January 5, 2008
by Graham
4 Comments
Petr Roesel asks about the history of the Pronunciation Unit, and various other questions. The Unit had a predecessor body called the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, that was set up by the BBC’s first Director General, John Reith, in … Continue reading
January 3, 2008
by Graham
8 Comments
Petr Roesel asks if the pronunciation of Salman Rushdie that I gave as the “correct” one is an accurate reflexion of the pronunciation in Urdu. All words borrowed from one language into another, whether names or not, have to be … Continue reading
December 30, 2007
by Graham
2 Comments
Starting in the early 1990s, I was increasingly asked at the BBC how we should be pronouncing the names of the years following 1999. Until then, there was only one way of naming the years: by grouping the numbers in … Continue reading
December 27, 2007
by Graham
0 comments
In John Wells‘s blog today, he talks about the interjection (or should that be exclamation?) most usually associated nowadays with Homer Simpson – variously spelt doh, d’oh or duh. He quotes from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and says … Continue reading
December 17, 2007
by Graham
22 Comments
What is the plural of diocese? Easy, you might think – it’s dioceses. Ah yes, but how do you pronounce it? Until 1999, and the tenth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, no help was given by most ‘ordinary’ dictionaries. … Continue reading
December 9, 2007
by Graham
2 Comments
A few weeks ago, just after we changed the clocks to GMT, Fi Glover, presenting ‘Saturday Live’ on Radio 4, referred to the ‘moniker’ “Spring forward, fall back”. What she meant was mnemonic (pronounced ‘neeMONNik’). None of the possible scenarios … Continue reading
November 28, 2007
by Graham
1 Comment
Lilli Lee asks if we can still order Peking Duck, or whether we now have to ask for Beijing Duck. Some names are fixed, and regardless of other changes in the language, they remain. Strangely, this has happened three times … Continue reading
November 26, 2007
by Graham
13 Comments
A letter in the Independent newspaper last week (Wednesday 21 November), from Shirin Tata of London, explained the spelling and pronunciation of Peking as ‘a close approximation to the Cantonese name for the city (“puck-ing” with a hard “p”)’. This … Continue reading
November 19, 2007
by Graham
0 comments
I’ve been reading some Defoe novels recently, and it’s surprising how many ‘mistakes’ in grammar he makes that are frequently seen these days and attributed to the poor teaching of English over the last half century: confusion of who and … Continue reading
November 12, 2007
by Graham
0 comments
Samuel Johnson famously defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”, and there were a few other semi-humorous comments in his dictionary, including the non-definition of ‘trolmydames’: “Of this word I know not the meaning”. Chambers (or, as it used to … Continue reading