LETTERS That Dutch place
Sir: It was gratifying to learn from John Simpson's article, 'English, our English' (16 November), that my effortkto instruct BBC announcers how to pronounce Maa- STRICHT had borne fruit — as I had noticed in more recent BBC news reports too. (Anna Ford, by the way, was the only announcer polite enough to thank me.) To my chagrin, however, I realise that to be consistent I should now request announcers to pronounce Paris as PaREE and Berlin as BearLEEN. This would be too much. MaaSTRICHT is too, apparently, for now the BBC has resorted to the usual British compromise tactic and is saying MAA- STRICHT.
But, far from being, as John Simpson writes 'just a town in the least attractive part of the Netherlands', Maastricht is one of the most delightful in one of the areas most delightful too — and most like Eng- land. So much so that when I came to Hol- land in 1946, my host took me immediately to the area, of woods and hills and little streams and old farmsteads. Wherever could John Simpson have got his informa- tion from? Neither are the Dutch a 'sec- ond-syllable people': AmsterDAM, LEI- den, RotterDAM, GROningen, ARNhem, to mention just a few! Even SCHEVenin- gen, which I can't wait to hear a BBC announcer mispronounce.
James Brockway
Riouwstraat 114, 2585 Den Haag
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