At the beginning of
,attempts to give anyone reading the play an idea of Eliza Doolittle's
accent. This is her last line before he abandons the attempt:
Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now
bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me
f'them?
This, rendered into standard English, would
read:
Oh, he's your son, is he? Well, if you'd done your
duty by him as a mother should, he would know better than to spoil a poor girl's flowers then
run away without paying. Will you pay me for them?
The
first point is that obviously, standard English, as spoken by the middle and upper classes, is
very much closer to written English than theof Lisson Grove which Eliza speaks. The second is
that, while there are some differences in the consonants (the dropped "h" and the
elided "th" being particularly evident), the most striking distinction is the
difference in almost every vowel sound: san/son, wal/well, the elongated "e-oo" for
"duty" and "you," and so on.
Of course, it should be
emphasized that the chief difference, which Higgins has made his fortune by exploiting, is the
multiplicity of lower or working-class accents, as opposed to the single "standard
English" or "received pronunciation" which he teaches his clients. Eliza speaks
with a Lisson Grove accent, a variety of Cockney, but there are many other accents from all over
England which would mark her out as belonging to the same class in a different
region.
No comments:
Post a Comment