Yesterday evening, the Really Terrible Orchestra, founded in Edinburgh by Alexander McCall Smith and his wife, gave a concert in London, and, according to the press reports, received a standing ovation at the end.
How often are children told that “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”? The RTO goes to the other extreme, and follows the maxim “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”. I believe that this is a far more important principle, because it emphasises the enjoyment you can get from playing a musical instrument without worrying about hitting all the right notes, or making a beautiful sound with the bow or breath control. And it’s not only true of music - thousands of mediocre sports enthusiasts take to the playing fields every week end to enjoy a game of football - all codes - in the winter and cricket in summer. They all know that they will never play for a professional team, but what does it matter? they are de-stressing themselves by their physical exertion in the company of like-minded, and to a large extent like-skilled people. At the end of the game, or concert, or whatever, the participants feel a wonderful buzz of satisfaction. What could be better than that?
As a student, I knew someone who claimed he would never take an interest in anything unless he could master it. If he took something up, he would have to work at it until he reached a high standard. If this was the only way he could gain any satisfaction from an activity, then fine - for him. Most of us do not have that dedication, but we do have multiple interests. It is a shame if we are not able to enjoy those interests because others don’t think we are good enough. So congratulations to the Really Terrible Orchestra, which allows musicians to come together no matter how low their standard, and have a good time.
An open letter to the BBC suggests that it needs a Language Advisor, not (according to the interview Ian Bruton-Simmonds, one of the authors, gave to the Today programme this morning) to shame broadcasters publicly about their poor English, but to have a quiet word with them, so that they don’t do it again.
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I quite agree with Abdul (writing in response to my post on Afghanistan, 18 June 2007) that no one can be expected to know the “correct” pronunciation of every name. That is why the BBC has its Pronunciation Research Unit, which is dedicated to finding out the native pronunciation of any name (or indeed any word) that they are asked for, and then to provide a version to broadcasters that is acceptable to a native speaker but at the same time not too difficult for an English speaker to reproduce. Read the rest of this entry »
Abdul is right in his comment on “Kofi Annan and Edward Stourton”: the news readers can’t deal with the sounds and phonotactics of other languages - and the Pronunciation Research Unit doesn’t expect them to. As he points out, the syllable-final -h of the name Fahmi can have two solutions: ignore it, and say /fa:mi/, or replace it with /x/ as in “loch” or “Bach”. This is the practice followed by all languages when borrowing: use the nearest sounds of your own language in order to approximate the sounds of the borrowed word. Professor John Wells is discussing this problem in relation to English loan-words in Japanese on his blog at the moment.
In an earlier post, I was critical of Mishal Husain precisely because she does not follow this practice when it is a question of a name from a language she knows intimately. When she is speaking English, she should not introduce “foreign” sounds - it is disconcerting to the listener.
When Mr Annan was appointed as Secretary General of the United Nations, we in the BBC’s Pronunciation Research Unit were sent a tape of his inauguration, in the course of which he had to pronounce his own name. He clearly said “I, KOHfi ANNann” (re-spelt to show where he placed the stresses: -oh as in ‘ohm’). Consequently, this was the recommendation that the Unit made to the Corporation’s broadcasting staff, and so far as I am aware, and judging by the Radio 4 newsreaders’ pronunciation, this is still the recommendation today, available to every BBC employee, whether staff or freelance, via their desktop. Nevertheless, yet again this morning, he has been interviewed live on Radio 4, and introduced as “KOHfi aNANN” by Edward Stourton. This is the man who when he first joined the BBC from ITN had us informed that as a linguist, he had no need of the help of the Pronunciation Research Unit, and could we please stop sending him notes! He is the only news presenter in my experience who ever behaved in this way. Most of them have always been delighted to have the responsibility taken off their hands.
It ill behoves a man whose own name is pronounced in an opaque manner (STURton, not as written) to believe that he can say anyone else’s name without help. The very fact that he could think of telling us he was a linguist and didn’t need help proved (a) that he is no linguist, and (b) that he needs lots of help.
With this “superbug” back in the news, it seems time to revisit the subject of its pronunciation.
The name contains two Latin words, and as Latin, the second word should be pronounced with four syllables, and stressed on the second. The official BBC line however is to pronounce the second word as if it was French, but with the stress on the first syllable: DIFF-iss-il, and the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation goes on to say “This pronunciation is in line with the usage of the various microbiology and infection control experts the BBC has consulted. Medical Latin is commonly anglicized.” We are then referred to the separate entry for “Latin”. However, nowhere in the entry for Latin is the case of C. diff. (to give it its common abbreviation) dealt with. There is never any suggestion that the syllable structure of Latin can be ignored in favour of a false French analogy. Read the rest of this entry »
What is it about Spanish names that sports commentators can never get them right? For the past four days, not a single BBC sports reporter or commentator has pronounced Sergio García’s first name correctly (let’s leave aside for the moment whether the second name ’should be’ garssee-a or garthee-a). They seem to have no problem with the name José - the first sound doesn’t come out as a full-bodied velar fricative, but there is an attempt at it - so why have they decided that Sr García’s first name is Italian? Inevitably, they don’t even get it really right as an Italian name either, saying ’serji-o’ rather than ’sairjo’, but can the golfer really want them to say it that way? Brian Perkins, the incomparable Radio 4 newsreader, is the only broadcaster I’ve heard all week end pronounce it in a Spanish manner. He ought to live up to his “Dead Ringers” reputation, and deal severely with the sports people! Read the rest of this entry »
In the days before most people were literate, there were only two ways to pronounce a foreign place name - you either pronounced it more or less how the locals pronounced it, or you ignored their name and gave the place/river/mountain/whatever a name of your own.
This meant we said Paris as ‘parriss’ and Lyon as ‘lions’ (like more than one of the animals). This is because in early medieval French, Paris was pronounced in French as ‘parreess’, and Lyon as ‘lyonss’ (-y as a consonant, not a vowel). In the course of time, final -s disappeared from French pronunciation, but not from English (I’m talking 12th-13 Century here), but by this time, the names were so familiar to English speakers that they had become English words and started to develop according to English rules rather than French. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been very flattered by the review of my piece on the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation in languagehat. It’s started a lot of reaction as well, several points being raised about other things I’ve mentioned. I’ll take them up one at a time.
First, in my piece on the Dictionary, I used the same “phonetic” transcription as the editors, including the -uu- for the vowel of “wood”. This is not the “standard” BBC Modified Spelling for the sound, as anyone who’s seen the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names will know. The original system was refined over many years, and first devised by Arthur Lloyd James in the late 1920s, when he was a lecturer in phonetics at UCL and secretary to the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English. While not in any way equivalent to IPA, the Modified Spelling (MS) serves its purposes admirably: its intention is to allow an English speaker to pronounce anything written in the MS in such a way that it is immediately recognisable, but not pretentious. I think that the MS symbol for the “wood” vowel, which was double O with a short mark above it, was far preferable to -uu- which looks very much like a long vowel. A single -u- is not satisfactory either, as it looks to the non-initiate like the vowel of “bud”, which would also be wrong. Lloyd James had obviously thought this through, but the OUP editors, who I believe insisted on the change for the latest guide, have not.
So, later, when I commented on the pronunciation of P.G.Wodehouse, I used an ordinary re-spelling, to show that the first syllable is pronounced like the word “wood”, and the second like the word “house”.
The approaching tenth anniversary of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death brings Althorp back into the news. This is where she grew up, and where she is buried. The BBC first became aware of the difficulty about pronunciation well before the Second World War - Broadcast English II, published in 1930, included it, with the pronunciation áwltrŏp. Later, in about 1952, the Pronunciation Assistant, G.M. “Elizabeth” Miller, wrote to the then Viscount Althorp (Diana’s father) about it, and was told the same thing. I, as Pronunciation Adviser, wrote to the present Earl Spencer (Diana’s brother) in 1992, and in January the following year, he wrote back saying “áwltrŏp. This is definitely correct. I can remember my grandfather pronouncing it like this; my octogenarian great-aunt does, too - and it is clear that alternative pronunciations only came about recently, out of laziness (it became simpler not to correct the many who mispronounce it - the majority of whom were foreign visitors to the house.)” See here for more on the argument. He included the same pronunciation in his history of Althorp
However, some time after this, he succumbed to the pressure, and put out a press statement saying that henceforth the house should be called ‘áwlthorp’ - as spelt.