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New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 403, 14 March 1947, Page 18

Sir-I think we must postulate a single standard of pronunciation. Without this, separate standards are set up and only present-day rapidity of communication prevents the speeches of widely-separated communities from becoming mutually unintelligible. Even a literary standard would not prevent this. What shall this single standard be? The Americans are greatly in the majority and their speech may prevail. Which American? There is no single American standard. New Zealanders, with a good deal of reason, pride themselves on a speech that varies within comparatively small limits. Is this little country on the perimeter, then, to set up the single standard? Surely the fount of English is England. There is in England a rapidly spreading dialect, a speaker of which it is difficult or impossible to refer to any particular community or locality. Is not this the standard to aim at, rather than adherence to.some parochial variation? A dialect is not mutilated speech and may be intrinsically as good as, or better than, the standard. A southern dialect says "I be, you be, he be." The standard says "I am, you are, he is." Which is the "mutilated" one? A northern dialect distinguishes between the pronunciation of "for, fore and four." In the standard they are all alike. Which is the better? Either of these might have become the standard; but neither has done so, and each has only a limited currency. It is the spelling of "ate" that is wrong, not the pronunciation "et," which has continued practjcally unchanged for a thousand years since the Anglo-Saxon, Nobody ever called it "eight" until the spread of education enabled people to see the word in print. Any good English dictionary will give "et." "Argosy," like most others of his time, was taught wrongly at school and most schools are

not now commonly making that mistake. A like mistake is to pronounce the bad spelling "decade" as "decayed," perhaps stressing the first syllable, in spite of the similar words monad, triad, octad, myriad, etc. I never heard "Co-vent." The variant is "Cuvvent"-and the "Cuvventry" so detested by the people of the place. Nobody ever pronounces Magdalen, Keswick, Harwich or Holborn as they are spelled, any more than they do One, Two, Dozen, or Possess. Perhaps "Argosy" should try Oamaru, Waitaki or Negongotaha.

EDINBURGH

(Cambridge).