By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

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      If you have a DVD of the film, pause it at that point and look at the third line up from the bottom. It says:

      Peter Ladefoged died in London in January 2006, on his way back from a field trip working on the Toda language in India, just as I began writing this book. It was a tremendous loss to the world of phonetics.

      One of his many interests was a concern to establish just how many vowels and consonants the human vocal tract is capable of producing in the languages of the world. The answer is more than people think. He estimated that there were over eight hundred different consonants and some two hundred different vowels.

      First impressions count, so I have good cause to remember David Abercrombie. I first met him when I was an external examiner for his department in Edinburgh, back in the 1970s. Or rather, I met an aspect of his character before I actually met him. I had arrived a little early at the university, so I made my way to his office, where, the departmental secretary had told me, there were some examination scripts waiting for me to read.

      I knocked at the door. No reply, but it was unlocked so I went in. There in the middle of the room was a fridge, and on top of the fridge a piece of cardboard with a large green arrow on it, pointing towards the door of the fridge. I opened the door. Inside were the examination scripts. And on top of the scripts were a bottle of French wine, a glass, and a corkscrew. No examiner ever had such a pleasant introduction to the dull routine of marking.

      We had dinner at the Old Howgate Inn in Penicuik, just south of Edinburgh, where I learned that David had a house in France and was one of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the elite wine-tasting society in Burgundy. The restaurant-owner knew him well, and when it came to choosing a wine, there was nothing as mundane as a wine list to read. Instead, we were ushered down into the wine cellar, and the bottle was chosen straight from the racks. I learned more about wine from that one meal than I have ever done since. I just wish I could remember half of it.

      Henry Higgins wasn’t the first fictional language expert. Four hundred years earlier, Shakespeare had given us the caricature of the pedantic schoolteacher Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Holofernes is very much concerned with correct Latin and with English spelling. He insists on having words pronounced as they are spelled. People (he is thinking of Don Armado in particular) should pronounce the b in doubt and debt, he says, and the l in calf and half. And as for leaving out the h in abhominable… Those who do so are ‘rackers of orthography’, he says – torturers of spelling – and they ‘insinuateth me of insanie’. They drive him mad!

      There were several linguistic pedants around in Shakespeare’s day, most of them interested in ways of reforming English spelling. Any of them might have been the model for Holofernes. One of them was Richard Mulcaster, the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in North London, and the teacher of Edmund Spenser, who would become the leading Elizabethan poet. Another was the humanist scholar Roger Ascham, the young Princess Elizabeth’s Greek and Latin tutor, famous for his 1570 treatise on the best way of teaching Latin, The Scholemaster.

      Shakespeare would certainly have been aware of Mulcaster, as the boy actors of Merchant Taylors’ were a well-known theatre company. They may even have been the ones chiefly in mind when Hamlet and Rosencrantz pour scorn on the ‘eyrie of children’ who were so fashionable that they were putting real actors out of work.

      Or, of course, they may not. Neither Mulcaster nor Ascham, nor anyone else, may have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing his play. Still, it’s a tempting thought. Mulcaster didn’t die until 1611. Love’s Labour’s Lost was written in the mid-1590s. Both Mulcaster and Shakespeare had their companies play at Hampton Court. Depending on which biographical temperament you choose, they possibly, probably, definitely met.

      Searching for sources of characters is always a dangerous occupation, unless you have the author there to ask. And even then, when you do meet the author, you don’t always get a clear answer. Or, sometimes, any answer at all.

      At an event in Paris, back in the 1980s, I met William Golding. We had both been at the Paris Salon du Livre – the annual book fair. He was signing his books and I was signing mine. My queue was a few yards long. His stretched outside the building.

      Golding arrived late from the hospitality room, expressed surprise at the length of the queue, and reluctantly sat down at his table. He signed half a dozen books, then decided he’d had enough. He got up abruptly and walked off the stand, heading back for the hospitality room. I saw raised eyebrows, shoulders and rounded vowels throughout the queue, in that unmistakeably French body language which simultaneously expresses puzzlement, disgust, and amusement. The queue disintegrated, with people talking animatedly. They did not seem especially surprised. Evidently this is what famous literary authors were permitted to do, at least in France. Expected behaviour, almost.

      I did invite people to join my queue instead. Nobody took up the offer.

      I don’t know whether Golding came back to the signing area. He hadn’t by the time I left.

      As I walked away from the Salon I passed hundreds of visitors arriving for a day out. Several were whole families. I saw a man (carrying a picnic basket), his wife, and their three children, aged between about five and twelve. They were chattering excitedly about where they would go first. A day out. A picnic. At a book fair. It seemed so typically French. And so typically not English.

      Try the following dialogue out in virtually any English accent, and it doesn’t really convince. ‘’Ave a good weekend, Arthur?’ ‘Yeah, lovely, thanks.’ Ad a nice day out on Sunday. Took the kids to the Book Fair.’

      It works perfectly in a French accent.

      That was in the 1980s, mind. Today, you will see such sights regularly at the Hay Literary Festival. Times have changed.

      Later that day my wife and I went to a soirée at the British Embassy, and after a while we met Golding and his wife. He was taciturn, so I searched for a conversational topic. What do you say to a Nobel Prize-winner?

      Coincidentally, the week before I had given an evening of readings back home in support of a local parish community trying to raise money to renovate its church spire. One of the readings was, I thought, particularly appropriate: the climactic scene from Golding’s The Spire, where the masterbuilder, Roger Mason, realizes that the weight of the new spire being added to the cathedral is causing the building to be in danger of collapse. I had no idea then that I would be meeting the author a week later.

      So that was my conversation opener.

      ‘This is a nice coincidence,’ I said. ‘Just last week I was doing a reading from one of your books.’

      He showed a spark of interest: ‘Oh, which one?’

      ‘The Spire,’ I said, and I explained the reason.

      ‘Which bit did you read?’ he asked.

      ‘The bit where everyone looks down into the pit and they see the ground moving.’

      There was a silence.

      “‘The earth’s creeping!”’ I quoted, lamely.

      His eyes seemed to glaze over. There was a pause.

      ‘Idon’t recollect that,’ he said. He turned to his wife. ‘Did I write that?’

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