SIR – We read that the Information Commissioner’s Office “has told staff that they should not use certain phrases, such as quid pro quo, because they may alienate their readers” (report, June 13). This is to continue the long tradition of destroying what’s left of our once proud British culture.
Biblical Latin, via the Vulgate, entered the DNA of modern English, providing us with scientific, legal and literary vocabulary. Without it – and Greek – English would never have emerged as the world’s most versatile spoken and written language.
The “dead” classical languages used to be pronounced colloquially in whichever country they were spoken. Scholars spoke Latin in their mother tongue and wrote to each other in what became an international lingua franca. In Britain, anglicised Latin and Greek integrated seamlessly into the English language.
Towards the end of the 19th century, something tragic happened to the teaching of the classics that severed the historic link between modern languages and their classical cognates, rendering these languages remote, impenetrable and, more seriously, leaving modern vernaculars in free fall.
Germany was the first European country to start the nationalising craze. Towards the end of the 19th century, state-funded intellectuals, believing that race and language are one, decided that German needed to be “purified” of its foreign imports. Perversely, these innovators decided that the “dead” classics should be “brought to life”. Their new Restored Pronunciation, considered to be the authentic Latin spoken by the ancient Romans, was rolled out as a means of awakening the “spirit” of the classical age.
In 1872, following Germany’s example, the British reformist government nationalised education at the very time that Britain led the world in literacy. Although traditional English public schools held out against the Restored Pronunciation longer than those of any other country, even they eventually capitulated and stopped anglicising classical pronunciation.
Is it any surprise that accurate, concise, Greek and Latin roots are giving way to ambiguous constructions, nonsensical idioms – and woke?
C M Wheeler McNulty
Watford, Hertfordshire
SIR – English must be the most beautiful, multi-national, multi-ethnic, diverse, inclusive language on earth, yet universities in the country that gave it to the world are apparently on a mission to destroy it (“English language reinforces ‘white superiority’, academics told,” report, June 16).
What must those millions around the globe who use it think of us?
Patrick Kelly
Chippenham, Wiltshire
SIR – I have just received a missive from my bank saying: “Ta-da – here’s your shiny new debit card.”
Surely this is yet a further example of language that Julian Fellowes believes is “infantilising the British people” (report, June 13).
Colin Henderson
Cranleigh, Surrey
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