In Our Time, on BBC Radio 4, continues to throw up unusual pronunciations. This morning (30 April 2010) we have had two more, both from the same speaker, who I think was Julia Lovell, Professor of Chinese History and Literature in the University of Cambridge.

First, she pronounced vestige to rhyme with prestige, a pronunciation I can find in none of the standard dictionaries. I wonder if this was merely a slip of the tongue.

Later she used the uncommon word paradisical, and rhymed it with bicycle. This adjectival form of paradise is found in the OED, with several quotations ranging from 1649 to 1992. The only one of the pronunciation dictionaries to give it is the Oxford, and the pronunciation given there, and in the OED itself, is /pærəˈdɪsɪkəl/. Only two of the OED’s references are to 20th century sources, the earlier one being from 1967, so it is not a word that Professor Lovell is likely to have heard spoken very often. The more usual adjective formed from paradise is paradisal (although there are several other forms in the OED), and the pronunciation given for this is /pærəˈdaɪsəl/.

I’ve just been listening to “In Our Time” on BBC Radio 4 (the latest one available as a podcast, 22 April 2010), and was struck yet again how inconsistent English speakers are in their treatment of Latin names. The discussion was about Roman satirists, and was between Melvyn Bragg (of course) and three professors who may be expected to have a thorough understanding of Latin: Mary Beard (Professor of Classics at Cambridge University), Denis Feeney (Professor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University) and Duncan Kennedy (Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol).

Nevertheless, their pronunciation was inconsistent. All three pronounced Maecenas as /maɪˈsiːnæs/ (with occasional reduction of the final vowel to schwa), which is neither traditional English (/miːˈsiːnæs/) nor an adaptation of Classical Latin (/maɪˈkeɪnæs/). One of the two men astonishingly spoke of the battle of /faɪˈlɪpaɪ/, which bears no relation to either the Classical Latin pronunciation or the traditional anglicisation. On the other hand, all the participants in the programme spoke of Lucilius as /lʊˈsaɪljəs/, which includes the traditional English treatment of the (long) stressed vowel.

There is obviously total confusion in the minds of native English speakers over the way in which they should pronounce Latin names, even those that have been used in English for many years – and even among the Classics community. My view is that the reformed pronunciation introduced into schools in the mid-nineteenth century, and the influence of the Roman Catholic church in propagating the Italianate pronunciation, are the reasons for this.

I wonder if the same confusion exists in other European languages?

As a footnote, for anyone interested, the whole series of “In Our Time” is now available on the BBC website, going back to October 1998.

I notice that BBC Radio 4 announcers regularly pronounce Ms O’Leary’s family name as /əʊˈlɛəri/. I suppose from her accent that this is what she calls herself, but I’m wondering if following suit when one does not have an Irish accent is mimicking her rather than representing her name in ‘neutral’ terms. For those unfamiliar with Radio 4’s output, Olivia O’Leary is the presenter of “Between Ourselves”, a discussion programme that deals with a single issue in each edition.

To start from a different example. True to my roots, I pronounce bath with the TRAP vowel (as John Wells says in Accents of English, it would seem a denial of my northernness to change this). A friend of mine comes from the City of Bath, and he insists that I am mispronouncing his city. On the other hand, he pronounces Newcastle with the same BATH vowel (not a good key word in this discussion!), regardless of the fact that most Novocastrians from either Newcastle upon Tyne or Newcastle under Lyme will use the TRAP vowel. In my view, he is right to say /…’kɑːsl/ and I am right to say /bæθ/ – both in the terms of our own accents.

To return to Ms O’Leary. In her accent, I assume she calls King Lear /lɛər/. Certainly, when the Short Brothers Lear Fan Jet plane was in the news, Northern Irish commentators called it the /lɛər fɑːn/, but this did not persuade others to pronounce it in the same way. In my view, Ms O’Leary should be pronounced /əʊˈlɪəri/ by the announcers from other parts of the UK. By trying too hard to get a close approximation to her own pronunciation, they might appear to be simply making fun of it (and by extension, her).

The main railway station in Edinburgh is named after the first of Walter Scott’s novels, which he published anonymously. The pronunciation known to everyone and contradicted nowhere is /ˈweɪvərli/, but is this really what Scott intended?

There are certain characters whose dialogue is rendered in a – fairly inconsistent – attempt at Scots. Most of them are portrayed as saying Waverley without any indication of what vowel sound they are using in the stressed syllable. Two, however – Bailie Macwheeble and Janet Gellatley – regularly pronounce the name “Wauverley”.

Is this an attempt to imitate a broad Scots version of a different pronunciation from the one we all know? Did Scott think of his hero as being pronounced /ˈwævərli/, or /ˈwɑːvərli/ (which in many Scots accents are neutralized)? Or alternatively /ˈwɒvərli/, which could then be rendered as ‘Wauverley’, /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ being also neutralized for many Scots.

Just a thought.

Attending BAAP last week, I was very pleased to find there was a whole session devoted to rhythm, which I have written about before (here). One of the general conclusions was that the perception of rhythm in a language depends on the native language of the perceiver. English has a relatively complex syllable structure, while French and Spanish have far fewer consonant clusters, so that their vowel onsets are closer together. The syllable durations of French and Spanish, measured in milliseconds, are therefore shorter and more similar that those of English syllables.

Poetry, as the most rhythmical form of lanuage, may be able to help. English verse lines are measured in stresses, and one of the papers at BAAP measured the rhythm of the most regular form: the limerick. This is either a verse of five lines, with three stresses in each of the first two, and the last, and two stressed in the third and fourth lines; or it is a verse of four lines, each of four stresses, the final one of the first, second and final lines being silent, and an internal rhyme in the third line. The rhythm of a limerick can easily be tapped out as it is being read, and the silent stress is obvious.

French verse is measured in syllables: an Alexandrine has 12 syllables, with a caesura after the sixth (in a classical poem). Any line that does not have 12 syllables is not an Alexandrine. Each line can therefore be tapped out with twelve beats.

Spanish verse seems to be a hybrid: a Spanish Alexandrine has 14 syllables. There is no necessary caesura, but a condition of its being a true Alexandrine is that the thirteenth syllable be stressed. Here are eight lines from a poem by Antonio Machado to illustrate this:

Adoro la hermosura, y en la moderna estética
corté las viejas rosas del huerto de Ronsard;
mas no amo los afeites de la actual cosmética,
ni soy un ave de esas del nuevo gay-trinar.

Desdeño las romanzas de los tenores huecos
y el coro de los grillos que cantan a la luna.
A distinguir me paro las voces de los ecos,
y escucho solamente, entre las voces, una.

In each case (allowing for synalepha), the thirteenth syllable is stressed. The only places where there is no synalepha are in the third line between ‘no’ and ‘amo’, and in the last line, between ’solamente’ and ‘entre’. This makes a total of between 13 and 15 syllables for the individual lines.

If Spanish is syllable-timed, how do we achieve equal lengths for these lines?