News and Views

Abstract

THE brochure entitled “Broadcast English I. Recommendations to announcers regarding certain words of doubtful pronunciation,” which was recently published by the British Broadcasting Corporation, is a scholarly production, and one that should appeal to a wider audience than that for which it is primarily intended. Though the pen is the able one of Mr. A. Lloyd James, of the School of Oriental Studies, the voice is that of the expert committee, which includes, among others, the Poet Laureate and Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, and was appointed by the Corporation in 1926. Speech, it is pointed out, is governed by local convention and public taste, and although most people think there are right and wrong ways of speaking, these adjectives are only applicable where the different considerations of propriety all lead to the same conclusion. “The higher a community climbs in the social scale, the greater is the uniformity in its speech.” There is no standard pronunciation of English, so there cannot be one and only one right way of pronunciation. Our language is rich in alternative pronunciations of equal authority, and the task of the B.B.C. has been that of deciding between them. The special difficulties of the task originate in the discrepancy between sound and written symbol, the presence of many foreign words, the relationship between the value of a symbol in the modern language and the value it had in a classical tongue, and the absence of any principle to govern the incidence of stress.