LANGUAGE EVOLVING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 730, 10 July 1953, Page 10

LANGUAGE EVOLVING

WORLD OF WORDS was scripted by Simeon Potter, author of that useful Pelican volume, Our Language; and that led us to expect something rather different from what we got. The outlines were treated sketchilythe development of English dialects, growing standardisation, American and Colonial speech, the function of slang. This was right enough, I suppose, for its original purpose, as part of a series of semi-popular programmes on _ the English way of life; on its own, the result was rather thin, and the main thing was the variety of English speech illus-trated-the Cockney (who "doesn’t paralyse his vowels"), the yarning Australian, and the soft-spoken Jamaican, among others. Particularly interesting were the three historical illustrations, in’ which passages of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and of Hamlet as played by Garrick, were giveri in reconstructions of contemporary speech. We had, however, rather to take these on trust, for the programme had some odd errors"Wanganui" (with the first syllable rhyming with "clang"), "King Arthur’s Wessex" (Alfred’s?), and Shakespeare’s "Mermaid Theatre" (Globe Theatre, Mermaid tavern?). Confidence was restored by the brief New Zealand excerpt which, with its remark on our tendency to over or under-enunciate, was authentically Zelanian.