Natural Speech
HY does such a corner-polished expert as O. L. Simmance put slight hesitations here and there into his readings, like roughage in porridge? If the idea is to sound more natural it fails. The stumblings and hesitations of natural speech would come over the air like Clapham and Dwyer. This reflection came when I was listening to Bunyan’s "Trial of Faithful," and wondering just why it is that seventeenth-century English was better at plain speech (in the broader sense of the term) than any other tongue. It is really insufficient to point to the Authorised Version as the improving influence, because it seems pretty certain that the Authorised Version’s success was largely due to the fact that it was written as nearly as possible in the common speech. The particular quality of the tongue, I think, is not in vocabulary so much as in speech rhythms and_ the arrangement of clauses; and perhaps a major tragedy of history is its disappearance before the more polished Ciceronian rhythms of the eighteenth century aristocracy. This at its worst led to pomposity in the educated and gibbering in the uneducated, and the tongue of men and of angels, of Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch, Hakluyt, Cromwell and Bunyan has vanished forever.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19450223.2.14.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 296, 23 February 1945, Page 6
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209Natural Speech New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 296, 23 February 1945, Page 6
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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