Home > The Magazine > The Week

Thursday 4 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Mind Your Language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 20th August 2008

Dot Wordsworth pronounces English place names

‘What are all these letters?’ asked my husband, unhelpfully stirring the pile on the doormat with his foot, looking without success for any addressed to him. They were about the BBC recommendations to announcers, published in 1928, that I wrote about last week. To entertain you further, I’ve been rummaging in a successor booklet, from 1930, on the pronunciation of English place-names. By then, George Bernard Shaw had taken over from Robert Bridges as chairman of the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English (in existence from 1926 to 1940). I’m not sure how that trimmed the vessel. Daniel Jones, the phonetician who worked with him, praised Arthur Lloyd James, the professor of phonetics who compiled a ‘remarkable’ series of booklets for the committee, but I’m sorry to say that in the anxious years of war, Lloyd James ‘fell a victim to depressive insanity’, and took his life in 1941.

His tone, working under Reith in 1930, was robust and elitist. He remarks that ‘correct pronunciation is like correct behaviour — the custom of the educated, having regard to established convention, public taste, and to the object in view, which is, in the case of speech, intelligibility’. Hence the stroke with which Lloyd James cut through the Gordian knot of Daventry. If the people who live there want it to be pronounced danetree, let them spell it like that. After all, its linguist history is a parallel of haven’t, which some people pronounce haan’t (though not announcers on the BBC).

Here are some more for you to pick at: Alnmouth (Northumberland), aylmouth, stressed on the ayl; Burpham (Sussex), burfam; Colne (Essex or Lancashire), cone; Debach (Suffolk), debbidge or debbich; Etchingham (Sussex), etching-ham (stressed on the ham) or etching’em (stressed on the etch); Frant (Sussex), fraant; Greenwich (south London), grinidge, grinnich or grennich; Hoxne (Suffolk), hoxen; Ide (Devon), eed (like the Muslim feast, not that the committee mentioned that); Kirkby (Lonsdale, Malzeard, Moorside or Stephen, in Yorkshire and Westmorland as was), kurby; Lowestoft (Suffolk), low-stoft or low-stoff; Mildenhall (Wiltshire), mildenhall or mine-all; Newland (Gloucestershire), new-land, stressed on the land; Oughtibridge (Yorkshire) ootibridge, outibridge or oatibridge; Prideaux (Cornwall), priddox, stressed on the prid, with an indeterminate vowel in the ox; Reculver (Kent), stressed on the culv; Southall (Middlesex), south-awl; Throwley (Kent), first syllable rhyming with stow, or with cow; Uttoxeter (Staffordshire), uttoxeter with the first syllable rhyming with but, or yewtoxeter, or uxeter, or uxter or utcheter; Wrotham (Kent) rootam; Yealmton (Devon), yamtun, stressed on yam. That’s enough for now.

More articles from: Dot Wordsworth | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

Tamzin Lightwater

Tamzin Lightwater's unique take on the week

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

Tamzin Lightwater

Tamzin Lightwater's unique take on the week

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.