Changing Tongue

By ANGELA MILNE

ALOT has happened to the English language lately. For example, there was what the beatniks did to it. They did plenty to clothes when they reduced their own to mad, shaggy garments to keep warm in, mad, tight garments to shock; they did something at least to them- selves when they swopped civilisation's solemn eating rules and mystique for cat food; but their most striking (and .1 think lovable) action was when they looked at the terrifying skyscraper of word-associations and meaning-overtones that our language has built itself into, and turned away from the whole business and began all over again with those basic. stumbling communi- catory sounds which had the morning freshness of the Old Stone Age.

It was a nice comment on where centuries of words had got us; it was endearingly topsy- turvy to be making with the feet after years of walking, to be using the single primreval cry of 'Man' on people with carefully chosen Christian names and carefully inherited surnames. But, as it has turned out, the beatniks didn't do so very much to the language. The thing is changing too fast on its own, because of America and mass communications and class barriers shifting and all the reasons you know as well as 1 do.

And yet, I suppose, this is only a speeding up the chronic process. Like every parent of adolescents, I get the new words and pronuncia- . 'bons as they come, and, like all grown-ups, my immediate and fierce reaction is rejection. Rejec-

tion, that is, of pronunciatiOn. How lunatic that 'stereo' and 'cereal' should now be 'sterreo' and `cerreal,' how mdristrbUs that 'jographY,Shouid have become OK talk and 'soot' the non-comic way of saying 'suit". And then, having fumed (loomed?) a bit, I remind myself that it has all happened before. In my own youth my brothers and I would enrage my mother by refusing to say Brumpton Road or Muntgumery, being con- vinced of our rightness in blazing a trail for the 0 sound. Someone reminded me the other day that our grandfathers talked of St. Lewk, Which parallels the 'suit' change of today; and for all I know we did a pioneer thing with 'fiend,' which to the scholarly wireless speaker Whom I heard talking of a lee-und' must sound as revolutionary as the new. two-syllabled 'diamond' does to me.

So, of course, I've nothing logically against changes in standard pronunciation—how on earth.can one way of mouthing a collection of letters be better than another? I put my antipathy down. simply to the fact that when once you've got set with one way of pronouncing a word You don't change; to judge from one's elders. Or Will we prove more bendable? When old- established commentators can be -heard these days using the squashed zeddy-sounding American 'Asian' instead of the brisk old 'Asiatic' they were brought up on, who knows that middle- aged triers like me won't end up saying 'sooner- market as naturally as a teenager?

It is much easier to assimilate new words than new pronunciations; not so much new slang

words (which in all but the very ' y.oung call for hard work, self-consciousness and patchy results) as names for new things. In the last few years we have got noticeably quicker at realising when the new thing is there, when there is a genuine vacancy for a new word; 'gimmick' would slide into place today with a good deal less pedantic fuss than it caused in the Fifties. What I enjoy about new words is the giddy sense they suddenly' give you of having got into the future; as when.. carving a piece of gammon, you are asked by one of the hungry mouths round the table for a slice off the flipside. (Note to uninitiated : underside, cf. pop record.) You can get this sense acutely by playing the game of pretending to be Rip Van Winkle waking after twenty-five years to read the front page of your newspaper. It is fascinating wagging your white beard in mystification, not only at the big news story about a country you've never heard of, but also at the small items in which a jet lands on an airfield (would that be to do with an aerodrome?), `Layby Moped Mystery' could mean anything and 50,000 pairs of mesh nylons (pairs of what?) arc found in a derelict prefab (found where?).

I doubt whether this game could have been played so rewardingly over any other twenty-five years of history (assuming all liiktotyliad 'news: papers) or whether, the invention of printing made more difference to language than television is going to. Novels, says The Times, are losing ground; they'll lose more when in ten years the new generation of storytellers is established .he- hind the television cameras instead of sitting at typewriters. (And, with their new craftsman's technique, how much happier they'll be than the novelist in his vacuum.) Then those commercials —at present they're just the words of the old printed advertisement spoken aloud (a thing that Was never seen as happening to that kind of prose), in exactly the way that the first railway coaches were replicas of horse-drawn coaches; but one day commercials will find their art form, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went along

with the Yogi Bear rhyme-form ('So you're.yelfrr,

feller') and knocked the stuffing further out of the poor tired rhyme-scratching verse-writers aiming at print. A young hopeful suggests to Me that, serious rhyme having so clearly had it,

'Just browsing, thank you.'

there may be a future in poetry for alliteration —which certainly has the extberance of the age.

But you can accept, welcome, enjoy the changes in language, flatter yourself that you see words as mere things to serve man's ever- altering needs, and then when a reform like the Shaw phonetic alphabet rears its possibly menacing head, where are you? Having exactly the reaction that I get to `sterreof 1 wish none of it. Take alphabet reform away, hands off our English heritage. Here is an attitude so chauvinistic that it wants thinking about. \'■ hat should we lose if we did our reading with those cold squiggles?

Well, I suppose we should lose the sight of the words, anyway for a bit, and we shouldn't get them back in their endearing inconsistency or individuality. We could no longer gaze at -a simple pictorial word like `glass' and see the in- describably glass-like effect of that double 's'; or go on to 'grass' and marvel bow that double letter now does an entirely, different job- in con- veying the cropped, spiky look of new-mown best-quality sheep's fescue. In' fact, we'd be losing all the memory, affection, loathing (could the word 'snake' look so terrible in any other form?) and general emotion that we've been packing into the concrete words of our language since we first saw them on paper.

The process is long. I remember, at about the age of eight, working out what vowels I saw in what colours and finding I had one colour, con- sistently graded in shades, for each; thus in the 'a' group 'hay' was pink and 'hat' Scarlet, in the 'o' group 'home' was grey and `hot' was black. . It is, incidentally, the only consistent and logical soUnd-colour chart I've ever heard of anOody lhaving, and ,even at that, age t'Alvas 'pro-lid to find 1 owned it. But as I got, older and ever more talked and written words poured through eye and ear into memory, images began to get in the way of colours; 'green,' instead of' being pale yellow, naturally turned green, and 'hat' became a yellowish gardening panama with the 'h' and the 't' outlining the rather battered"shape in a way that the Shaw twiggles could never do for me. And in that tangle of cerebration and sentiment lies my resistance to the ultimate streamlining of language, and 1 don' doubt that yours is the same.

I think, though, that we should accept that one day a phonetic alphabet of some sort will come and we may live to see it. The groundwork is being done by television, by radio, by tape- recorder and all the apparatus designed to get v,ords direct from mouth to ear; and by the serene conviction of the young that, honestly, language doesn't really matter. This isn't just the

young being slapdash, it's their asse. Ssrnerit of

the situation. They know that preoccupation with vocabulary and grammar is a bore and puts the cart before the horse. And for Myself, in spite of knowing I'd miss the extra `g' on 'egg' (to show which is the non-pointed end), I am resolved to welcome the revolution.

I tell myself that phonetics, if it can just wait till 1 have got round to pronouncing ever■ word

the ‘vay it'll be spelt, will have one huge ad- vantage. Words will stay pronounced how they-re spell and no new wave will try to push me back to 'steered—which already, I am glad to say, is beginning to sound funny.