Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7971

Q: As between the forms – “with a view to express” and “with a view to expressing” – the Concise Oxford Dictionary calls the former vulgar.

A: I don’t agree with Oxford. Both forms are used. If “to express” is vulgar, “to expressing” is cumbrous and therefore inelegant.

Q: The Oxford Dictionary seems to leave one no choice as regards counting the number of syllables in the word “vision” and its likes. I quote below some of the words explained as monosyllables in the same way as “rhythm” and “prism”:

Fa’shion (-shn)

Passion (pa’shn)

Prison (-zn)

Scission (si’shn)

Trea’son (-ezn)

Vi’sion (-zhn)

As X would say, qu’en dites vous? Chambers’s Dictionary makes “vision” a dissyllable, which is quite sensible, but the monosyllabic pronunciation of it deserves to be considered at least a legitimate variant when H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler – the name of Fowler is looked upon as a synonym for authority on the English language – give no other. I don’t think I am mistaken in interpreting their intention. Take “realm”, which they pronounce in brakets as “relm”; now I see no difference as regards syllabification between their intention here and in the instances above.

P.S. I must admit, however, what struck me after typing the preceding. In the preface to the Oxford Dictionary it is said that it has not been thought necessary to mention certain pronunciations which are familiar to the normal reader, such as that of the suffix -ation (ashn). Does this mean that a word like “meditation” is to be taken as three syllables only? According to my argument there seems no alternative; and yet the example looks very much like a reductio ad absurdum.

A: You may not have a choice – but I have a choice, which is to pronounce and scan words like vision and passion and similar words as all the poets of the English language (those at least whom I know) have consistently pronounced and scanned them – as dissyllables. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare’s line in the following manner to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler,

Ĭn māī|děn mēd|ĭtatīōn | fān|cў frēē,

I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, “treasons, strategems and spoils”; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe would do the same – though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I lived in both northern and southern England, but I never heard vision pronounced vizhn, it was always vizhun; treason, of course, is pronounced trez’n, but that does not make it a monosyllable in scansion because there is in these words a very perceptible slurred vowel sound in pronunciation which I represent by the ‘; in poison also. If realm, helm etc. are taken as monosyllables, that is quite reasonable, for there is no vowel between “1” and “m” and none is heard, slurred or otherwise in pronunciation. The words rhythm and prism are technically monosyllables, because they are so pronounced in French (i.e. that part of the word, for there is a mute “e” in French): but in fact most Englishmen take the help of a slurred vowel-sound in pronouncing rhythms and it would be quite permissible to write in English as a blank verse line, “The unheard rhythms that sustain the world”.

This is my conviction and not all the Fowlers in the world will take it away from me. I only hope the future lexicographers will not “fowl” the language any more in that direction; otherwise we shall have to write lines like this –

O vizhn! O pashn! m’d’tashn! h’rr’p’lashn!

Why did the infern’l Etern’l und’take creash’n?

Or else, creat’ng, could he not have afford’d

Not to allow the Engl’sh tongue to be Oxford’d?

P.S. I remember a book (Hamerton’s? some one else’s? I don’t remember) in which the contrast was drawn between the English and French languages, that the English tongue tended to throw all the weight on the first or earliest possible syllable and slurred the others, the French did the opposite – so that when an Englishman pretends to say strawberries, what he really says is strawb’s. That is the exaggeration of a truth – but all the same there is a limit.

27-9-1934