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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

Encouraged by those blancmange-makers of the linguistic kitchen, the Queen’s English Society, listeners have recently been having a go at the BBC.

One left a website comment: ‘“He was going too fast” — the word fast is an adjective not an adverb but you wouldn’t know it these days!’ But fast is an adverb too, and has been for the past 800 years.

Poor old BBC. People say all sorts of things on air, and many of them annoy me and you. But this is our laboratory. We listen to these locutions as samples of how the language is changing, and what is going wrong.

The BBC still has a pronunciation unit and thanks to its labours the OUP has brought out the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99, but £10.49 on Amazon). The useful task it performs is to provide, for each word it lists, both an impressionistic pronunciation respelling and the conventional IPA transcription. It would be a lovely present for a member of the Queen’s English Society or anyone interested in our language.

Or in other languages, which prove tricky for announcers. Take Dylan Thomas. Clever-clogs know that the Welsh pronounce the name Dylan something like dull-un; but the poet preferred to use the anglicisation dil-uhn for English-language broadcasts.

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