Arthur Johnstone's spelling of the composer's name above is intriguing is it not? Members will wonder whether it indicates something that has been forgotten over the intervening years. For the function of the diæreris when written thus over the second of two vowels is to indicate that it is to be pronounced separately rather than to form a diphthong with the first. Thus the word "
naïf" has two syllables, and we would read Mr. Johnstone's "Tchaïkovsky" similarly, in four separate syllables:
Tcha-i-kov-sky.
So why do we moderns now use only three? We use
the sound of "Chinese" for the first syllable: Tchai.
This is odd in another way, because there are in fact few instances in English where "ai" - without the diæresis - has the sound of "Chinese." More often it has the sound of "chain" - which if used when speaking the composer's name would sound quite affected; or it has the sound of "chair", which when used to speak the composer's name sounds
poncier still does it not.
What is the solution to this disturbing enigma?
And on top of all that there is the wholly unnecessary initial "T" . . .
In fact
five different spellings are current in English. We have seen Arthur Johnstone's, but here is how the name appears in the composer's own text on harmony:
and the name appears in the same form throughout Eaglefield Hull's "
Modern Harmony":
And here are a third and a fourth spelling, from the
Oxford Dictionary of Music:
And finally the fifth and possibly most authoritative version, as used by our great twentieth-century philosopher-critic Sydney Grew:
But now, after encountering Mr. Johnstone's way, I would like to propose a new, sixth, and "standardized" spelling:
Chaïceffsci, which has
four syllables, and incorporates the best features of all the others.
