Page:Gurujadalu English.djvu/336

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upon them to indicate the spoken dialect in respect of which such cuency was to be understood. The denial of a polite standard speech is an important article of faith of the Old school. The SubCommittee opine that, “the proposal of some that the dialects of the Krishna and Godavari districts be imposed as standard language on the other parts of the Telugu Country is unsound in principle and will prove most mischievous in practice”. The majority of the Sub-Committee have thus cut the ground from under their own feet. Under the circumstances, they had no right to discuss current forms or to undertake the classification required by the second resolution.

50. The Old school labour under a misconception that no spoken dialect should be considered as a standard, unless it be uniform throughout the whole of the country in which the language is spoken. Even in countries like England where ideal conditions conducive to uniformity prevail, polite speech presents marked variations.

51. In his Primer of Spoken English, Sweet said, “All I can do is to record those facts which are accessible to me, to describe that variety of spoken English of which I have a personal knowledge, that is, the educated speech of London and the district round it, the original home of standard English both in its spoken and literary forms. That literary English is the London dialect pure and simple, has now been proved beyond a doubt by the investigations of the German Morsback... But the unity of spoken English is still imperfect. It is still liable to be influenced by the local dialects in London itself by the Cockney dialect, in Edinburgh by the Lothian and Scotch dialects and so on. (pages v & vi)

52. Again in his Sounds of spoken English, “A standard spoken language is, strictly speaking, an abstraction. No two speakers of standard English pronounce exactly alike. And yet