The last word

SIR – Nick Timms (Letters, June 16) asks how to pronounce Alrewas.

All (as in all or nothing); re (as in remain, not as in reason); was (this is the tricky bit: either as in wasp or, preferably, as in pussycat).

Simon Tonking

Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire

SIR – I once worked for a company whose managing director had risen through the ranks and was intent on losing his old accent.

This involved pronouncing factory as farctory.

Hugh Gill

St Lawrence, Jersey

SIR – David Starkey is the only person I have ever heard to take the trouble to pronounce the i in Parliament.

Chris Cleland

Farnham, Surrey

SIR – For those complaining about changes in pronunciation, I recommend Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language.

This explains that the process to which they object is how languages change, and is the reason we speak the English of today, rather than that of Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer and the Anglo-saxon Chronicle.

Andrew Hobson

London SW6

SIR – Unlike Edward Baker (Letters, 15 June), I am delighted to learn that the old pronunciation chimleys survives in 21st-century Kent.

Alfred Lord Tennyson immortalised the word in his Lincolnshire dialect poem “Owd Roä”:

Straänge an’ owd-farran’d the ’ouse, an’

belt long afoor my daäy

Wi’ haäfe o’ the chimleys a-twizzen’d an’ twined like a band o’ haäy.

Writing in 1887, Tennyson was recalling the dialect used before he left Lincolnshire 50 years earlier.

Peter J Taylor

Louth, Lincolnshire