B.B.C. PRONUNCIATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 33, 8 February 1934, Page 6

8.8.C. PRONUNCIATION.

MR. BERNARD SHAW EXPLAINS,

As chairman of the committee which. in the discharge of its frightful' responsibility for advising the 8.8.C on " the subject of spoken English has incurred your censure, as it has incurred everyone else's, may I mention a few circumstances which will help towards the formation of a reasonable judgment of our proceedings J (writes Mr. Bernard Shaw in "The Times' , ). (1) All tlie members of the committee speak presentably: that is, they are all eligible, as far as their speech is concerned, for the judicial bench, the cathedral pulpit or the throne. (2) No two of them pronounce the same word in the English language alike. (3) They are quite frequently obliged to decide unanimously in favour of a pronunciation which they would rather die than use themselves in their private lives. (4) A.s they work with all the leading dictionaries before them they are free from the illusion that these works- are either unanimous or up to date in a world of rapidly-changing usage. (5) They are sufficiently familiar with the works ofi Chaucer to feel sincerely sorry that the lovely quadrisyllable Christemasse, the trisyllable neigiiebore, and the disyllable freendee .should have decayed into kriesmus, naybr and frens. We should like to vary the hackneyed set (if rhymes to forever by the Shakespearean persever; and we would all, if we dared, slay any actress who, as Cleopatra, would dare degrade a noble line by -calling her country's high py ram idea pirramids. But if we recommended these pronunciations to the announcers they would, in the unusual event of their paying any attention to our notions, gravely mislead the million* of li.stciicri* who take them as models of current speech usage.

((i) Wireless and the telephone have created a necessity for a fully and clearly articulated spoken English quite different from the lazy vernacular that is called, modd'ninglieh. We have to get rid not only of imperfect pronunciations but of ambiguous ones. Ambiguity is largely caused by our English habit of attacking the first syllable and sacrificing the second, with the result that many words beginning with prefixes such as ex or dis sound too much alike. This usage claims to be correct; but common eense and. euphony are often against it; and it is questionable whether in such case* it 1 is general enough to be accepted a,s authentic usage. Superior persons stress the first syllable in dissputablc, labratory, ecksmplary, desspicable, etc.; and we, being superior persons, talk like that; but as many ordinary and quite respectable people say disputable, laboratory,, exemmplary and despickable, we. are by no means bound to.come down on the side of) the pretentious pronunciation if the popular alternative is less likely to be confused with other words by the new human species called listeners-in. Wβ have to consider sonority also. The short "i" ifi much lees effective than the long one; and tlie disturbance I created in the United States last April by broadcasting privvacy insteadSof pryvavy was justified. Issolate is a highly superior pronunciation; and wind (rhyming to tinned) is considered more elegant in some quarters than wynd; so that we get the common blunders of trist (rhyming to list) for trytst, and Kozzalind for" Koealyiidc; but wo recommend the long "i" to the announcers for the sake of sonority.

Some common pronunciations have to be rejected as unbearably ugly. An announcer who pronounced decadent and sonorous as dekkadent and BOiinerus would provoke Providence to strike him dumb. The worst obstacle to our popularity as a committee is the general English conviction that to correct a man's pronunciation is to imply that he is no gentleman. Let nle explain, therefore, 'that we do not correct anvone'ft pronunciation unless it is positively criminal. When we recommend an announcer to pronounce disputable with the stress on the second syllable we are neither inciting him to an ungeiitlemanly action nor insinuating that those who put the stress on the first ought to be ashamed of themselves. We are simply expressing our decision that for the purposes and under the circumstances of the new art of broadcasting the (Second syllable strc&ft is the more effective.