PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 47, 19 November 1926, Page 5

PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES

When the British Broadcasting Company decided that the name of its new station should he pronounced as it was spelled, Daventry, it shocked a great many lovers of old ways (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 “Daintry.” 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 lielcl 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 the old. correct spelling; that it was not even a true literal tendering of any local pronunciation. Others, with memories of Cirencester os long as Mr. Vaisey’s, might bear witness that 40 years ago the name was pronounced l oth as Sizziter and (though more rarely) as Sissister. And how long, another might ask. has Daventy been called “Daintry?” Tn Domesilay Book it is spelled Daventrie, in twelfth-century records Daventre. May not the British Broadcasting Company have blundered upon a pronunciation of the name even cider than that beloved bv the champions of old usages? These few details taken from the correspondence 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 pronunciation of English names of place and of family, the more does it look as if. indeed, we spelled them Cholmondeley and pronounced them Marjoribanks. “Others may call it Alexandria: vou and I. sir, must certainly say Alexa nd rein.” Would that there were always such firm eronnrl of decision! Pronunciation of English names seems sometimes to flout spelling and sometimes to follow it slavishly. Tn the names of London, of Pontefract, of Derby, it disregards tlie written letters: hut, while the corruption Of the French ITautbois info Hohbis is easily 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 ether foreign names. Writing, not speech, must be the origin of our trinpers’ “Bolone” (for Boulogne), our soldiers’ “Wypers." and every Englishman’s “Paris.” Yet no one outside a dramatic academy would dream of pronouncing the first syllable of England as it is spelled, and the Gloucestershire man's "Glorster’" is scarcely more like the written word than the Cockney’s “Gloster.” Old usages are pleasant. It flatters cne’s self-esteem to get things right: to say "Shrosebiiry,” ns Shakcsnearc did. instead of Shrewsbury; to know, in Worcestershire, that it is renllv “Lye”. Court thought it is spoiled Leigh, and in c”ssex how to say Cowden nr West Honthly. But there is a pedantry rf usage as well as a pedantry nf letters: and any attempt to make the spelling fit the pronunciation would be to li'iild a house on the snnd, fo mould the more enduring upon the less enduring.