"NEW ZEALAND"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 3

"NEW ZEALAND"

sir,-i hear soi-disant purists label as "awful", "frightful", or "appalling" the oft-heard shortening of the "ea" in "New Zealand". Like these people I know nothing of the canons of orthoepy, but I do know that they can never be absolute: gradually but inexorably pronunciation changes. Apparently, however, these changes follow, in general, certain fundamental laws which operate throughout all the Indo-Aryan languages, Skeat, in his Primer of English Etymology, gives the following rules. (1) When the length of a word is augmented, an original vowel is apt to be shortened by the accentual stress falling on it. (2) In disyllabic compounds accented on the former syllable, a long vowel in the latter syllable is frequently shortened by the lack of stress upon it. The operation of the second rule is surely well shown in the word "Zealand" itself, for nobody could pretend that the "a" is sounded as in "land". Why then is the tendency to shorten the first vowel so heinous a sin? The vowels in "heal" and "zeal", to take two similar cases, become short in "healthy" and "zealot" following the tendency laid down in Rule 1. I suspect that the objection to the shortening of the "ea" in "Zealand" is based on priggish reverence for the pronunciation of the BBC; but no real New Zealander, as Baker has recently pointed out in his New Zealand Slang, "speaks with the educated Southern English accent". We pronounce the first syllable of "Australia" as that of "ostrich", not like "awesome" as the BBC does. Why then the objection to allowing the operation of an established law of sound change in the case of the name of our own country?

NIALL

ALEXANDER

(Christchurch).