"COLONIALISM"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 418, 27 June 1947, Page 14

"COLONIALISM"

The third of a series of four articles written for "The

i! Listener" by

A. R. D.

FAIRBURN

TIN New Zealand I think we find ) strong evidences of a sense of ) inferiority leading to the de- | basement of the spoken language. In some individual cases I'am sure | we can diagnose from the manner of speech a definite anti-social alignment. I havé noticed at times a deliberate mangling of the spoken language-to an extent that is hard to account for unless we assume some hidden motivation. One result of compulsory education is that the number of people capable of doing "white-collar" jobs far exceeds the supply of such jobs. In spite of a fair measure of democratic sentiment, ‘"‘whitecollar" work still has a prestige that derives from its association wiih the business and property-owning classes who up till the present have held economic power. I find it not at all fantastic to assume that these speech-manglers are people in whom a moderate amount of

education has produced a heightened sense of social inadequacy, Either it has made them too poignantly aware of their own native deficiences; or it has antalised them with prospects of advancement never to be realised. They become, in a real sense, social misfits. If they had more. character they would either thrust their way up through’ the social hierarchy toward" "success"; or become communists; or | even philosophically accept a place near the bottom of° .

| the ladcer-efter having looked at some _of those near the top. Revenge is Cheap When such a personal crisis leads to | psychological defeat, the victim often seeks revenge against society. Since | crime, on the whole, doesn’t pay, only | a few take that path..In any event, it _is only in the more extreme cases tha‘ | the situation is intense enough to produce such strong anti-social. reactions But there is another sor: of revenge that is cheap and painless (if quite profitless, except in terms of psychological satisfaction), end that is the mutilation of :he lenguage. This amount:, on a secular | plane, to something like the defilement | of an altar. For language is, in a mete- | physical sense, the body of socie y, its | real substance and being: it is the repository of the communal. spirit; in and through which social velues are realised, recorded, and enshrined. It is logical’ to expect those who have hidden. anti-social -motive;.to "take it out" in ritual fashion on the language of society. I have heard larrikins aggressively mriming the language they learnt at , school-mangling it, pul'ing its wings off, kicking it along the gutter with evident gusto. These are the same people who smash bottles in the street, and reel out life-lines on surf beaches, cut them halfway, and re-wind them again. They are

fn | a small minority of the population, and they constitute a social problem. My purpose at the moment is not to preach a sermon against them, but to indicate one of the ways in which the spoken language comes to be debased. "Colonial Inferiority" Apart from such extreme types, there are in New Zealand many people who show evidence in their speech of some sense of social inferiority. My own view -and you can -take it for what it is wor.h-is that there is in this country a widespread "Colonial inferiority" feeling. Any well-bred and well-spoken Englishman who has lived for a time in New Zealand will, I think, confirm this view

a if you ask him. The ordinary New Zealand voice has a hint of something 4 oF enly and hang-dog about it when ‘set against a good English voice. So far from English speech providing an example, it is more likely to provoke a resentful reaction in the opposite direction, towards a more aggres ive Colonialism. Very often, of course, this is due to the English voice being tinged with one of the more precious dialect-flavours of fashionable Englend to which I referred in an earlier article. Then, of course, there is the opposite type of New Zealander, who cultivates — a ridiculously "superior" style of speaking, which becomes more affected the higher he manages to climb up the monkey-puzzle tree of bourgeois society. The social toady end the profiteer’s pimp can often be identified by their voices. There are many, others in New Zealand,' perhaps the majority of those who speak badly, in whom the fault is due to indifference and laziness more than to anything else: an accep‘ance of the conventional habits of speech of those with whom they mix. They feel a certain diffidence about trying to improve their speech. They are afraid of being mistaken for pansies ‘or social climbers. Their friends and workmates might think they were putting on dog, trying to get (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) a bit above themselves. But very seldom, I think,’ do we fail to find some trace of that Colonial inferiority feeling which lurks at the back of our minds. For the benefit of these people who hesitate to attempt to speak well it should be pointed out that the proper speaking of English has nothing to du with snobbery or pedantry-which are at the root of most of the ultra-genteel dialects I have mentioned. It is my belief that standard English can be described and defended in terme that are purely aesthetic and functional, Production of the Voice Let us deal first with the functional side of the matter. To speak well, a person must have good voice-production, and use all the organs of speech in a flexible and controlled way. A good deal of the harshness of quality one hears in ordinary speech in New Zealand is due to pinched mouths and constricted throats. The development of the muscles of the throat, mou‘h and face, and their efficient use, is exactly on a par with the Mla 2 and use of.other muscles. A y who has a normal and healthy desire "to be athletic will often use his speechorgans in a most unathletic fashion. Faulty voice-production is therefgre of the same order as hunched backs, knockknees, and hollow chests. If this idea could be got into the heads of*school athletes (who usually set the pattern of behaviour for the rest), the standard of spoken English in New Zealand could be jacked up half-a-dozen notches within a generation. Voice-production, however, is not the whole story. If a person uses his speechorgans efficiently, he will probably produce good consonants and vowel sounds; but will he use the right vowel sounds in pronouncing his words? There is no certainty that the diphthong in "rain" will not become a perfectly produced i sound. Nor is there any guarantee that an important. suffix such as -/y will not be given a false stress, leading to such solecisms as "quicklee" and "nicelee"; or that "beauty" will not be debased into "beautee." In trying to establish a "right" enunciation of vowel sounds we can of course fall back on usage and convention. But they in turn call for some justification other than the tact that educated people-or some _ educated people-support them! I think we can find another touchstone-one that is purely aesthetic. The sciente of phonetics presents great subtleties, and uses a system of symbols that is familiar to perhaps one person in every 10,000. Since I am one of the 9,999 I propose to use a very simple and arbitrary, and not at all subtle, phonetic scheme to make certain points that seem to me to be important. The "Colour" of Language First let me ‘offer’ an analogy. The opaque colours which artists: use in peintiog pictures are related to the specaye -sunlight. A rainbow is, by comm consent, a beautiful thing. It would not be so beautiful if it consisted of only one band of colour. Nor would the artist be able to paint so effectively if he were restricted to using nothing but monochrome. Just as the spectrum of sunlight shows a graduated series of light emanations ranging from red to violet, with a con-stantly-changing wavelength as we move from one extreme to the other, so there is a sort of "spectrum" of vowel sounds,

on the proper use of which the. "colour" of spoken language chiefly depends. Vowel sounds are made by a resonance in the open throat, the degree of openness depending on the particular vowel. (The formation of consonant sounds al-ways-with the exception of the sibilants and the r sound-involves making a temporary and complete obstruction with the lips, teeth, or tongue.) In using colours the painter is, as a rule, attemp ing to imitate or to represent nature. And in nature there is a jumble of colours, just as there is a jumble of sound. If the painter were doing something parallel to what we do when we speak, he would select certain slabs of. colour and use them as a sort of sign-language. He would find it best to keep them separate, without mixing them, in order to preserve the meaning of each distinctly. And it would be desirable for his colours to be sufficiently few in number to retain their distinctive characters; yet sufficiently numerous to make full use of the range of the spectrum, Take Postage Stamps To make the point clearer, let us take another analogy. If we are issuing postage stamps of various denominations we shall also use the range of colours derived from the spectrum. If we have too many denominations of one pattern, we shall be compelled to grade the colours very close to ome another. But if we have a comfortable number to deal with, we can space them out over the range of colours, and make every one quite distinct from the others. The thing I want to emphasise is the advantage of spacing the colours more or less evenly. Not only will they be more distinct, but they will look more pleasing when seen all together. Similarly, with our range of vowel sounds it is desirable’ on aesthetic (as well as functional) grounds to keep them evenly spaced over the range of our "spectrum" of sound. In that way we shall maintain distinctions, keep the character of each sound separate from its neighbours, and provide the basis of a spoken |language that is rich in its diversity of sounds, and at the same time a thoroughly efficient means of communication, . (Tobe continued)