Dot Wordsworth compares the pronounciation of words in 1928 and in the present day
Do you pronounce the ‘l’ in falcon? That civilised Kentish man Mr Eric Brown has sent me an entertaining newspaper cutting kept for 18 years. It is from the Times’s ‘On this day’ column, with news from 27 July 1928, of the first published booklet on BBC pronunciation for the guidance of broadcasters.
It cannot have been easy for the pronunciation committee, appointed in 1926, to agree. Its members included the learned phonetician Daniel Jones and the opinionated playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas about language were not always soundly based. Jones was the basis for Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. The chairman, Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, must have had his work cut out.
The Times noted in 1928 that falcon was to be pronounced fawkon.
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