tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4134533972010981122.post1560964984750708167..comments2024-03-26T05:04:15.369+00:00Comments on The Edithorial: Extra Early Post Because I am AnnoyedEdith Hallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02518971064140009711noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4134533972010981122.post-46244485386087785322013-12-28T22:48:11.167+00:002013-12-28T22:48:11.167+00:00Neville Gwynne is an oaf. He's precisely the k...Neville Gwynne is an oaf. He's precisely the kind of prescriptive idiot that made Latin's influence over both the methods and the content of grammar school teaching so objectionable to so many. He's one of the two regular guests on an occasional late night 'grammar' phone-in (really just a phone-in about the uninformed's pet language peeves) on Radio 5Live. It's a terrible shame that people like him still command the most prominent positions as apparent advocates of the English language, and, indeed, of language as a whole. It's just one woeful misconception -and tragic, demoralising demands to force the same down the throats of everyone else, young or old alike - after another. I recall Gwynne once claiming in a phone-in about pronunciation that when words or their components came from Greek or Latin, the original pronunciation ought be retained, and that this was the uncontestable arbiter. I wonder, therefore, if he pronounces the tele- or television in the same manner he does when it appears in telemetry or telephony, or whether he succumbs to the same quite natural phonological shifts and patterns of stress the rest of us do when pronouncing words that have hopped their way to us over several centuries and half a dozen languages. Needless to say, that's without even having to ask whether he thinks we should defer to pre-4th century aspirated forms, or the later fricatives - or, indeed, the plosives the Romans seem to have realised them as. I wish I'd had the energy to get out of bed and ask him how I should pronounce 'cyber' and 'govern', given their common provenance. Does the fault lie with the Romans, who presumably perceived the initial unaspirated voiceless velar plosive as a voiced one? <br /><br />Having not had the energy to call in regarding pronunciation, my only slight victory came some weeks later, during a phone-in concerning acronyms, when a short email contribution of mine was read out on air: GWYNNE, Grammar Whinger Yearning (for) Non-existent Norms of English.<br /><br />Not really your point, I know, but the harm done by people like Gwynne isn't only that they talk down the quality of the education on offer; it's at least in part that they fundamentally misconceive of what a useful education is, being so dogmatic - and, inevitably, misguided as a consequence - in their own view of language, and most other disciplines.Matt Keefehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06504500969184399780noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4134533972010981122.post-15448264377399171112013-12-05T22:19:54.249+00:002013-12-05T22:19:54.249+00:00I think this is a wonderful programme. How I wish...I think this is a wonderful programme. How I wish we in the States could get something like it; however, here it seems that everything is babied down to less than the least common denominator. I think that this is what Ms. Odone is fearing. Ever since the Moon Landing American education has been on a steady down hill course. Of course, as I was in college at that time, I remember it as if it were yesterday. In my mid-20's I was interviewed for a slot in the English staff at the USAF Academy (mid-1970's) and was informed that I would have to teach remedial composition. A few years later, it was mathematics. Obviously, I knew, our so-called schools of education really did not do a good job. They just created panaceas which I knew would never work. GB must be doing something right. (I always knew children would engage in the "old stuff." It's fun.) Julia Erganehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04613625453621934834noreply@blogger.com