/Colonial Pronunciation/--The debate that long raged over the pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of determining with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a people long departed from earth. The American colonists, of course, are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have relatively little difficulty in determining just how they pronounced this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the neglect of our philologists, or, perhaps more accurately, our lack of philologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English pronunciation,[42] and what Wilhelm Corssen did for Latin, no American professor has yet thought to attempt for American. The literature is almost, if not quite a blank. But here and there we may get a hint of the facts, and though the sum of them is not large, they at least serve to set at rest a number of popular errors. One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broad /a/'s (making /last/, /path/ and /aunt/ almost assonant with /bar/) comes down unbrokenly from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence superior in authority to the pronunciation of the [Pg059] rest of the country, with its flat /a/'s (making the same words assonant with /ban/). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to show that the flat /a/ was in use in New England in 1789, for the pronunciation of such words as /wrath/, /bath/ and /path/, as given by him, makes them rhyme with /hath/.[43] Moreover, he gives /aunt/ the same /a/-sound. From other sources come indications that the /a/ was likewise flattened in such words as /plant/, /basket/, /branch/, /dance/, /blast/, /command/ and /castle/, and even in /balm/ and /calm/. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in English ever since the Middle English period,[44] and according to Lounsbury[45] they have moved toward the disappearance of the Continental /a/, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice." Grandgent, another authority,[46] says that it became flattened "by the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the standard language had no broad /a/." Even in such words as /father/, /car/ and /ask/ the flat /a/ was universally used. Sheridan, in the dictionary he published in 1780,[47] actually gave no /ah/-sound in his list of vowels. This habit of flatting the /a/ had been brought over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no suspicion that any other /a/ was possible. But between 1780 and 1790, according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broad /a/ (not the /aw/-sound, as in /fall/, but the Continental sound as in /far/) arose in England,[48] and this fashion soon found servile imitation in