THE KING'S ENGLISH
NEW 8.8.C. GUIDE-BOOK
Hadio, which has made the pronunciation of foreign names "a daily duly" especially among announcers, has inspired the British Broadcasting Corporation to issue a handbook entitled "Broadcast English."
Professor A. Lloyd James, expert in phonetics at the University of London, is the author of the work, sub-titled "Recommendations to announcers regarding the pronunciation of some foreign-place names." While this subject covers verbal acrobatics, an "acrobatic mouth" in handling tonguetwisters is a feat announcers are warned not to attempt.
It is confessed at the outset tliat the problem of pronunciation of foreign words is an old one, but it cries aloud for solution more than ever before now that "news is purveyed by the spoken word." A word that looks quite harmless on paper may not be so simple in sound, and for that reason radio announcers and commentators may tremble.
And well these unseen commentators may tremble, for as Professor James points out, even if they spoke a native tongue all their life, the pronunciation would not satisfy everybody in such a vast audience as that of radio, now so international in scope. And if the announcer microphoned the words exactly as the university had vouchsafed to him, still he would be criticised by some listeners.
It seems a safe linguistic maxim, according to the professor, to assert that a nation will seldom adopt any speech sound that does not develop naturally in the evolution of its language, unless, of course, there have been large infiltrations of foreign speakers. For instance, French has had very little effect on the sounds of English.
The Britisher asserts: "French nazalised vowels as i.i 'vin,' 'blanc,' 'bon,' and 'un,' have never flourished among us, being entirely unlike anything that has developed naturally within the body of English pronunciation." French words that came into the English language centuries ago quickly shed their foreign sounds and became as English as the natives.
Professor James points out that "pincers" and "pinch" are what they are, but "pince-nez," a comparatively late arrival, still bears audible trace of its alien origin in the half-hearted attempt of some people to say something like the French. Most educated speakers, he says, nowadays make an attempt to imitate the foreign sounds. Whether this is desirable he does not know, but he does believe it would be very unwise to lay down a general maxim that in the pronunciation of foreign words there should be slavish imitation of the foreign version.
We have to face the fact that there is now a greater familiarity with the spoken forms of foreign words than there was before the spread of rational education in foreign languages," continued Professor James. "This familiarity has considerably increased with broadcasting. . . . The advent of empire broadcasting has introduced in some cases a further complication, for traditional English pronunciations as used in Britain are not always found to be acceptable in the places concerned.
"The announcer's task is a difficult one. He must walk the narrow path between pedantry and ignorance and be prepared to be sniped at by zealots on either side; and most of this shboting comes from one side. He knows -from long experience that the less fuss be makes over it the better it will be for him in the end.
"If he interlards his English with foreign speech sounds, there are volleys from the left; if he slips up a false, quantity or wrong accent, there is sharpshooting from the right. If he gets his accent in the right place and makes the whole thing sound utterly English in every detail, he will probably be allowed to pass over unscathed. Even then there is the sniper to contend with."
The professor concludes his introduction to "a formidable battery of words" with this advice to radio announcers and speakers: "A technique that obtrudes, in speech as in most other forms of human activity, is offensive; it should be the aim of those who have to handle 'the spoken word to evoke neither admiration nor humiliation."
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19370617.2.215.4
Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 142, 17 June 1937, Page 28
Word Count
673THE KING'S ENGLISH Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 142, 17 June 1937, Page 28
Using This Item
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Evening Post. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 New Zealand licence. This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.