PRONUNCIATION OF "CLOTHES."

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20354, 10 March 1928, Page 17

PRONUNCIATION OF "CLOTHES."

A RHODES SCHOLAR’S OPINION,

(From Goa Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 25. With the British Broadcasting Corporation as a more or less unwilling authority on pronunciation, the subject is more often under discussion than it used to be. Leading articles are devoted to a doubtful word. Scholars write letters to the daily papers, and educated people often find that they have spent a lifetime pronouncing a certain word incorrectly—that is, if learned men can claim any greater authority on the subject than the rank and file. The latest word to come up for discussion is the simple word, “ clothes.” Should “ th ” be pronounced in this common word, or does it rhyme with “ rose ” V Our Rhodes Scholar for 1910 enters into the controversy. This is Mr Kenneth Sisam (Auckland), who writes to The Times from Oxford. He points out that the pronunciation without “th ” has a respectable antiquity of at least five centuries, and the earliest examples clear it from the suspicion of Cockney origin. “ Still they may be dialectal,” Mr Sisams goes on to say, “ and Ophelia was mad when she sang : “ ‘ Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes.’ But the usage of good authors from about the middle of the seventeenth century cannot be disposed of go easily. Herrick begins a famous poem—- ‘ When as in silks my Julia goes. Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes.’ Dry den, in his prologue to the ‘ Rival Ladies,’ has—- ‘ He’s bound to please, not to write well, and knows There is a mode in plays as well as clothes.’ Pope, in the fourth satire of Dr Donne versified, writes— . , ‘ And why not players strut Jn courtiers’ clothes, For these are actors, too, as well as those.’ “ Swift rhymes clothes: nose; Prior (* The Dove ’) and Goldsmith (‘ Mad Dog ’) foes ; clothes ; and Dr Johnson, the typ'e of dignity in speech, goe s out of his way in his dictionary to say, ‘pronounced clo’s. ’ There happens to be no Scot in this list, and lest it should be supposed that th survived in Scotland I cite a mere phenotician, James Buchanan, who wrote an ‘ essay towards establishing a standard for an elegant and uniform pronunciation of the English _ language throughout the British Dominions ’ in 1766. Burns’s less elegant lassies hung out their claes on the braes. UPHOLDERS OF TRADITION. “ It appears that clothes, because it was dissociated from the singular cloth, had lost its th for educated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotsmen of the eighteenth century ; and I suspect it was the same in America before Americans studied to pronounce as they spell. The pronunciation with th is a comparatively recent reconstruction from the spelling, which has no beauty to commend it. The argument for it is the desirability of avoiding homophones like close; clothes; and nobody who has read the tract on “ Homophones,” which Mr Bridges wrote for the Society of Pure English, will under-esti-mate that principle. But the upholders of tradition should not be thought of as corrupters of the language. Some concession ought to bo made to those who would still have Julia move without unsilken noiacs; and it might be permissible (m domestic privacy) to rhyme ‘ The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes.’ ”