PRONOUNCING NAMES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19946, 13 November 1926, Page 22

PRONOUNCING NAMES.

CORRECT SPELLING. FLOUTED. HISTORIC ENGLISH PLACES. When the British Broadcasting Company decided that the name of its new station should be pronounced as it was spelled, Daventry, it shocked a great many lovers of old wavs (says The Times). Here was a body, with a power over English speech much greater than that of stage or pulpit, setting a bad example. No matter what the spelling, the sound was “Daintry.” It always had been “Daintrv.” A little later Mr Ernest Law returned to the charge in defence of a famous old Cotswold town. He protested in our columns against the “modern atrocity” of the name Cirencester, which he held to have been forced upon the people of that town by etymologists. Let them revert to "the old, correct spelling,” which, he declared, was “Ciceter. And then a Cirencester man. Mr Vaisey, wrote to say that “Ciceter” was not th'e old, correct spelling; that it wds not even a true literal rendering of any local pronounciation. Others, with memories of Cirencester as long as Mr Vaisey’?, might bear witness that 40 years ago the name was pronounced both as Sizziter and (though more rarely) as Sissister. And how long, another might ask, has Daventry been called “Daintry.” In Domesday Book it is spelled Daventrie, in twelfth-century records Daventre. May not the British Broadcasting Company have blundered upon a pronounciation of the name even older than that beloved by the champions of old usages? These few details taken from the correspondents are enough to suggest that the matter is not, so simple as it appears. And the more we look into the differences between the spelling and the pronounciation of English names of place and of family, the more does it look as if.'indeed, we spelled them Cbolmondeley and pronounced them Majoribanks. “Others may call it Alexandria; you and I, sir, must certainly say Alexandria.” Would that there were, always such firm ground of decision I Prononnciation of English name? seems sometimes to flout spelling and sometimes to follow it slavishly. In the names of, London, of Pontefract, of Derby, it disregards the written letters; but, while the corruption of the French Hautbois into Hobbis is easilv understood, how comes it that in Chesham Bois and Theydon Bois the English sound “Boys” is due not to a corruption of the French sound, but to a close following of the written letters. It is the same with the English forms of other foreign names. Writing, not speech, must be the origin of our trippers’ “Bolone” (for Boulogne). ou r soldiers’ “Wypers,” and every Englishman's “Paris.” Yet no one outside a dramatic academy would dream of pronouncing the first, sellable of England as it is spoiled and the Gloucestershire man’s “Glorster” is scarcelv more like the written word than the Cocknev’s Old usages are pleasant. It flatters one s selfesteem to get things right; to say “Sbrosehury,” as Shakespeare did. instead _of Shrewsbury; to know, in Worcestershire, that it is really “Eve” Court, though it is spelled Leigh, and in Sussex how to say Cowden or West Hoathy. But there is a pedantry of usage ns well as a pedantry of letter*: and anv atemnt to make the spelling fit the pronounciation would he to build a ho”se on the sand, to mould the more endurin'* W enduring.