With Luck
John Lanchester
- The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage edited by R.W. Burchfield
Oxford, 864 pp, £16.99, November 1996, ISBN 0 19 869126 2
During the latter half of the Second World War, Ludovic, the deranged and upwardly mobile murderer of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, becomes ‘an addict of that potent intoxicant, the English language’. He begins an obsessive study of books about words, and starts to write a volume of pensées (a piss-take of Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave). ‘Not laboriously, luxuriously rather, Ludovic worked over his notebooks, curtailing, expanding, polishing; often consulting Fowler, not disdaining Roget; writing and rewriting in his small clerkly hand on the lined sheets of paper which the army supplied.’ The Fowler referred to here is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler, usually known as Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1926, and now brought out in a third edition, completely rewritten by the lexicographer Robert Burchfield.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997
From Nicolas Walter
John Lanchester accepts Robert Burchfield’s claim in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage about the double pronunciation of the word the (LRB, 2 January); but it is surely as false as many of his other claims, which do so much damage to the rest of the book, as they previously did to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is true that the is pronounced thuh (neutral schwa) before words beginning with a consonant, but it is untrue that it is pronounced thee (long e) before words beginning with a vowel. On the contrary, it is only ever pronounced thee for emphasis – at least in Britain, whatever may be the case in New Zealand. It is normally pronounced as thi (short i) before most vowels, and as thuh frequently before e and occasionally before other vowels in stressed syllables as well.
Nicolas Walter
London N1
From Anthony Quinton
John Lanchester expresses the hope, at the end of his fine review of the new Fowler, that someone will produce ‘a clear, unequivocally prescriptive account of contemporary written English’. The thing has already been done, by Michael Dummett, in his brief, forceful, crystalline, comprehensive Grammar and Style for Examination Candidates and Others (1993).
Anthony Quinton
London W1
Vol. 19 No. 4 · 20 February 1997
From John Burchell
Having been born and brought up in South London, I naturally regard North Londoners as a separate tribe, or possibly, species. Nicolas Walter of London N1 (Letters, 23 January) confirms me in this view. I have never pronounced the in any way other than thuh before consonants and occasionally before a long e, and thee before vowels for emphasis. I have been listening for Mr Walter’s ‘normal’ pronunciation, thi, but have not detected it so far. I have also tried, with great difficulty, to use it myself and have been getting some strange looks – even from North Londoners.
John Burchell
Old Coulsdon, Surrey
Vol. 19 No. 5 · 6 March 1997
From Gordon Wharton
I’ve spent most of my life saying thee and thuh – never thi – like my almost-neighbour John Burchell (Letters, 20 February). However, during my National Service (some of which I spent making do with der, die and das), I found myself in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where I came to doubt the existence of the. Even the stand-in t, as in ‘On Ilkley Moor bar t’at’, became dubious when pronounced by folk in and around Pontefract and Doncaster. And in the exemplary ‘Dahn in t’cellar coil-oil wheer t’muck clahts on t’winders’, the has become little more than a glottal stop.
Gordon Wharton
Wallington, Surrey
From Peter Regent
In my (East Anglian) pronunciation the indefinite article is invariably pronounced uh before a consonant. I believe this accords with standard usage, except that the latter may allow ay for emphasis. In the US, particularly among orators, the pronunciation ay is much favoured. Now the habit is spreading to the more ponderous politicians in this country, and seems, incidentally, to be a fair index of conservatism. Thus, the Home Secretary is an egregious ay man. Perhaps it is significant that Mr Blair is moving in that direction.
Peter Regent
Newport-on-Tay, Fife
