The Jewellers Window

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30823, 7 August 1965, Page 12

The Jewellers Window

nunciation of English but “w” before “oo” is actually difficult, if not impossible, for some speakers. You note that in the pronunciation of Welsh-English, for instance, in Shakespeare’s Fluellen, “world” is “orld” and “work” is “ork.” I remember a Welsh farmer proudly showing me a troutfly—“all my ‘ork’.” So that is what happened to “who”; the “w” vanished and we have “hoo.” As for “whom,” which we use or do not use as the objective form of “who,” this is a shocking breach of old grammatical rule for when our language was inflected the objective (or accusative) form was “whone” with “n,” not “m"; the form with final “m" was dative. During the period of anarchy in the Middle Ages the form with “n” disappeared and the dative form took over. So if you are taken to task for saying, “who did you see?”, you can say in your defence that "whom" is bad grammar; it was. Long Memory Judge H. A. H. Munro, of the Native Land Court, visited us in 1901 at our home in Fendalton. He looked over my books and suddenly exclaimed, “Why, you've got ‘The Fool of Quality’; now I shall be able to finish it at last.” He had come to New Zealand from Tasmania in 1835. His father, a Waterloo vete-

ran. had had a grant of land in Tasmania, but after a few years there he had put his family and belongings into a ship and come as a settler to New Zealand. Among his possessions was a copy of this book in five volumes, the fifth volume, however, was missing and now at last he could go on with it. He remembered perfectly how the fourth volume ended with the principal personage just about to speak, but what he was to say was in the fifth.

We reckoned that the gap between his reading of the fourth and of the fifth volumes was just 70 years and I call that a long memory. “The Fool of Quality.” 1766. was written by an Irish playwright and novelist, Henry Brooke (1708-1783). His other writings have been completely forgotten, but Charles Kingsley produced an edition of this book in 1859 having a great admiration of it, it is said, because of its religious flavour. It is credited with “simplicity of style, humour and close observation." It is over 50 years since I read it and I have no very clear recollection of it; though I do remember the rather obtrusive morality, I can’t recall anything at all humorous in it.