SPOKEN ENGLISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 5

SPOKEN ENGLISH

Sir,-Miss Ngaio Marsh’s remarks on speech-habits in England are very helpful. Where I generalised, she was able to particularise. I agree with her about the long-drawn-out "eeyes" as a fault of many New Zealanders, and am alarmed to think that I may have given some encouragement to it by analysing the "y" sound in "young" as "ee-oung." The "ee" here is, of course, as short as one can make it. When Miss Marsh says that the various shades of upper and middle class dialect one hears in England are the result of "environment and training," and that the users are "almost entirely unselfconscious," I think she may be beside the point. In our social actions and reactions our true motivation is often none the less real for being concealed under a layer of convention,

The use of a special speech habit. establish social superiority comes unde the heading of group-behaviour: the in« dividual may be unaware, or only partly aware, of what is being done. As for the question of the Southern English "s," raised by Miss Marsh and also by Mr. Barwell, perhaps I cans not do better than quote from a letteft I happened to read several days aga in a copy of the English Listener which Providence must have put into my hands. It is by Gerald Bullett, who is replying to a correspondent who is "dise tressed by the redundant ‘rt’ which ...« is added by broadcasters to words like area, idea, India, and guerrilla." © This correspondent had asked: "Is what was once regarded as a Cockneyism to ba accepted as standard pronunciation?" Mr. Bullett goes on to reply: "For my own part I hope not, but worse. things may happen and have happened. For it is this nervous (and snobbish) dread of falling into Cockney error that has led to the spurious and vulgar ‘refine ment’ of never pronouncing an ‘r’ if it can possibly be avoided, and in particu lar of never joining a terminal ‘r’ to the initial vowel of the next word, That ‘we of the south have difficulty in pronounc« ing the ‘r’ in ‘corn’ and ‘morn’ is na reason for leaving it out of words like ‘moreover’ or phrases like ‘for ever’. or ‘after all.’ I submit that ‘the idear of,’

though manifestly incorrect, is qa hune dred times less offensive than tha equally incorrect, faw eva: maw ova$ faw instance; afta all; ah troops opened fah; no maw waw; restawing; faw-inch guns-examples all handpicked from comparatively recent broadcasts. If BBC official practice is a true index, these emasculate noises now pass for standard English pronunciation; which, I suggest, is part of the reason why any English speaking Scotsman or Irishman speaks infinitely better English than the greag majority of expensively-educated south« ern Englanders."

A. R. D.

FAIRBURN

(Auckland),