I will introduce the texts with a few remarks on the geographical location of the provinces where they are found. Kola is a peninsula on the White Sea and part of the government of Archangel which extends along the Artic Sea from Finland to Siberia. Vologda lies south of Archangel, and Perm southeast of Vologda, both on the Siberian frontier. The three governments of Niži-Novgorod (Nižegorod), Vladimir and Tver follow each other (from the city that gives its name to the first) to a point between Moscow and Petersburg. The provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambov, Saratov and Astrachan extend from a point a little towards the south west of Moscow to the Northern extremity of the Caspian Sea; Voronež lies south of Tambov.

In studying the language or pronunciation of any section of the country, it is necessary first of all to trace back the history of the people inhabiting it to the earliest beginnings in order to explain understandingly the dialectical peculiarities of its grammar or pronunciation. I shall, therefore, preface my remarks on the linguistic peculiarities of this region with a brief sketch of its earliest settlements and later development.

The earlier history of Western Virginia, now known as West Virginia, begins a century later than that of Eastern Virginia, or Virginia proper. In 1710 Alexander Spotswood, a Scotchman, was the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia.

Supply in the texts of the tales the following marginal letters according to the Synopsis : b in No. 7, c in Nos. 38 and 43, d in No. 45; remove the second a in No. 19.

Literary Variants.—–‘Ren.,’ iii, i ff.; vi. 750 ff.; xiv, 540 ff.=Méon. 749 ff., 14462 ff., 3919 ff. (?); Rothe, pp. 123 f., 192, 136; Carnoy, pp. 51 and 58: The fox feigns death and eats the fish : ‘Ren.,’ vi. 761 ff.; xiv. 586 ff. = Méon, 14473 ff., 4178 ff.; Rothe, pp. 192, 137; Camoy, p. 58: The wolf feigns death and is beaten : Rein.,’ 208 ff. and ‘Reinke’ 165 ff. : The fox feigns death and the wolf eats the fish. Berachjah ha-Nakdan 99 (Gr., ‘R. F.‘ p. cclxxxiii); Waldis, iv, 73 : The fox feigns death to obtain some bacon and gets it; the wolf tries the same trick, but is beaten.

The science of phonetics is still so new that it may seem premature to suggest the possibility of a partially deductive method of exposition, but if it is to be used in teaching beginners in a language how to pronounce, how much easier the task would be if we could begin by stating certain general characteristics which color the whole phonetic field of that language so that the peculiarities of every sound in it, and the rules of phonetic change might be largely explained by and remembered through them. That this will some day be done, I firmly believe, and I wish here to suggest how one such characteristic of French may be used in this way.

I congratulate the Modern Language Association on the establishment of a section which is as indispensable to language as the character of the Prince of Denmark is to the play of Hamlet. Language lives in sound; and the study of modern languages is the study of the spoken tongues.

Prof. Edward A. Freeman—writing or speaking to a friend in regard to a young American who was going to the University of Jena in order to study Anglo-Saxon—remarked: “Why does he not go to Orange County, Va., instead of to Jena? They speak very good West-Saxon in Orange County.” This statement may serve as an introduction to my remarks on the pronunciation of Fredericksburg, Va. For Stafford, Spotsylvania, and Orange Counties have about the same pronunciation and have preserved to a remarkable degree the older English sounds brought over in the seventeenth century by the early settlers of this region.

It is with extreme diffidence that I offer to read a paper before this Association. My own teaching is done under conditions of such disadvantage—with students so poorly prepared, and with results so unsatisfactory—that I cannot but feel how presumptuous it would be in me to attempt here to teach those who themselves teach under so much happier conditions and to so much better purpose than I can do. My sole apology might be an experience which, covering now three decades of language teaching, has passed through many phases both of our professional activity at large and of my own individual work. But these phases, for myself personally, have been rather renewals of effort and of disappointment than landmarks of progress or of triumph; and this experience, if I could recount it, might serve rather as a warning than as an example. So that it is as a seeker rather than as a giver that I come, to share my counsel with my more favored brethren; in order that by the confession of my own shortcomings, and especially by the criticism and discussion which this paper may elicit, I may be helped —and so perchance may help others—to find “the better way.”

Three years ago I was one of those who gathered in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin. I have given them that order of precedence which they had in the minds of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came first because they believed that it had been spoken by God himself and that it would have been the common speech of mankind but for the judicial invention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek came next because the New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough of the primeval forest, there were probably few who believed that a book written in any living language could itself live.