to the fore in Shakespeare's time, that in the Commonwealth years
our speech was in as perilous a condition as it is to-day, and at the
Restoration made a self-conscious recovery, under an impulse very like
that which is moving me at the present moment; for I do not look upon
myself as expressing a personal conviction so much as interpreting
a general feeling, shared I know by almost all who speak our tongue,
Americans, Australians, Canadians, Irish, New Zealanders, and Scotch,
whom I range alphabetically lest I should be thought to show prejudice
or bias in any direction. But this is beyond the present purpose,
which is merely to exhibit the tendency which this so-called
degradation has to create homophones.

[Sidenote: Mauling of words.]

As no one will deny that homophones are to be made by mauling words, I
will begin by a selection of words from Mr. Jones' dictionary showing
what our Southern English is doing with the language. I shall give in
the first column the word with its literary spelling, in the second
Mr. Jones' phonetic representation of it, and in the third column an
attempt to represent that sound to the eye of those who cannot read
the phonetic script, using such makeshift spellings as may be found
in any novel where the pronunciation of the different speakers is
differentiated.

_Examples from Mr. Jones' Pronouncing Dictionary._[19]

parsonage. p[a]:s[n.]i[dz] [-sn-] pahs'nidge _or_
pahsnidge.
picture. pik[ts][e] pictsher.
scriptural. skrip[ts][er]r[er]l scriptshererl _or_