Tag archives: accents
My Fair Lady: simple phonetics and pygmalion words
My Fair Lady, a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion, was first performed on Broadway in 1956, and has been in performance somewhere in the world almost ever since. Telling the tale of how London phonetics professor Henry Higgins gives cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle speech lessons in order to pass her [...]
Sound and fury: cockney ducks and mimicking politicians
Language has always been more fashion than science: as Bill Bryson once said, the way we use it ‘wanders around like hemlines’. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington newspaper the Olympian ran an article headed ‘When visiting the South, please leave fake accent at home’. Its writer, Kathleen Parker, finds political charlatan accents among [...]
Diacritics? They’re just passé!
There is a moment in the life of every British 12-year-old in the first year of secondary school (that’s high school, for non-Brits), when, sitting down in front of their French teacher for the first time, they are introduced to the mysteries of accented letters. The twenty-six letters that have served them so well for [...]
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