William Osler's The Transatlantic Voice: A Philological Study.(Book review)

William Osler's The Transatlantic Voice: A Philological Study by Richard L. Golden, MD, Charles S. Bryan, MD, and John T. Golden, MD

Montreal, Canada: Osler Library, 2006. Soft-cover, 77 pp., $25.00.

This previously unpublished manuscript is a tribute to the still viable power of oral communication in our electronic society. In his opening essay, Osler illustrates this point by paraphrasing a passage from Robert Southey, 19th-century poet laureate of Britain: "A Welch triad says that those unconcealable traits of a person by which he shall be known are the glance of his eye, the pronunciation of his speech, and the mode of his self motion--in brief--his look, his voice and his gait, and of the three the voice is the most important & distinctive force" (p. 24).

Over approximately three decades, Osler collected personal observations that compare and contrast the sounds of speech between American, British, and Canadian English speakers. This philological study was announced in a 1911 advertising brochure for The Century Magazine as a forthcoming article in the 1912 publication under the title, "The American Voice." For unknown reasons, the publication never materialized, adding to …