know the village of Rokeby
(pronounced Rookby) despise the world for not knowing how to name Walter
Scott's poem: that same world never asked a question about the matter, and
the reception of the parody of _Jokeby_, which soon appeared, was a
sufficient indication of their notion. Those who would fasten the hodiernal
sound upon us may be reminded that the question is, not what they call it
now, but what it was called in Cromwell's time. Throw away general usage as
a lawgiver, and this is the point which emerges. Probably _R[=u]ke-by_
would be right, with a little turning of the Italian [=u] towards [=o] of
modern English.
[Some of the above is from an old review. I do not always notice such
insertions: I take nothing but my own writings. A friend once said to me,
"Ah! you got that out of the _Athenaeum_!" "Excuse me," said I. "the
_Athenaeum_ got that out of me!"]