Many of yesterday’s British papers (e.g. here, here, here, here and here) reported on Warwickshire Police’s handbook “Policing Our Communities”, with headlines that were critical of the Political Correctness inferred from statements such as “Don’t assume those words for the time of day, such as afternoon and evening, have the same meaning [in other languages as they do in English]“. They go on from there to assume that this prevents any Warwickshire police officer from saying “Evenin’ all” in the way that the character George Dixon did in the long-running BBC TV series “Dixon of Dock Green” (the articles all had a picture of Jack Warner, the actor who played George Dixon).

All linguists know that the day is divided up differently by different languages – I have been wished “Bon soir” in French at 1 p.m., and Spanish has no separate word to distinguish “afternoon” from “evening”, using tarde for both. Even within English, I doubt if everybody agrees on when the afternoon turns into the evening – certainly from summer to winter the time will vary. I’m writing this at 5 p.m. and the sky has a slight blueness in the west, but otherwise it is now night. I think I would call this “evening”. But in summer, I might well consider this to be “late afternoon”, with “evening” starting considerably later. By 8 p.m. today, it will definitely be “night”, but again, in summer, that will be just as definitely “evening”.

I think the instruction in the Warwickshire handbook is to remind officers that they need to be precise about times when taking evidence or asking questions, and not to rely on subjective judgments. Other items in the handbook may be ridiculously over the top, but this one may have some sense in it.

I couldn’t find articles from the Times, Guardian or Independent – probably the three most serious of our national dailies. Does this mean they quite sensibly didn’t cover it, or have I just missed them?

Stress in English is often said to be “fixed and free”, by which is meant that for each word it is fixed, but that there is no fixed position in the word where it must occur, unlike Czech, Finnish or Hungarian, for instance, where it is invariably on the first syllable of a word, or Polish, where it is (with very few exceptions) on the penultimate.

However, the ‘fixed’ part of this statement has to be hedged around with all sorts of caveats. The stress placement on individual words can change over time,and one of the most frequent complaints made by older people about ‘the young’, is that they mispronounce words by putting the stress in the wrong place. (more…)

Once you’ve decided how you’re going to pronounce Latin when you’re speaking English, the next problem comes up for singers.

It’s not only English that has its own version of Latin pronunciation, but every language in Europe has its idiosyncratic ways as well. In German, for instance, they pronounce C before E and I (and AE and OE) as /ts/, while G is always /g/. Consonantal U~V is /v/, like Italian.

Should English-speaking choirs pronounce the text of masses written by Beethoven or Schubert (the question never seems to come up with Haydn or Mozart) with the Italianate Latin, or a more German-sounding pronunciation? Likewise, should Fauré’s Requiem be sung in the way that French choirs sing it? (French  composers often set the words with final stress, as French, rather than keeping to the Latin pattern.) In my experience as the rehearsal accompanist for a Choral Society, it depends on the knowledge of the conductor. Our present one knows how Germans pronounce Latin, so he likes the singers to use /ts/ and /g/, and the other quirks, when they sing Schubert, but he is less sure of how the French pronounce Latin, so for Fauré they sing the Italianate style. However he also likes Italianate Latin for Bruckner. The English composer Douglas Coombes was commissioned to write a Requiem for a French choir. They took so long to rehearse it that our choir gave the first performance, using Italianate pronunciation. The work sounded very different when the French choir came to England to sing it with their French pronunciation.

This conundrum of what to do with Latin could be carried on to other languages: should Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem be sung with a Hamburg accent, while Schubert’s songs have a Viennese accent, and Richard Strauss’s lieder a Bavarian one? Taking it even further, should we sing songs using Burns’ words with a Scottish accent, or in the accent of the composer? I have heard Spanish singers distinguish between Castilian and South American pronunciations within the same recital.

This could all get very silly, but actors reading stories aloud often adopt the appropriate accent.

Getting back to Latin pronunciation, Harold Copeman wrote a comprehensive study (Singing in Latin) of the ways in which Latin is pronounced in the various European languages. This was self-published by Mr Copeman in 1990, together with a separate “Pocket” version of the same work. I don’t know whether it’s still available new, but the only copy I can find on Abebooks is now priced at £225!