Charles Hall Grandgent

Charles Hall Grandgent approached spoken language as both a scholar and a teacher. German and English Sounds, issued by Ginn in 1892 as part of the International Modern Language Series, is a compact study of pronunciation and phonetics. Grandgent compares the German spoken by a Prussian informant with his own English, formed in and near Boston, and supplements the discussion with diagrams of the mouth and tongue. The book examines vowels, consonants, regional variation, and the physical production of speech, making it a practical record of late nineteenth-century language teaching as well as an early work of descriptive phonetics. Bibliographic records identify Grandgent as the sole credited author and list the original volume at forty-two pages. His wider scholarship extended from sound change and Romance philology to French, Italian, Latin, and Dante studies.