Vowel play
Edward Pearce
The English are trying very hard to come to terms with foreigners, to make their own vowels, genteel or proletarian, jump through the hoops required to pay due courtesy to Hungarians and Ghanaians and exactly to observe, for all one knows, received Ostro- gothic pronunciation. With Africans we have learned to say 'N' backwards, so that the merest slip of a girl on Tonight would not be seen dead saying 'Nuh-dola' or 'Nuh- konv.
It is strange, in fact, how attitudes change. Sixty years ago the accurate pronunciation of most foreign words was thought to be ostentatious, if not downright subversive— mere ill-bred erudition. However, the edu- cated classes prided themselves on making, quite absurdly, an exception for French, in the pronunciation of which they indulged, as do Americans today, in a sort of elocu- tionary overkill—the sort of thing which P. G. Wodehouse's Bingo Little summed up for all time with the summons `Garcong, l'additiong'.
Germans on the other hand could go to hell. German may have been, as Lady Bracknell observed, a highly moral lan- guage, but it was full of spluttering sibilants and exact, angular consonants. If you have been brought up to speak like Robert Hardy's memorable Mr Grandcourt—all vaporous languid verbal idleness, dropping end-consonants like small-change charity, and generally getting through a sentence with the urgency of a sedan chair, one can see the appeal of not having to pronounce the 'h' in 'hauteur' and the sheer hell of `Hauptstade. Sadly for their education, the upper class seem to have missed Vienna, where everybody speaks a kind of German as slatternly and unstrenuous as the most overtaxed and convalescent English larynx could wish for.
But in any case German was the language of magnetos and advanced steel pro- duction, of pure science and frenetic com- merce. One could not in learning German be indulging in the nostalgic reverie of Ronsard me celebrait du temps que j'etais belle', but doing dismally useful stuff about has Stahlfabrik. (German is now treated with proper respect by broadcasters, but announcers relaying festival concerts by courtesy of Austrian Radio do seem to think that there is a place called Zaltzburg. There is not.) Apart from French there used to be a little light Italian learned in Jane Austen- land (very light, it hardly equipped a girl to do more than refer to her 'Caro sposo'). But Livorno remained Leghorn, as resolutely as Regensburg was Ratisbon, Köln Cologne, and those poor irredeemable Slavonic places whatever it was convenient to call them. As for the personal names of Poles, Russians and what not, it was their privilege to be anglicised into something less out- landish like Chekoff, for example. As late as 1944 Evelyn Waugh (admittedly Evelyn Waugh) has a character referring affection- ately to the South Slays as 'Jugs'. The British were probably not as offensive in all this as they seem to have been. They just had a timid disinclination to believe that a world west of Aachen really existed outside travel- lers' tales, or that its reported languages could ever be mastered by someone laagered in English and Greek.
In fact we make some mistakes in pro- nunciation which we did not make a hun- dred years ago. This is partly because we now dare not transliterate in the cheerfully imperialistic style of the nineteenth century so that the gentleman in the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce is rightly called `Briezhnief' on the nine o'clock news and commonly re- mains Tres-no,' to those anachronistically still reading newspapers. The Poles are an even greater curse in print, since their lan- guage, like Czech, is Romanised very sketchily. How outside the pronunciation
department of the BBC (three charming and very expert ladies) are we to know that a squiggle over an 'r' in Czech supplies a turning Vorisek to Vortishek, or that 'c' in Polish frequently means Is'? I think David Coleman has stopped calling the Polish- speaking, Welsh soccer international 'Kriz- wicky' instead of `Krisvitsky', but he could hardly be blamed in the first place.
In fact the smaller or more remote parts of civilisation only begin to receive accurate pronunciation, even at the hands of the BBC; if something fairly drastic puts them in the news and sends the better journalists in pursuit of correct locutions. Whatever conclusions one draws from the events in that country, the one certain consequence of the struggle in Portugal is that anyone with half an ear has picked up basic Portuguese pronunciation, and has learnt that those ubiquitous 'h's' are to be treated as 'y's'. If Major Otelo should spend his exile amongst us there will be no excuse for calling him `Sen Hor Carval Ho'. Similarly it seems that those carnivorous fish, which Ian Fleming lingered over so unpleasantly, are `piranya'. We have also learnt that Briga- dier Neves, whether he is seen as a redeem-
ing angel, a black fascist counter-revolution- ary or a reasonable professional soldier, can now never be rhymed with Reeves and only be spoken of in the slurring sibilants of County Galway as 'Nevesh'.
Sadly I recall something very similar hap- pening to our knowledge of Hungarian nearly twenty years ago. Once the BBC in 1956 had sorted out the disconcerting Hun- garian (and incidentally Austrian) habit of putting surnames first—Schmidt Fritz, Dor- ati Antal, Pettofi Sandor, it then had to get us through the minefield of Magyar vowels. Alas, if we began by referring, when the first stones were thrown, to Imre Nagee, by the time he formed his government and begged to make Hungary a neutral country we were calling him Nage, and when the Russians hanged him we had learned to speak of Imre Nodge.
This is of course the sort of unwise article which is all too likely to release disdainful wisdom from people who really do speak the languages concerned. It is only proper to duck in advance and make it clear that I speak with no more authority than is con- ferred upon an obsessive listener to news bulletins and to that non-stop festival of music, Radio 3. Now that the medium wave service has been prospectively boiled down by an international conference on wave allo- cations to be re-used in transmitting the Enver Hoxa line in Gheg and Tosk, my grasp of elementary Finnish vowel separa- tion in `Leminkainen and the Island maid- ens' and my exotic ability to pronounce the Czech form of George out of easy mimicry of the BBC's authoritative version of a string quartet player whom I had taken to be called Jerry, will both decline, together with the rest of my pleasure.
Outside of music and politics, where new or newly discovered names get correct, in- deed meticulous treatment, there are still some anomalies.
We anglicised certain place-names cen- turies ago, and while it is considered quaint or barbarous to talk about 'Mows art' or 'Lewis the fourteenth' as we did in the un- regenerate days of effortless inaccuracy, one would still feel a positive fool, or at any rate a Euro-obsessive who wore his flight num- ber on his sleeve, to be chattering about 'Munchen' or 'Wien' or 'Milano' or 'Firenze'. That kind of thing is best left to Americans who have so many offendable citizens in Milwaukee and Newark.
For my own part, while I will cheerfully follow the pronunciation department over Turkish, Kazakh or indeed that rather dis- gusting language Dutch, I do have my pre- judices and unlike the Foreign Office and the compilers of menus, long to regress to the glories of eighteenth-century Franco- phobia and to pronounce French with all the studied arrogant wrongness which so many of the French inflict on English. Let us, just for the devilment of it, revert to say- ing Rheims to rhyme with 'dreams', Stras- bourg as the decent German word it is, and the third city of France as if it was a proper British tea shop.
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