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 [2]

The Oxford dictionary seems to leave me no choice as regards the number of syllables in the word “vision”. I quote below some of the words explained as monosyllables in the same way as “Rhythm” and “Prism”, which are given as Rhy•thm (-dhm); Pri•sm (-zm).

Fa•shion (-shn)

Passion (pa•shn)

Pri•son (-zn)

Scission (si•shn)

Trea•son (-ezn)

Vi•sion (-zhn)

Chambers’s Dictionary makes “vision” a dissyllable, which is quite sensible, but the monosyllabic pronunciation of it deserves to be considered at least a legitimate variant when H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler — the name of Fowler is looked upon as a synonym for authority on the English language — give no other. I don’t think I am mistaken in interpreting their {{0}}intention.[[In fact, the correspondent was mistaken. The six words he listed, as well as “rhythm” and “prism”, were marked in the third edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, eds., 1934) to be pronounced as dissyllables. — Ed.]] Take “realm”, which they pronounce in brackets as “relm”; now I see no difference as regards syllabification between their intention here and in the instances above.

You may not have a choice — but I have a choice, which is to pronounce and scan words like “vision” and “passion” and similar words as all the poets of the English language (those at least whom I know) have consistently pronounced and scanned them — as dissyllables. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare’s line in the following way in order to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler

In mai|den med|itation | fan|cy free,

I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, “treasons, strategems and spoils”; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same — though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I lived in both northern and southern England, but I never heard vision pronounced “vizhn”, it was always “vizhun”; “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. If “realm”, “helm” etc. are taken as monosyllables, that is quite reasonable, for there is no vowel between “l” and “m” and none is heard, slurred or otherwise in pronunciation. The words “rhythm” and “prism” are technically monosyllables, because they are so pronounced in French (i.e. that part of the word, for there is a mute e in French): but in fact most Englishmen take the help of a slurred vowel sound in pronouncing “rhythms” and it would be quite permissible to write in English as a blank verse line, “The unheard rhythms that sustain the world”.

This is my conviction and not all the Fowlers in the world will take it away from me. I only hope the future lexicographers will not fowl the language any more in that direction; otherwise we shall have to write lines like this —

O vizhn! O pashn! O fashn! m’d’tashn! h’rr’p’lashn!

Why did the infern’l Etern’l und’take creash’n?

Or else, creat’ng, could he not have afford’d

Not to allow the Engl’sh tongue to be Oxford’d?

P.S. I remember a book (Hamer’s? someone else’s? I don’t remember) in which the contrast was drawn between the English and French languages, that the English tongue tended to throw all the weight on the first or earliest possible syllable and slurred the others, the French did the opposite — so that when an Englishman pretends to say “strawberries”, what he really says is “strawb’s”. That is the exaggeration of a truth — but all the same there is a limit!

27 September 1934