UoIIW IIIT
Compton Mackenzie
AY I begin by quoting what I did say about the atti- tude of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to the English Language in the matter of pronunciation ? " It will make a desperate effort to preserve the right pronun- ciation of certain words which are in peril of being destroyed by popular usage.. No attempt will be made to restore pro- nunciations now hopelessly lost."
And of my own attitude : " Well aware that innumerable inconsistencies in the pro- nunciation of words derived from Latin and Greek-are firmly established, I have, surrendered to thein like everybody else, and 1 am not advocating a quixotic pedantry at the expense of current usage."
However, it is worth while to have one's attitude misrepre- sented when the misrepresentation is as gracefully expressed in rhyme as it was by Mr. C. S. Lewis. May 1 ask him a question ? If current usage decided to pronounce as it is written the name of the College whose kindly maternity we share, would he, surrendering to the democratic snobbery of the time, abandon Mawdlen' ? When I was an undergraduate every Oxford cabby corrected the fare who bade him drive to ' Mawdlen ' by repeating, To Mag-dalen '? Right.' Today under the influence of. what is believed to be standard English Cirencester' gets all its syllables and Daintry ' is forever Daventry.' So why should Magdalen be mispronounced Mawdlen ' ? Indeed, if it were a town instead of a college it certainly would be Mag-dalen by now.
Last year the Daily Express took the BBC to task for encouraging announcers to use the affected pronunciation Compton ' for Compton,' The fact that for more than a thousand years it has been pronounced in various hamlets all over the West Country as Cwm ' or Coombe ' and thus pre- served its ancient signification is unimportant if it sounds affected to the corner boys of an outer suburb, who will soon be thinking that cumfort," cumpany ' and cumpass ' are equally affected. The pronunciation of ' er ' as ar ' as in clerk or of ' en ' as in ' as in England ' may have been medimval Cockneyisms, but Cockney was then a dialect. Any pronunciation in a dialect which has established itself should be respected, but why should we surrender to the synthetic gentility of today which despises dialects and irregular pronunciations because it believes it is thereby demonstrating its own education ?
Lazy, laughing, languid Jenny, Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea.'
Today the prevailing fashion is to pronounce Jenny' to rhyme with ' penny,' and I already hear extra-genteel people frightened to say Ingland ' or Inglish.'.
The letter from the Department of Phonetics at Glasgow University rejoices that English is not a dead tongue yet. It very soon will be if the steady destruction of dialect continues and if the flat speech of the London suburb sets the standard for the spoken language. Would the Department of Phonetics at Glasgow University accept Kelvinside English as a pro- phylactic against the ossification it dreads ? I suppose that a science like phonetics is superior to the art of poetry and would scoff at any attempt ,to preserve the pronunciation of words for their value in prose or verse.
" Does it matter," the Department of Phonetics asks, " whether, a word is good Latin, Greek or Sanskrit so long as it is good English ? "
Of recent years the word autarky ' has come into vogue to express self-stifficiency ' in a national sense. Owing to the inability of the Southern English to distinguish ck ' from eh ' in their pronunciation, autarky ' is now almost always written autarchy," , which means absolute government.' If it seemed necessary to manufacture a word from the Greek (which it was not) why should it be misspelt by people ignorant of Greek but looking for a grand word and their pretentious- ness be blessed as good English ?
Now I come to Mr. Beeley who, after " waiting in vain for someone to expose " my " fallacies," selflessly assumes the burden himself. He contends that the quantity of the vowel in the original has nothing to do with the case, and I would accept that on a long view. What I will not accept is that English has any rules of pronunciation; a tendency is not a rule. Therefore, to say that the epsilon in Eros ' must become eta in order to conform with an imaginary English rule is a fallacy. Until the BBC, truckling to this fetish of democracy. declared in favour of Eeros ' people of education were saying Erros.' In passing, let me congratulate a gallant announcer last week for defying the rule of the BBC and saying Eros.' It was like a draught of water from the Pierian spring and compensated for the pronunciation of idyll ' as iddul ' by a Third Programme speaker who was introducing some trans- lations of Greek poetry by people who did not know Greek, their ignorance being extolled on the strength of a wandering remark by Coleridge. And I suppose it was an altruistic attempt to prevent ossification of the Italian language that led another Third Programme speaker Who was giving us a little lecture on an Italian composer to pronounce placido ' as placido.'
To return to Mr. Beeley. Having rebuked me for my plea to save what is left of accurate pronunciation, he himself goes on to regret the pronunciation of amenities ' as amenities,' but is apparently willing to yield to it because it follows this imaginary rule that an antepenultimate vowel in English should be short. However, the BBC recommendation to pronounce conduit' as kondewit ' is too much even for Mr. Beeley, and we can shake.hands over that monstrosity, which is his appro- priate epithet for an- obscene mispronunciation.
Is the Department of Phonetics at Glasgow University pre- pared to do its bit to save the English language from ossifica- tion by encouraging the students to speak of a vaniller ice ' ? It must face the fact that this is now the pronunciation of standard English and that the pronunciation as vanilla ice ' sounds to Southern ears either provincial or affected. Is the retention of the aspirate in ' which ' and ' what ' a sign that the arteries of the North are hardening ? Are we to accept ' fah ' as the right way to pronounce ' fire' ?
The vanishing of the second person singular from English Was a severe loss to the language. I imagine that this was the result of laziness : thou shouldst ' and thou wouldst ' were too much trouble to say. For the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century `_you was' endured as a compromise but it came to seem ungrammatical, and for many years now ' you was ' has been held to show lack of education. Yet ' you was ' even today is more obstinately preserved in Cockney than any ,other mix-up of plural and singular. How did ' ain't I' come to seem a vulgarism and aren't I' come to be accepted as genteel ? And why did the amn't I' of the North never make any headway in Southern usage ? Whatever the answer may be, I should never dream of advocating any attempt to correct current colloquialisms and I would use those colloquialisms without hesitation in formal language if I believed them to be more effective than a stilted correctness.
What I plead for is a fight against the further debasement of the language because we are afraid of offending the new democracy. I would much rather that the English language were ossified than that it should exist only as a chromium- plated automaton.
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