How To Speak English
By ROSE MACAULAY
IT occurs periodically that this great country of ours is rent from Land's End to John o' Groats by a fierce and bitter internecine warfare, and her inhabitants, all (at least with regard to this subject) of the bull-dog breed, fly at one another's throats and remain there snarling for at least three weeks. We address each other with the ferocious mutual contempt and distaste of Bishops at a fifth-century Christian Council, or of sixteenth-century theologians. Odium theologicum (that degree of rancour, says Hume, which is the most furious and implacable) scarce exceeds odium linguisticum, the distaste engendered by the different ways in which it is possible to pronounce the English language.
The most recent of the battles on this embittering theme has been started by one of those periodical lists of Words and How Announcers Shall Say Them, which is issued to a derisive public every now and then by the B.B.C. Committee on English Pronunciation. This list is always greeted with mockery on the part of the 'English, who complain that the Committee is led by an Irishman and consists exclusively of non-English speakers of the English tongue. This time it has shown a sinister in- clination to recommend the pronouncing of English words as they are spelt—a quite unheard of innovation in our remarkable old language, though it has sometimes been suggested by phoneticians that it should be spelt as it is pronounced.
Both are very odd ideas, and we are right to make it clear at once that we will stand neither for a moment. We trust that we have done so. Letters have poured in to our newspapers from all parts of the country protesting that the writers have never heard anything but cundit, or, at worst, condit, which shows that they have never taken a taxi to the street of that name : taxi drivers must delight Mr. Shaw by their phonetics, and there are probably announcing-jobs at Broadcasting House waiting for them, should the present announcers prove stubborn in their resistance to the advancing tide of democratic speech. So far, I have not heard any of the new list of words on the air ; it would almost appear that announcers are shirking them. One day during the conduit war the papers announced, with somewhat maliciously prominent head-lines, that a disastrous flood, drowning many, had been caused in France by the burst- ing of a conduit. This interesting item found no place in the radio news. I think our announcers should face up to (as Americans and Oxford Groupers say when they mean face) this issue. Perhaps some listener will oblige by running down a pedestrian in Conduit Street and " failing to stop " (as the police call the subsequent get-away), a, course of action which seems to result in a wireless announcement with the evening's news bulletin.
Anyhow, we • all began writing to the papers. What should we do without this fortunate vent for our indigna- tion ? What, in fact, used we to do before we had it ? Many of us expressed ourselves in pamphlets, which were used by our 16th and 17th century ancestors for the arrows or clubs of their still ruder forbears. Others fought duels. Those who did neither spat and went their way, their bosoms unpurged of the perilous stuff which rankled therein. We are wiser. Printer's ink splashes freely about, bedaubing our adversaries, and they sling it back, and we all feel better, as if we had won a victory. Mr. Shaw wrote informing us that no two of the B.B.C. committee pronounced any English word alike, and that they liked to choose the pronunciations which sounded prettiest to them and/or which they believed to be most intelligible to the majority, so that they recommend the long i in wind, tryst, and Rosalind, the long a in decadent, and the sounding of the u in conduit. He did not say if they also advised the long i in opposite and definite, the long second u in truculent, and the sounding of the nes in Wednesday.
But he did mention that the committee would frequently sooner die than use their recommended pronunciations in their private lives, which conjured up a fine picture. One sincerely hopes that the dilemma will never arise, and that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, for instance, will never be faced with a taxi-driver who refuses to drive him to Cundit Street, for there is no loss to English life and letters over which I should shed more tears than over his martyrdom. Still, one is glad that he and his colleagues feel like that about it.
Anyhow, the spate of letters began, and still con- tinues. It has run into some curious by-channels ; some one, for instance, wrote from Sheffield to a Sunday paper saying that it would " give the B.B.C. a fit " to hear the h sounded in who, where, and when. He does not make it clear whether B.B.C. speakers say " oo " for who, or " woo," like owls. I must listen for this.
For good or ill, the English will never pronounce alike. It was noted five centuries back that " Hit is to be hade in mervayle that the propur langagc of Englische men seholde be made so diuerse in oon lytelle yle in pronunciacion," and it is still a marvel, though less. The most toleration we can hope for from one another (and that we shall seldom get) is Johnson's concession to Boswell, after James had been at some pains to anglicize his Scots tongue—" Sir, your pronun- ciation is not offensive." " With this," says Boswell, " I was pretty well satisfied ; and let me give my country- men of North Britain advice not to aim at absolute perfection, not to speak High English. . . . A studied and factitious pronunciation, which requires perpetual attention and imposes perpetual constraint, is exceedingly disgusting. A small intermixture of provincial peculian. ties may have an agreeable effect, as the notes of different birds concur in the harmony of the grove. . ."
According to Mr. Shaw's picture of its causeries, the Pronunciation Committee achieves this harmony when met together, and very pleasant it must be to hear. I, for one, like each bird to sing with its own note.
Meanwhile, there is reported to be scandal in the Church, for an Archbishop (which, I know not) has been sounding the t in often. This is to go_ too far. Different notes are all very well, but such a note as this is mere discord, and discord in the Established Church of England is not to be allowed, however churches in Germany and elsewhere may go on. Frankly, this t is exceedingly disgusting (as Boswell would say).
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