To think an English teacher should know the correct pronunciation of Glamis?

I think I'd be more concerned whether the teacher has a good relationship with your DC? Does he/she monitor the child's progress? Is work marked frequently and useful feedback given? Does DC enjoy learning with this teacher?

Compared to these issues, the pronunciation of a single word in a play (which may be on the GCSE syllabus, but this in no way means all schools/teachers opt to teach it) is trivial. Yep, revel in your superior knowledge on here, but I wouldn't bring it up with the teacher unless you want to come across as the sort of parent who's more interested in teacher bashing than ensuring your DC is happy and making effective progress.

Last time I checked, knowing the correct pronunciation of a place name was not in any GCSE or A'Level spec. For this reason, to me, your post says far more about you than the teacher in question.

On 16th Century pronunciation, everyone on the thread should watch this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCckcTHWqKw

I think Shakespeare may sounded very different to what we might think.

or what about Stivichall in Coventry pronounced 'Stychall'!

Oh yes, that could be it, certainly -- is there a name for that?

"There's many a slip/ Twixt graphological representation of phoneme in a system which ties semantic content to aural effect, and lip" nods sagely

Huh. Yes, I can see that. I've never read that poem out loud (it is difficult).

Which reminds me, I think the teacher might also have been doing that thing where you know how something should be said, but somehow when you say it aloud it insists on coming out wrongly?

Hahaha! Oh, if only...

Oddly enough, that poem was involved in my own personal "ohisthathowyousayit" - after declaiming "I caught this morning morning's minion" etc rather a lot as an undergrad it wasn't til I was in Exeter and they opened a new Wetherspoons called The Chevalier that I realized I should have been pronouncing it "O my shevaleer!", not "O, my shivalliay!"

He did.

Though I still feel he missed a tremendous opportunity for apt Anglo-Saxonism by leaving 'windfucker' out of his list of synonyms for kestrel in 'the windhover'.

Ha! Love that line from Griffiths!

And your last paragraph speaks to a worrying feeling I have the older I get: that Gerard Manley Hopkins talked a lot of sense... genuflects, reads Dons Scotus, opines on Anglo-Saxon metre, has intense relationship with the colour blue

sacred on a Midlands theme try 'Caldmore' in Walsall. Pronounced Kar-ma.

This played an important role in catching the so called A34 murderer Raymond Morris during the late 60s. When the suspect stopped and asked a group of kids for directions to 'Kar-ma' they knew they were looking for a local man.

I'm sure there are plenty of Scottish teachers who can't pronounce English place names properly.

[purposefully misses the point of the thread]

*"Hey - that's weird - how come that really famous line has 11 syllables when every other line in the play only has 10. I wonder if there's something odd about the pronounciation".

Surely English teacher should know about metre and wonder... 'Thane of Glamis, and Cawdor too' (IIRC) wouldn't go dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum with 2 syllables in Glamis. You have no idea how little my phone liked that!

"Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:
By Sinel's death I know I am thane of Glamis;
But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives,
A prosperous gentleman; and to be king"

"Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;"

"The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou'ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do"*

Loving the suggestions that the entire play is written in iambic pentameter. How boring would that be?

If you actually count the syllables in the lines, they are all over the pace, and Shakespeare used all sorts of different feet - not just iambs. So you can never really rely on the meter to help you scan the later plays...

Or the rhyme. I remember the struggles I faced at the age of 14 and playing Puck, with the lines:

When in that moment, so it came to pass, (which I only ever pronounced "parse")
Titania waked and straightway loved an ass.

Nope, don't know it - thank you!

I used to go to lectures by Eric Griffiths, who would remark that Shakespeare thought of ten as a number between 9 and 14. It stuck in my mind.

I like your point about rap, though I'm not sure I can pull it off! My difficulty is they're so used to the idea that 'metre' means 'iambic pentameter', it is hard to explain a metrical system that doesn't care how many unstressed syllables there are, and only counts the stresses. But I suspect Shakespeare knew it perfectly well.

Of course, jeanne, feel free. You prob already know this one, but Hamburger's volume in the New Critical Idiom series, "Metre, Rhythm, Verse Form" is pretty good on introducing undergrads to the idea that metre is essentially an abstraction, whilst also helping them work with it. I think it's him who damns Browning for his over-regularity in the lyrics, by (if memory serves) quoting a few stanzas of Love Among The Ruins and simply commenting "Anyone for tennis?"

In one way I guess we're lucky to be teaching this generation, as they're much more used to organised spoken rhythm being variable and flexible in popular music - anyone who grew up with Missy Elliott, Nas, Eminem, Dizzee Rascal, Kanye and Roots Manuva to listen to instinctively knows that variation is the essence of metre - they'd never dream of assumng that a rapper drops every stress (or every word) only on the beat.

(My first lecture on the first-year course usually ends up wasting a lot of time demonstrating how "Call Me Maybe" organises itself around four-syllable trochaic riffs, so the more that pattern appears, the closer we are to the chorus. Or how "Milkshake" is entirely metrical without the caesurae in each line, but also perfectly metrical with them.)

Bang on twm, I honestly felt like I was a 5 year old. Break it down and sound it out.

you tocks itta?

My dh still laughs and my first attempt to pronounce uttoxeter!

"Uh-toh, uh-toh-icks, uh-toh-icks-et-errr?"

Also a local store make a very nice steak and ale pie with belvoir ale, aptly named "Belvoir pie" (tee hee hee)

But, while we might pronounce it Jay-tweez, it was also a pun on Jakes (a slang name for the toilet).

HTH

You must be one of these idiots from an ex-poly

I went to the University of Lunn (formerly Lunn Poly).

Tcha.

You must be one of these idiots from an ex-poly, QI.

(Actually, I really like that explanation of metre, do you mind if I plagiarise use it and quote you? I'm trying to get mine to realise it's not scary to suggest a line might be irregular.)

(Loving Jeffrey's letting of the cat amongst the pigeons. If only because I have heard that discussion happening over drinks in the Shakespeare Institue.)

Sod it, got to the end of the thread only to find that bog and jeanne made exactly the point I had in mind - in those passages quoted above neither a single syllable nor a two-syllable trochee makes regular metrical sense.

Studying Shakespeare does not consist of remembering the notes to the text - that's the sort of literary pub quizzery which we spend our time trying to move first-year students on from.

Also metre doesn't consist of fitting words exactly into a fixed beat. One of the most characteristic features of the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, is the reversal of a foot at the beginning:

DUM-di-di-DUM-di-DUM-di-DUM-di-DUM, so to speak

("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is a good example.)

A poet sets up a metre to work as a beat which can be felt or "heard" behind the lines, whether or not individual words or even whole lines fit into it. Poetry which simply reproduces the set rhythm is bad poetry, and sounds unbelievably tedious and banal, like a nursery-rhyme. So there's no way of determining that an individual word "should" be spoken in a aprticular way.

Double 'isn't it'. I should really have a coffee.

holly, I like the point about the two syllables in the original.

S'true. Chaucer too.

I love Shakespeare and don't love Chaucer, but both of them are jumped on for nationalistic reasons like crazy. Besides, it's a bit poor, isn't it, to teach a canon of dead white men and not even question it, isn't it?

We did Duchess of Malfi for A Level because my teacher was lovely.

I have no idea how the Italian in that is meant to be said, either.

Some of us have gone to university post-1880, and no longer accept the 'our greatest playwright' line, as it's very very dated.

This. Even the artistic director of the RSC has said that he doesn't really understand why it's Shakespeare, rather than Ben Jonson that holds this exalted position.

Much of it has to do with the eighteenth-century "rediscovery" and elevation of Shakespeare for nationalistic purposes.

It's ok! I'm not even sure what are typos and what is baby brain at the moment. I need sleep.