SPCW
Sta,—Sir Compton Mackenzie is, as I expected him to be, kind and courteous, but we are still at cross purposes. The difficulty is that each regards himself as the defender of pure or classic English against modern vulgarity) He thinks I am citing words like criminal al a reductio ad absurduin C' If you are sq enamoured of correctness you might as we say crigh-urinal"). Actually 1 cited them al specimens of the real laws of English correct ness. For me the modern vulgarisms are those synthetic pronunciations which, I believe) began when a large, nearly literate populatioa ceased to learn English from the tradition 0 the best speakers and began making up language of their own out of dictionaries an derivations. Of course, Sir Compton hirnse belongs to no such group; but here a curioul little epicycle in. phonetic history comes Ira His age-group is senior to mine. And in hill young days there was a temporary dominance of the synthetic pronunciations in a fairly small circle of highly educated speakers (S1S Compton will remember that Sir Herbert Warren pronounced composite to rhyme wits fright): Such pronunciations appear to hii old because he heard them in his youth; but they were very new when he first heard then.Jo 1, though younger, happened to grow up .11J Ulster, which is, linguistically, archavet Piracy, privacy, ominous all had a short vowel in the first syllable. This conforms to the true ' Old Latin ' pronunciation, where the voss el of ',omen changes when you get to the genitive, Hence I insist that it is 1 who am fighting the rearguard action and he who is I tmcon• sciously) the innovator. My reasons for deprecating oh-minotts are the same as his tot deprecating Mag-dalen.—Yours faithfully,
C. s. t lEwig Magdalen College, Oxford
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