PRONUNCIATION

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 September 1934, Page 4

PRONUNCIATION

EVERY MAN’S BOGEY “No man dure pronounce a word of three or more syllables unless and until he has heard someone else pronounce it first.” This statement, so encouraging to foreign students of English, was made by Mr. A. Lloyd James, secretary of the 8.8. C. Advisory Committee on “Spoken English” in a. lecture at the vacation course (says the “Manchester Guardian”). He said that when the word “congener” came up at the 8.8. C. Committee, Sir Robert Bridges and Mr. Shaw said that they had never used the word. After some discussion thby agreed the second syllable should be accented, but Mr. James pointed out that no reputable dictionary supported them. The dictionaries accented the first syllable. “Sir Robert and Mr. Shaw said. ‘Dear me: then that must be right.’ ” Mr. Janies showed that written language had ppssessed such enormous prestige that for centuries wc had been under the domination of printed language, but now millions of people relied for information on the spoken word.

“If speech education was necessary twenty years ago, it is ten thousand times more necessary to-day,” he said. “Even our universities have so concentrated on education of visual language that 1 am constantly faced by brilliant young men from Oxford and Cambridge who cannot read English prose aloud before a microphone with intelligence. “Probably more nonsense is talked about standard English pronunciation than about any other aspect of the speech question. There is no such thing as standard English, but there are many standards of speech! Speech should be intelligible but intelligibility does not depend to the extent you would suppose on sounds. The London telephone cannot make any difference between the sound of ‘s’ and ‘f,’ nor can gramophones or any loud-speak-ers, but the distinction is not necessary, for you hear by context.” He hud an idea that one of the determining factors in intelligibility was rhythm, and that in .fact it governed the whole situation.

“Within limits you can do what you like with words, but if rhythm is wrong you will be unintelligible. The best example of English spoken on bad rhythm comes from French students. Intonation is another factor. There is a. national way of performing the act of speech. Intonation probobly causes more international ill will than anything else. English people think the French are excitable. If they spoke in the way the French frequently do it would be under stress of emotion, so they imagine the French speaker is suffering from that emotion. Masses of American students are regularly offended by the common casmtl British way of saying 'Thank you,' which suggests terseness and rudeness and is not associated with the feeling they want jt to express.”