A READER'S WARNING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 98, 9 May 1941, Page 4

A READER'S WARNING

Sir,-Correspondence in recent issues regarding the pronunciation of the language can be taken as a warning that we will have an outbreak of pedantry on our hands if we are not careful. These outbreaks have been endemic since the advent of broadcasting but in no case was anything achieved, nor can: anything ever be achieved so long as the language belongs to the people as a whole and not to a few idealists who wish all words pronounced according to their particular authority. Our language is a live, everchanging thing, and the masses will persist in pronouncing words the easiest and most commonsense way, BBC lists and Bernard Shaw notwithstanding. Furthermore, the average New Zealander has such a distaste for anything approaching the " Oxford accent" that he is immediately suspicious of the reformer. If the advocate of "better" pronunciation would concentrate on making it easier he might get somewhere. The classic example is "centenary" which we all pronounced with the accent on the "ten" from our schoolboy days because it was the easy and obvious way, but just because a Duke pronounced it differently at the Melbourne Exhibition the purists have been driving us to an enunciation which is both difficult and foreign.: Then we have the correspondent a few issues back who wanted BBC announcers taught Maori just because one of them pronounced Otago incorrectly, the joke, of course, being that "Otago" is not a Maori name but a pakeha corruption. There is nothing much wrong with the speech of our announcers. We understand them and if they were to adopt one of the "pure" forms of speech they might have difficulty in getting their message across. : I think that there are many much more important

things to be discussed just now.-

J. S.

LYNCH

(Upper Hutt).