MODES OF SPEECH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 234, 3 October 1934, Page 5

MODES OF SPEECH.

THOUGHT INTO SOUND

LOST POETRY OF LANGUAGE,

REMARKABLE ILLUSTRATIONS

Speaking in deprecation of the modern materialistic degrading of language, Mr. H. W. Rhodes, of the staff of Canterbury College, lectured to the members of tho Society for Imperial Culture on "Tho Beginnings of Language," in Christchurch, states tho "Times." After touching on the main philological theories on the origin of human speech, Mr. Rhodes pointed out the increasing modern tendencies to speak in the abstract forms of language, by which was lost all the poetry and imaginative expression of the earlier concrete modes of speech.

"The modern disintegration of the family is destroying all our traditional ideas of culture," said Mr. Rhodes. "People are getting away from the roots of their and are thus losing all connection with the culture of their forbears. The only way to re-establish connection is to reinvest words with all their rightful glamour and meaning. Words are becoming defaced and losing their clouds of glory." Genetic Study of Language. Mr. Rhodes then told of some children who had been found to have a language of their own. In Iceland last century a girl had been born who early began to speak in a kind of gibberish of her own, and could not learn the tongue of her parents, who eventually had to accommodate themselves to hers, in order to teach her the catechism. Similarly, in Denmark two boys who had been neglected by their parents had developed a language of their own, which was found to have some obscure connection with Danish. Furthermore, the Eskimo tongue was practically uniform from Greenland to Alaska* and the language

of the blackfellows was likewise standard all over Australia, while in California alone there wore thirty different family groups of languages, and in Europe live. Hence it seemed that the less chance orphaned children had of surviving the less chance- there was of the language developing differences and dialects. Lost Glamour. "We are rapidly losing the metaphorical values of words," continued Mr. Rhodes. "For instance, the word 'lord' has a certain meaning and set of associations for us, but we forget its descent from the word 'half-weard' or 'guardian of the loaf. . Similarly, the old word for window really meant 'eye of the wind, , but our abstract use of words has stripped them for us of all their glamour and poetry."

Modern slang, however, was a form of poetic thinking, as was the "pidgin English" of the Islands. When an

islander caled a bald head a "coconut no belong grass," he was really using the poetic imagery that was so sadly lacking from our own tongues.

"We can avoid a mass civilisation with a minority culture by poeticising the language," said Mr. Rhodes in conclusion.