Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Third of A Century.] MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1913. VOCAL ANARCHY.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LXV, Issue 11754, 18 August 1913, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Third of A Century.] MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1913. VOCAL ANARCHY.

The voice is all important. It tells us more than —at any rate as much as— the expression of the eyes. But the voice is complex. The ■•timbre" or intonation, the method of delivery, the pronunciation ,all contribute towards the quality of the voice. Perhaps the ■■timbre" tells us most of all, for, by that, can we almost tell where, how, and in what surroundings a man has been brought up, and we can still do so whether he has risen or fallen in the world. On the other hand, pronunciation is undoubtedly a sign of culture— inherited or acquired. And so, from pronunciation also do we deduce the upbringing of those with whom we come into contact. We do so from habit. But it must be admitted that the grounds for judging a man by his pronunciation are less secure than those of "timbre." Mispronunciation is nowadays a fashion—witness, for instance, the dipt "g," which was "de rigueur" at the end of the eighteenth century, and is no less --correct" at the beginning of the twentieth. Nevertheless, there is mispronunciation and mispronunciation. We apprehend that there can be no change—no warrantable change—in pure vowel sounds. It is here that complaint is justified. There is no doubt that a tendency prevails these days to slur over vowels. In this connection, it is interesting to note the remarks of our new poet laureate, Mr Robert Bridges, in a "Tract on the present state of English Pronunciation," recently re-published. His first charge is in regard to the degradation of our unaccented vowels, the blurring and running together of a and c and o and v into one indeterminable sound—the sound of the last syllable, in j

danger. Ho finds this sound in our unstressed pronunciation of and, the, to, must; and representing it by the cr of danger (in wnieh, of course, the r is not pronounced) • that we' say inter for into, prernounce for pronounce, ter bo or not ter be, I came frerm Oxford ter London..' His next illustration of decay is in the f increase of what is called "palatalization," the change of t to eh before the sound of v. Nature has already become neycher and can hardly be saved; but don't ybu is changing to dontshew, Tuesday "to Cheusdy, and tune is well on its way to bo pronounced chiune. And d also in the same position is..now threatened, as wo sco in immediately, and in the pronunciation of audjins or orgins for audience, which Mr Bridges noted in tho speech of a certain professor of English.. There are other mispronunciations creeping into our speech which have been remarked by various observers; om bord, im fact, im vain are becoming common- the r, which we have already lost before a consonant (for sword and sawed, Lord anil haul, arms and alms are now identical in sound), is we are told, disappearing from the speech of the younger generation before a vowel also —as in faa away, faw ever, pawing with rain for pouring, it we add to these the bogus pronunciations produced by unphonetie spelling, and the English habit of "swallowing" words, there can. be little doubt;, for any one who carefully observes his own utterance or that of his friends, that the speech of the educated classes in England is undergoing serious changes at the present moment. That these changes are regrettable most of us would admit; whether or not they can be checked, or must be allowed to work their will unimpeded in the language, is another question. And here conservatives in language, and all those who

wish to exercise a conscious care over its beauty and integrity, find themselves opposed by a group of scientific linguists who regard attempts to preserve the so-called "purity" of speech as pedantic or futile. History has taught them that; the ideal of a fixed language is a vain and foolish dream; they have studied the changes which have affected our pronunciation in the past, and regarding these changes as the result of irresistible forces, the believe that we can no more control the course ol language; by our conscious efforts than we can control the circulation of the blood or the movements of the planets. To the stricter sect of this new school whatever is, is right; the words "beauty," "decay," "degradation," "vulgarism." have little or no meaning for them; and "from a purely scientific point of view," as one of them has declared, "no difference of superiority can be recognised between the speech heard at the bench of a village alehouse and that of the Bench of Bishops." Between, therefore, the purists of language, who wish to preserve it from change, and the scientists, whose greatest pleasure is to catch it in the very act of changing, there seems to be an irreconcilable difference. Nor can there be much doubt that this modern point of view is coming to be more and more widely accepted—already teachers have been known to declare it an almost sinful interference with nature and the free phonetic development of language to correct the pronunciation of children in any way.