WRITTEN ENGLISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 429, 12 September 1947, Page 15

WRITTEN ENGLISH

"NIJEW ZEALAND speech has diverged from standard English, both in idiom and in vowel quality," writes Professor Ian A..Gordon in his book The Teaching of English. His advice to teachers is, in effect, not to bother about it overmuch since there will always be provincial variations in language. That is sound enough up to a point, but in written as well as spoken English some changes are gaining ground which should be resisted in the interests of efficiency. Three can be instanced that are not confined to New Zéaland, though they are rampant here. Nice distinctions of meaning were accustomed to be expressed by a choice between the words "shall" and "will," but soon they will be expressible no more, becatise few Englishmen of affairs and fewer still New Zealand writers or speakers havé any use for, the word "shall," which threatens to disappear from the language. Read the cablegrams, if any doubts are felt respecting the first class. I am waiting to hear a great gathering sing "Will we gather at the river." Similarly of the two words "may" and "might," designed to convey quite different shades of meaning, the first threatens to absorb the second, and an audience that was young enough would not necessarily discern anything contradictory or unnatural if it heard the captain of the Pinafore sing: For he may have been a Roosian, A French, or Turk, or Proosian . . . But . .. he remains an Englishman! The good captain would only have been expressing himself in the fashion, not only of his equals, but of his superiors. Read the Press which records their utterances. Again, "disinterested" to-day for a surprisingly large number of people, means the same thing as "uninterested." What a loss! °*

W.F.

A.