From Poetry to Slang
Linguist, novelist and composer Anthony Burgess contemplates the nature of language and the future of English literature
So what's to be done? Most people want to hear about how beautiful the English language is and make a little hobby of it. In my view, unless we do something about phonetics, we're going to lose language totally. We must know how to set down the sounds we're using. I am making a plea for literacy on three fronts. One is our normal literacy, in which we can spell and punctuate and indeed write in a conventional form what we say and hear. Second is a subtly scientific means of writing through the international phonetic alphabet. Music is the third medium in which sound becomes sight. It worries me a great deal that people don't know how to read music and the international phonetic alphabet.
I was brought up as a musician, and my ambition was always to be a great composer, not a writer. Obviously, music is trying to say something, but what it is we don't know. I'm still striving hard to try to find out. Music is obviously desperately important, or we wouldn't have so much of it. I think some of the magic that applies to music probably also applies to language. There's a mystery going on in the human mouth and in the human ear that we'll never, never understand.
A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess, William Morrow & Co. ($25)
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