28. Features of Franklin’s Boston Accent in the RMS and an Overview of Part IV

The first part of Chapter 28 identifies a set of irregular features that surface sporadically in Franklin’s RMS transcriptions, but never in those of Stevenson, a Londoner. An example of this a single instance in which learned is rendered as [læɹnd] (RMS larn’d), in contrast to the two innovative – and socially stigmatized – centralized forms associated with London working-class speech, such as learn [ləɹn] (RMS lɥrn). In comparable phonological environments, Franklin’s poetry (and that of his fellow New Englanders) consistently exhibits [æːɹ ~ ɛːɹ] realizations in sequences involving [are], [ear], and [ere] spellings.In total, eighteen such transcription “errors” have been identified. I argue that these are unintended reversions to Franklin’s native Boston idiolect and reflect features characteristic of the conservative Massachusetts koine described in Part III. Significantly, many of these forms also find parallels in peripheral and outlying English dialects. All of them, however, stand in clear violation of the phonetic values Franklin explicitly assigns to vowels and consonants in his RMS tables, confirming that they cannot be interpreted as deliberate elements of his orthographic system.The second section turns to Franklin’s treatment of vowels in unstressed syllables. This issue, first introduced in Chapters 14 and 26, is closely tied to his pedagogical vision of language instruction, which emphasized oral reading under the guidance of a teacher who corrected pronunciation, intonation, and rhetorical delivery. Viewed in this light, the RMS emerges not merely as an orthographic proposal but as part of a broader pedagogical program grounded in spoken performance (cf. the English School, Philadelpia Academy, Chapter 14).The chapter then widens its perspective by revisiting the diachronic evolution of English in England between 1500 and 1800, and in America between 1600 and 1800 (cf. Chapter 15). This comparison demonstrates that the variation inherent in both systems follows coherent and largely parallel trajectories of phonetic development. Evidence drawn from the Massachusetts town records and from the poetry of Franklin, Barlow, and Dwight further substantiates these shared patterns, while at the same time revealing a striking contrast between New England pronunciation and the model encoded in Franklin’s RMS.The chapter concludes with a comparative assessment of Franklin’s RMS alongside the pronunciation schemes proposed by three major English orthoepists: Kenrick (1773), Nares (1784), and Walker (1791). The conclusion is inescapable: Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling constitutes a partially successful attempt to represent polite London English rather than his own native colonial speech.