SECOND LANGUAGE

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 84, 5 October 1940, Page 19

SECOND LANGUAGE

A FORM OF HUMOUR

SECRET SERVICE PITFALLS

(Written for the "Evening Post" by

A.M.)

That was an amusing article that the "Evening Post" published three weeks ago from the Melbourne "Age" about the curious English of'lndians and foreigners. Because English is a world language and so many people have to learn it to get a living, the opportunities for unconscious humour of this kind are limitless. No doubt AngloIndians have always cherished quaint examples of native English, but I think it was F. Anstey, of "Vice Versa" fame who, in the pages of "Punch," scored the first marked success with this sort of thing in England. His "Baboo Jabberjee" was probably the father of a large family. But the foreigner wrestling with English has long been a common device of humour, from the comic Frenchman of the stage to the pleasant mixed idioms of A. E. W. Mason's detective Hanaud. When, by the way, are we to have another story about the unraveller of the mysteries of "At the Villa Rose," ""The House of the Arrow," and "The Prisoner in the Opal"? It is curious that ' in discussions among detective story "fans" Mr. Mason is so often not mentioned or given less than his due. In the opinion of this one he has no superior

"The hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket." So, it is said, a Bengali clerk wrote in asking for leave. How many people who have laughed at these specimens have asked themselves if it is quite fair to poke ' such fun at learners of English? That accomplished Australian essayist Professor Walter Murdoch is one. In criticising the humour in "Punch" that turns on departures from good form, he says "it is essentially, . for all its superficial elegance, a crude, uncivilised kind of humour, like that which finds something exquisitely diverting in the attempt of a foreigner to speak a language he has not mastered." Professor Murdoch had found Anstey's Babu English "irresistibly funny," "yet one laughed with a shame-faced feeling that this holding-up of our Indian fellow-subjects to ridicule, because they were not like English public school boys, was rather a cheap and ignoble form of satire." When we are: so amused, we might well ask ourselves, for example, what an Englishman floundering in French sounds like to a Frenchman. Possibly one could find in the humour of France specimens of English French akin to Babu English. There is an indication of what could be done with such blundering, in one of the Somerville. and Ross stories of Irish life. A young army officer, known to his friends as "Mossoo," "because of the incredible circumstance that he can speak French, In spite of the best public school education," is introduced to an Irish hunt .as. the Cbmte de Pralines, and by his stream of mellifluous French reduces members to a state of jibbering emtoarrassment. He asks Bobbie Bennett if she speaks French, and she replies, looking "as if she were drowning," "Seulement "tres petit." 'This'is a reminder that while the 3-iritish have taken full and often unkind advantage of the foreigner's mistakes, they have not.hesitated to make fun of their own countrymen as. linguists, That most popular short farce of fifty years ago or so, "Ici on Parle Francais," turned on the unfounded claim of an English lodginghouse keeper to speak French, which he made in. order to attract custom. Do you remember "Punch's" joke about a young; English officer buying provisions at a-French shop in the last war? Cheese and eggs and so forth— "Pour la messe." The stout shopkeeper raises her hands in astonishment. "Quelle religion!" A companion story, of which more than one version is current, concerns the puzzlement of Si continental at the.. French version of an Elder Brother of Trinity HouseV a post that English statesmen consider it an honour to hold. This was translated as "Elder Brother of the Trinity." It is no wonder a reader exclaimed, "Mon Dieu, quella position!" Nor should one overlook the story of Disraeli at the Berlin Congress. His staff learned that he proposed to open the Congress in French, and one of them went to the British Ambassador in alarm. "We shall be the laughingstock of Europe. He pronounces, ♦epicier' as if it rhymed with 'overseer,' and all his pronunciation is to match. It is as much as our places are worth to tell him so. Can you help us?" The Ambassador was equal to the task. He told Disraeli that there were at least half a dozen men at the Congress who could make a speech in French almost, if not quite, as well as himself, but who else could make an English speech? The plenipotentiaries were expecting to hear English spoken by its greatest living master; would he disappoint them? Next day Disraeli opened the Congress in English. This brings me to a matter that has worried me for some years past and has cropped up again through my reading another story, laid in this' war, of English secret service work in Germany. I have wondered how large is the supply, in real life of men and women who can speak German or any other foreign language well enough to pass safely as a national of that particular country. lam going largely on my own experience of foreigners, who are supposed to be better linguists than the British. With one possible exception, I have never met a foreigner,

even one who had lived in British countries for years, who did not show by his speech, in greater or less degree, that he was not English. Sometimes he spoke better English'than one usually hears among Britons, English that it was a treat to hear, but there was always a something, however slight, that indicated the foreigner, a strange intonation or.perhaps the very perfection of his sentences. I have consulted an expert in foreign languages, and he agrees with me that unless one has been brought up in the foreign country, it is extremely difficult to acquire the language so completely as to avoid detection. There are so many pitfalls. There is idiom. In a story about the last war a German officer passing as British betrays himself by describing bad weather as •'woman's weather." The greatest difficulty seems to be with intonation. If you listen to a foreigner, who speaks English very well you will almost certainly find that his intonation is wrong now and then, and it must be the same with Britons when they speak another language. Absplutely correct intonation can be acquired only by long practice among natives.

It is significant that these difficulties extend to the United States and are increasing. If you read a valuable book published in England a few years ago for the guidance of those who go to America you find a list of some of the words that bear a different meaning there; if, "though quite innocently, you use certain ones you will greatly embarrass your hosts. This adviser stresses the importance of intonation which, he says, can only be learned by listening- I should say that an Englishman deciding to pose as an American for secret service would have to be very careful. However, if there are fewer persons than is generally supposed fit to take up secret service/that will not deter writers. Look at the number of real murders and the number of fictional ones.