For pronunciation the best general rule is, to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written words.
There have been many schemes offered for the emendation and settlement of our orthography, which, like that of other nations, being formed by chance, or according to the fancy of the earliest writers in rude ages, was at first very various and uncertain, and is yet sufficiently irregular. Of these reformers some have endeavoured to accommodate orthography better to the pronunciation, without considering that this is to measure by a shadow, to take that for a model or standard which is changing while they apply it. Others, less absurdly indeed, but with equal unlikelihood of success, have endeavoured to proportion the number of letters to that of sounds, that every sound may have its own character, and every character a single sound. Such would be the orthography of a new language, to be formed by a synod of grammarians upon principles of science. But who can hope to prevail on nations to change their practice, and make all their old books useless? or what advantage would a new orthography procure equivalent to the confusion and perplexity of such an alteration?
Some ingenious men, indeed, have endeavoured to deserve well of their country, by writing honor and labor for honour and labour, red for read in the preter-tense, sais for says, repete tor repeat, explane for explain, or declame for declaim. Of these it may be said, that as they have done no good they have done little harm; both because they have innovated little, and because few have followed them.
The English language has properly no dialects; the style of writers has no professed diversity in the use of words, or of their flexions and terminations, nor differs but by different degrees of skill or care. The oral diction is uniform in no spacious country, but has less variation in England than in most other nations of equal extent. The language of the northern counties retains many words now out of use, but which are commonly of the genuine Teutonick race, and is uttered with a pronunciation which now seems harsh and rough, but was probably used by our ancestors. The northern speech is therefore not barbarous, but obsolete. The speech in the western provinces seems to differ from the general diction rather by a depraved pronunciation, than by any real difference which letters would express.
ETYMOLOGY
Etymology teaches the deduction of one word from another, and the various modifications by which the sense of the same word is diversified; as horse, horses; I love, I loved.
Of the ARTICLEThe English have two articles, an or a, and the.
AN, AA has an indefinite signification, and means one, with some reference to more; as This is a good book; that is, one among the books that are good; He was killed by a sword; that is, some sword; This is a better book for a man than a boy; that is, for one of those that are men than one of those that are boys; An army might enter without resistance; that is, any army.
In the senses in which we use a or an in the singular, we speak in the plural without an article; as these are good books.
I have made an the original article, because it is only the Saxon an, or æn, one, applied to a new use, as the German ein