Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw - Akasha Classics,
AkashaPublishing.Com - As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs,
not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due
place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not
teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that
no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for
an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other
Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible
to foreigners: English is not accessible even to English-men. The
reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast:
that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.
There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for
many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards
the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but
Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive
head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would
apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito
Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was
impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their
sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to
conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability
as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job)
would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps
enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt
for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought
more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the
Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain
was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly
review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial
importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing
but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and
literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic
expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as
impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author
into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time
for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a
quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by
sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a
sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It
must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into
something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of
phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but
nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance
with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right
in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left
any, include some satires that may be published without too
destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in
the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say;
but he would not suffer fools gladly.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
