I watched an interesting programme on BBC iPlayer this week. It was the first in a series of three programmes called In Their Own Words, and consisted mainly of recordings of novelists made during the 1930s.
It was interesting because of the content; the writers Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Jean Rhys, HG Wells and GK Chesterton all featured. Another thing of interest because it was so different from today was that everyone smoked throughout the interviews - BBC interviewers and interviewees. But it was also fascinating to see how pronunciation had changed over the last 70-odd years. Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in Ireland, had extremely cut-glass vowel sounds; the a in words such as bad sounded closer to an e sound, and off was pronounced 'orff'.
Evelyn Waugh used the word gibberish a couple of times, but he pronounced it with a hard g (as in golf). The OED lists two possible pronunciations for this word -- with a hard g, as Waugh pronounced it, and with the g pronounced as in giraffe, which is the most usual pronunciation these days.
If you are in the UK, you can see this programme for a couple more weeks here.
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