Robert Bridges (1844-1930) became the Poet Laureate (largely an honorary position under the Crown) in 1913. I think that his poetry is mostly forgotten nowadays, and arguably his greatest claim to poetic fame is his championing of Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, he also had linguistic interests, particularly to do with English spelling and pronunciation.

In 1910 he wrote an essay for the English Association entitled “On the Present State of English Pronunciation” which was intended to promote a new spelling for English that would encourage a ‘better’ standard of pronunciation. He specifically notes Daniel Jones’ Phonetic transcriptions of English Prose (1909) as showing [ə] – which he writes as ‘er’ – for all manner of ‘different’ vowels. “The only question can be whether Mr Jones exaggerates the actual prevalence of degradation. Some will acquit him of any exaggeration. Others I know very well will regard him as a half-witted faddist, beneath serious notice, who should be left to perish in his vain imaginings” (page 46).

Bridges’ solution is to decide how words should be pronounced, and then reform the orthography accordingly. The theory is that by teaching this reformed orthography in schools, children will learn to pronounce English ‘properly’. A good model is northern English, where many of the vowels have remained ‘uncorrupted’. This last statement has led some people to believe that Bridges spoke with a Lancashire accent. I cannot believe this: he was born in Kent and educated at Eton. However, his father died when Bridges was still a child, and his mother’s second husband was a clergyman with a parish in Lancashire. Perhaps a happy childhood home in Lancashire may have led him to his liking for that accent

Unlike Shaw, who wanted a totally new alphabet for English, Bridges wanted to use adapted Roman alphabet letter shapes, for example those he found in fonts used for Old English by the Oxford University Press, to distinguish one sound from another. In the 1920s, he started to re-issue all his essays with a gradually more complex spelling system to exemplify his ideas. For instance, in the first reprinted essay, The Influence of the Audience on Shakespeare’s Drama, he uses a script ‘g’ for the voiced velar plosive, but the usual printed ‘g‘ for the voiced palato-alveolar affricate, and a shape similar to ‘ŋ’ for the velar nasal. However, he leaves ‘j’ and ‘dg‘ unchanged for the affricate, so that judgment remains ‘judgment’. The plan was to refine the spelling gradually in the course of the reprints, but Bridges died in 1930 before he could complete his plan, and his widow and David Abercrombie did the best they could from the notes he left. In his last long poem, The Testament of Beauty, he adopted a simpler re-spelling, deleting final -e from words such as motive, to show that the ‘i’ was pronounced /ɪ/. Note that this was not an attempt to simplify English spelling in order to make it easier for people to learn, but because he believed that a regularized spelling would ‘improve’ their pronunciation.

In 1913, Bridges was the instigator, and one of the founders, of the Society for Pure English, whose aims were to guide the language in directions which its members (”a few men of letters, supported by the scientific alliance of the best linguistic authorities”  – Tract No. 1, 1919, page 6) felt to be “advantageous”, including some “slight modifications” (ibid). The Society’s work was almost immediately suspended because of the outbreak of the First World War, but started to issue its Tracts in October 1919. The last one, no LXVI, entitled A retrospect, was published in 1946.

Bridges early recognised the importance of broadcasting, and in 1926, he became the Chairman of the BBC’s new Advisory Committee on Spoken English, and at the first meeting demonstrated his ideas for how unstressed vowels could retain a flavour (as he put it) of the original. The minutes are silent on what Daniel Jones and Arthur Lloyd James, both present, had to say about this. The Committee published the first results of its deliberations in a booklet entitled Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Concerning some Words of Doubtful Pronunciation in 1928. As I mentioned in a recent post, a year later, Bridges got permission to republish this as Tract no XXXII of the Society for Pure English, with annotations from some correspondents – an unusual proceeding: for the chairman of a committee to publish a critique of a report of that same committee!

When Bridges died, John Reith wrote in his diary “21 April 1930: Robert Bridges died today and I am very sorry indeed.”

This has nothing to do with language, but this weekend, the world commemorates the 40th aniversary of the first moon landing.

In the US, it is celebrated as 20 July. This is correct (in UTC) for the landing, but I remember clearly staying up until three in the morning of 21 July to watch Neil Armstrong make his giant step live on television in the UK.

When things happen on Earth, the date and time when they happen can be decided by the longitude of the event, so that Columbus reached the Americas some five hours earlier than the simultaneous time in Europe. Captain Cook sighted Australia some hours later than the time would have been in Europe, and possibly a day later than it was at that moment in America. Each New Year creeps up on Earth gradually over the space of a whole day.

But when an event happens elsewhere in the universe, whose terrestrial time zone is the one to use? While 20 July is correct for the Americas, much of the populated world will have watched the moon landing on 21 July local time – Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia.

This BBC programme about Henry Purcell is available on line for the next couple of weeks. In it Charles Hazlewood claims that we know so little about the composer that we are not even sure how to pronounce his name.

It is true that many people (including Mr Hazlewood in this film – although he is not consistent) stress the family name on the second syllable, but all the evidence points to this being wrong.

Dryden, a good friend of the composer, wrote an Ode on the death of Mr Henry Purcell, in which the name appears twice. On both occasions, the metre of the line demands that the name be stressed on the first syllable: “So ceas’d the rival Crew when Purcell came” and “The Gods are pleas’d alone with Purcell’s Lays”. Similarly, and two centuries later, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sonnet to Purcell, the first quatrain of which is:

Have, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.

Better even than these examples is the evidence of contemporary spellings of the name: John Evelyn’s Diary has the spelling ‘Pursal’ or ‘Purcel’ (30 May 1698 – different editors have the different spellings); Henry ‘Persill’ appears as a member of the cast of “The Siege of Rhodes” (1656); Henry ‘Pursall’ in the Will of John Hingston (12 December 1683). The variation in the spellings of the second syllable indicate that this cannot have been the stressed syllable.

Americans frequently stress Andrew Marvell’s name on the second syllable and (in my experience at least) always stress Lawrence and Gerald Durrell in the same way, although I have never yet heard anyone British make this mistake.

Perhaps Purcell started to be stressed on the second syllable when Unilever started to market ‘Persil’ washing powder in the UK, in 1909.

Footnote: On 25 November 2010, Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, and clearly British, consistently used the pronunciation Mar’vell in the Radio 4 programme “in Our Time”.

Now for something completely different.

In April, a French luxury yacht, the Ponant, with thirty crew members on board, was hijacked by pirates in the Gulf. The French government decided to pull out all the stops to mount a rescue. The BBC reported the affair rather sketchily, here, here, here, and here,  but now the full story has emerged, in Le Parisien and Le Canard Enchaîné. I’m not aware of any of this being reported in the English-language media. Here is the account from Le Canard (11 June 2008). Any inaccuracies in the translation are mine.

“L’opération a été rondement menée”, avait claironné le chef d’état major des armées aprés l’épopée du Ponant. Sarko exprimait sa “gratitude”. Morin, son ministre de la défense, ses “félicitations” aux “forces armées, qui ont fait preuve de professionnalisme et de réactivité”. Il aurait pu ajouter: et d’une grande capacité d’adaptation dans l’adversité.

“The operation was carried out promptly,” the armed forces chief of staff trumpeted after the epic events surrounding the Ponant. Sarkozy expressed his “gratitude”. Morin, his Minister for Defence, sent his “congratulations” to the “armed forces, which  have demonstrated their professionalism and ability to react”. He might have added: and a great capacity for improvisation in adversity.

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This blog will be about language – mainly – with some references to genealogy and music. Maybe all three at once sometimes.