THE OXFORD VOICE

Southland Times, Issue 19900, 19 June 1926, Page 21 (Supplement)

THE OXFORD VOICE

BATTLE OF THE TONGUES. WHERE IS GOOD ENGLISH SPOKEN? London, April 29. What is a cultivated voice? The possession of one has been, and still is, regarded as a thing to be desired. Is it the Oxford voice ? The development of broadcasting has made the subject of pronunciation acute. Some of those who decry broadcasting do so because they have suffered from the pronunciation of broadcasters who are too often chosen not for how they can speak but for what they can tell us. The School of Economics Lectures and Counter-Lectures, alive to the importance of the topic, put in the chair Miss Irene Vanbrugh, while Mr St. John Ervine, playwright and critic, Mr Nigel Playfair, actor, discussed the matter. The best people of England, said Mr Ervine, and especially the young ones, talked in a “vile Cockney voice.” The Cockney voice was leaving, the purlieus of Walworth and going to the purlieus of Mayfair —Shepherd’s Market. Il was becoming increasingly common for members of theatre audiences and dramatic critics to complain that actors and actresses, again especially the young ones, were affecting the “Oxford voice.” It was actually only too true that this voice did belong to the people of Oxford These people could not ask you to dinner—they asked you to “dinnah.” They did not say “culture” —they said “culchah.” When they wanted to say “Oh, no,” they actually said, “O, noo,” or even “Ow, now.” This way of speaking has got into the church and on to the stage, and people were steadily becoming inarticulate. Nowadays, when one listened to a clergyman preaching or reading the service, nine times out of ten one could not hear what he was saying. As regards the theatre, many people instead of taking opera-glasses with them took ear trumpets. ■Mr Nigel Playfair, in reply said that he had two main principles on which he was relying to counter the arguments advanced by St. John Ervine. The first was that the English language was in many cases not pronounced as it was spelt; the second principle was that the understanding of English was guided by two things: convention determined by good taste, and context. For instance, even Mr St. John Ervine would not maintain that “Cholmondeley” should be pronounced a? it was spelt, any more than he would like bis own name to be pronounced “Saint John Irvyne.”’ Then again, when Mr Ervine said that there was no standard English pronunciation, he was talking nonsense. The standard was set in our national theatres and national colleges of correct pronunciation, the headquarters of which were in London, the centre of the British Empire. Mr St. John Ervine had at different times, Mr Playfair continued, been sarcastic about the accents cultivated at Eton, Harrow, and Oxford. It might be true that in all those places you could find odd cases of persons who, otherwise well-educated, were deficient in good speaking voices. But there was generally as high a standard of pronunciation there as anywhere in the Empire. Miss Irene Vanbrugh said that in her opinion, the Church and the stage were the two places where the English language should be very beautifully and clearly spoken. It was difficult, she knew, for certain young actors and actresses who had te portray modern characters of a certain type te speak otherwise than in the new fashion. But there were certain actresses who thought that unless they adopted the new style of speech they would not be considered “smart.” A good actress should not mind whether she was smart or not, so long as she did her duty io the beautiful language which she was allowed to speak. A correspondent of The Times calls attention to a saying of Mr Joseph Chamberlain who used te say that one of the great, rules of clear enunciation was to attend to the consonants and let the vowels look after themselves. That correspondent repeated the remark to one of our most distinguished actresses, whose elocution is not the.-Jeast of her charms, and she agreed, adding, however, that the vowels must be closed, as otherwise, “you will be talking ’Cockney/ especially to the remoter parts of the house.” American correspondents in London made much of a casual remark that our Royal Family was somewhat tainted with Cockney, with the result that the battle front has been extended across the Atlantic. Mr Frank Vizetelly, the producer of distionaries, is said to have declared that the English are butchering the common tongue, “out of cussedness, because they don’t want to be thought American,” and says that anyhow President Coolidge’s pronunciation is in excellent tradition whatever may be the case with King George’s. This assertion that the English have abandoned the purity of their mother tongue in order to be different is the view held also by Mr George Jean Nathan, who adds that cultured Irishmen and Americans speak better English than the English themselves.