Kitabı oku: «By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English», sayfa 4

4

Where are You From?

WELSHPOOL

The A487 away from Portmeirion runs alongside the Ffestiniog steam railway for a while, then winds its way through the edges of Snowdonia National Park. It was a clear day, and every now and then I could see the dramatic peaks of the Snowdon range. All highly photogenic, as film companies have repeatedly seen.

Take a left at Penrhyndeudraeth and you soon pass through Carreg Llanfrothen. There you will find Plas Brondanw, the family home of Clough Williams-Ellis. The ‘Dr Who’ series The Five Doctors was shot at the Folly Castle in the grounds. So was some of Brideshead Revisited. And, if you could time-travel back to 1958, you would encounter hundreds of Liverpudlian Chinese children marching with Ingrid Bergman across stand-in Chinese mountains for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

The roads through Snowdonia resound with the echoes of famous films. Carry On Up the Khyber was shot along the Watkin Path, one of the routes up Snowdon. Tomb Raider 2 used the environs of Llyn Gwynant. James Bond was in the area (for From Russia with Love), as were Robin Hood and Merlin.

That’s North Wales for you. One enormous film set. You can measure out any journey in film locations.

Robin Hood is a bit of a surprise, but you would expect Merlin to be here, in view of his home-grown origins – Merlin is an adaptation of Myrddin, according to the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kingdom of Britain’). Myrddin in turn comes from Caerfyrddin, the Welsh name of the county of Carmarthen, where he is supposed to have been born. Where exactly is a conundrum. I have lost track of the number of places in Wales – let alone elsewhere – which claim his presence, in birth, life, or death. There are several caves and mounds associated with him or his battles. I would pass at least three on the way to Hay.

In the meantime I followed the A470 winding south towards mid- Wales. I soon reached Lake Trawsfynydd, and in the distance, on the lakeside edge, I could see the solid mass of the old power station. It started service in the 1960s, but was decommissioned in 1991. What do you do with a retired power station? Turn it into a film set, of course. It was the location of Camelot in First Knight. They built the town on the shore of the lake and transformed the front of the power station into a castle.

Shame they had to build a mock castle, seeing as real castles abound in the region. I had passed four already on my journey from Gaerwen – Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Criccieth, and Harlech.

Every time I see the turning to Harlech, ‘Men of Harlech’ comes into my head. The song commemorates the men who defended the castle during a long siege in the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. It is one of the few Welsh songs that has crossed the border into England. It achieved worldwide – or at least, Hollywood – fame when it was sung in the film Zulu by the men of the Welsh regiment fighting in the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.

Did they sing it, really, in 1879? The song was first published in 1860, and the regiment didn’t officially adopt it until 1881. It seems unlikely. But it was a great film moment, nonetheless.

I had to make a decision after Trawsfynydd. Should I turn east and cut across through Bala towards Welshpool? Or should I keep going on the A470 south through Dolgellau and on towards Builth Wells? Linguistically, there was no contest. Welshpool is in marcher country. England is just a mile or so away. And marcher country is an excellent breeding ground for interesting accents. But time wasn’t on my side. I had to go ‘straight down the middle’, as they say in Wales.

Marcher has nothing to do with marching. It comes from Old English mearc, which meant ‘boundary’. That’s why people talk about ‘the Marches’, referring to the land on either side of the Welsh–English border. The modern word mark is related. Offa’s Dyke closely follows the modern border, going back and forth across it several times.

Offa was the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia between 757 and 796. He built the dyke to protect his kingdom from invasion by Welsh barbarians. It reaches twenty feet in height in some places along its eighty-mile length. One end is at Prestatyn in the north; as you travel south it passes Llangollen, Chirk, Knighton, Hay, and Monmouth; the other end is at Chepstow. It isn’t continuous. Offa may never have finished it; or maybe he decided to save unnecessary labour and let other natural obstacles fill the gaps.

The earthworks are especially prominent at Knighton. Indeed, the town’s entrance sign now has the caption: ‘The Town on the Dyke’. It boasts an excellent information centre.

Beware. If you look up Offa’s Dyke on an Internet search engine, you may need to do two searches. They spell dyke with an i in American English.

The name Welshpool means exactly what it says: ‘Welsh’ + ‘pool’. But the pool in question is not just an area of water. The original thirteenth-century borough was called Pola, and this developed into Pool. The region was known for its marshy land – the flood-prone River Severn is not far away – and in Welsh the local name is Y Trallwng, meaning ‘the sinking land’. But when the railways developed in the nineteenth century, the railway companies felt that travellers would get confused with the other Poole, in Dorset – so they changed the name to Welshpool, and it stayed.

I had already visited Welshpool a few weeks earlier, as it happened, as part of the same BBC project which had brought me to the sheep market in Gaerwen. On that visit I ended up in a different kind of market (fruit and veg), in the town centre, talking to one of the stallholders. What I was hoping to record was evidence of a mixed accent – one displaying features of both Welsh and English.

And that’s what I found. Here was a man who had lived all his life in Welshpool, but if you didn’t know that you might have placed him further south over the border in Herefordshire, or maybe even Gloucestershire. It was the phonetic quality of the r sound after the vowels in such words as car and heart that did it. He didn’t make it as a trilled sound, which is what you would expect to hear further into Wales. Rather, he curled the tip of his tongue back, producing a darker sound, more like a West Country or American r than anything else.

But it definitely wasn’t a West Country accent. Several of his vowel sounds were Welsh, as was the general lilt of his voice. And when I asked him if people recognized where he came from when he went on holiday, he was quite clear about it. ‘They always know I’m from Wales,’ he said. ‘But they think it’s Cardiff.’

Did everyone in the town have this ‘English r’, I wondered. And almost as soon as I had formulated the question, I had it answered. A customer arrived, a schoolfriend of the market-man. He too had lived in Welshpool all his life. They were the same age. They seemed to have similar farming backgrounds. And yet he had no trace of an r after vowels in his speech.

That’s one of the fascinating things about the way people speak along country borders. Because they are exposed to two ways of speaking, they make all kinds of different choices from the array of sounds that surround them. Even quite short distances can produce a noticeably different accent. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the two friends lived on opposite sides of the town.

I asked them whether they could tell the difference in the speech of someone from Welshpool itself and someone from nearby. ‘Of course,’ they said. ‘Someone from Llanfair Careinion sounds much more Welsh than we do,’ the market-man added. ‘I sometimes have difficulty understanding what they’re saying, when they come into the market.’ That village was just five miles to the west. ‘And if you go that way across the border,’ said his friend – gesturing vaguely towards England – ‘they’re even more different.’ That was only three miles away.

Professor Henry Higgins came to mind, from Shaw’s Pygmalion. He announces himself as a practitioner of phonetics: ‘The science of speech. That’s my profession, also my hobby. Anyone can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue, but I can place a man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.’ And presumably in Welshpool, also.

Two streets? In parts of Victorian London, this might not have been too far from the truth. Accents identify communities, and there would have been areas abutting each other which displayed major social differences, and thus different accents. Then as now, Mayfair and the East End are two hugely contrasting linguistic worlds.

Higgins would have had an even more enjoyable time today. There are over 350 language communities in present-day London, and when people from these ethnic backgrounds speak English their accents inevitably reflect features of their mother-tongues. Nor is it just their accents. Words and features of grammar from their mother-tongue enter their English as well, producing new hybrid dialects – Bengali English, Hindi English, Chinese English… It’s all a natural process. Increased language variation is an inevitable consequence of an ethnically diverse society.

Phoneticians are having a great time trying to disentangle the multiple influences which operate on modern English accents, but it isn’t easy. The situation has changed dramatically in the past century. Until relatively recently, most people lived their whole lives in one place, and rarely travelled. They would encounter only the occasional visitor with a different regional accent. As a consequence, their local speech would change little during their lifetimes.

Today, people are always on the move. Commuting over long distances is normal. And even if you don’t commute, innumerable accents and dialects enter your home every day through radio and television, the telephone, and, these days, Internet telephony. People move house more than ever before. Formerly isolated villages now have their eye on attracting tourists. Second homes are everywhere. It is unusual to find a village which does not have some incomers. And incomers do not usually adopt the accent of their new hosts wholesale, as my Gaerwen shepherd illustrated.

But if incomers find themselves integrating well into their new community, they will inevitably pick up a few features of the local speech – new words, sentence patterns, sounds, tones of voice. They will still sound ‘foreign’ to the locals, and they may not notice that their speech has changed. But if after a while they pay a visit to where they lived before, it’s a typical experience to hear their old friends say they sound different.

My wife comes from Hertfordshire, and people in Holyhead, where we now live, readily notice the southern accent in her voice. When she goes back to Hertfordshire, they say she sounds Welsh.

Mixed accents are the norm these days. My own accent is a mix of the places I have lived in – Wales, Liverpool, London, Berkshire. That means it isn’t an entirely consistent accent. Sometimes I say example, with a short a, sometimes exahmple. I never know which it is going to be. It depends a lot on who I’m talking to.

Generational differences are an influence. My children all say schedule beginning with sk–, as Americans do. When I was their age, I always said shedule. Today, I say both. If I’m talking to them, I join their skedule community. Otherwise I say shedule. They swap about a bit too, depending on who they’re talking to.

Mixed accents mean that it isn’t so easy to identify where people come from any more, just by listening to their voices. Quite often, when I meet someone for the first time, and they learn I am a linguist and discover what linguists do, they say smugly: ‘I bet you can’t tell where I’m from.’ I never take the bet.

Radio programmes sometimes include quizzes or games with such names as ‘Where Are You From?’. A team listens to guests and tries to work out which part of the country they come from. It wasn’t too difficult to get the right answer a few decades ago. It’s much harder now. Impossible, with many speakers.

I left the fruit and veg market and drove to the edge of Welshpool, where I had an appointment with another accent. I was keen to explore the identity question again. Here were people who had no Welsh language ability and whose accent lacked some of the most distinctive features of the English accents people associate with Wales. Would they feel as Welsh as their compatriots from the Snowdon hillsides or the Rhondda valleys?

Indeed they would, and the lady I had come to see proved it in a most unorthodox style. Halfway through the interview she began to take her clothes off – Huw the cameraman couldn’t believe his lens – and displayed a Welsh dragon tattooed below her shoulder. She waxed lyrical about Wales. She was pregnant, and was determined that her baby would be born in Wrexham hospital and not in Shrewsbury, even though Wrexham was twice the distance away. Her speech had the English r in it again. To my ears, she hardly sounded Welsh at all. Evidently there isn’t always a correlation between the national recognizability of a person’s accent and the strength of the speaker’s feeling about national identity.

Henry Higgins would have loved all this. Or rather, Henry Sweet would. Or rather, Daniel Jones would. Was there a real-life model for Henry Higgins?

Henry Sweet was the leading English philologist and phonetician at Oxford in the late nineteenth century. Daniel Jones was Professor of Phonetics at University College London a generation later. Phonetics, as Higgins, said, is the science of speech – or, slightly more precisely, of human soundmaking. Phoneticians spend all their time happily analysing how people speak, how speech sounds are carried through the air, and what happens when people listen to them.

What phoneticians don’t do is work with people like Eliza Doolittle in the way that Higgins did. No phonetician these days would dream of trying to change someone’s natural pronunciation so that it sounds more like the upper-class accent of a country. Traditionally, the people who would do that sort of thing are called elocutionists. And even they value regional accents more these days than they used to. Audibility and clarity of speech are still important goals, but they can be achieved in any accent.

Shaw had had a great deal of correspondence with Sweet over the years, but he says quite plainly in the Preface to Pygmalion that ‘Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.’ Yet he adds: ‘still… there are touches of Sweet in the play’. Shaw was puzzled that Sweet had not achieved greater public recognition, given his scholarly achievements. ‘With Higgins’s physique and temperament,’ he says, ‘Sweet might have set the Thames on fire.’ Shaw felt the reason was the way phonetics as a subject was being seriously underrated at Oxford, and he concludes: ‘if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn’.

Phoneticians among the most important people in England? Could there be any doubt? But when non-phoneticians say so, it makes you think, well, maybe they are. And Shaw is not alone in his opinion. The novelist Anthony Burgess states just as firmly, in the epilogue to his language memoir A Mouthful of Air: ‘Phonetics, phonetics, and again phonetics. There cannot be too much phonetics.’

It was probably Shaw’s correspondence with Sweet, along with supposed similarities between the characters of Higgins and Sweet, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, that led people to assume that the one was based on the other. In fact, if Shaw is making a bow in the direction of a real phonetician at all, it has to be Daniel Jones, who in his youth had worked with Sweet.

Jones helped Shaw in several ways. He gave him advice on phonetic detail, corresponded with him several times, and invited him to see his department at University College London. The technology used in Higgins’ laboratory in the play is close to what would have been in a phonetics department of the day. After Pygmalion was completed, Shaw offered Jones an unlimited supply of complimentary tickets to see it.

Where did the name of Higgins come from? By all accounts, it was borrowed from a London shop sign. By whose accounts? Jones himself, via one of his students. It seems that Shaw was riding on the deck of a bus through South London, wondering what name he should give his character, and saw the shop name ‘Jones and Higgins’. The student recalled Jones saying: ‘he could not call me Jones, so he called me Higgins’.

If Shaw’s bus route was through Peckham, he couldn’t have missed the shop. Jones and Higgins was the largest and most prestigious department store in the area, in Rye Lane. It closed down in 1980, but the distinctive building is still there.

Why couldn’t Shaw call his character Jones? It would have been very risky to portray a living character as a fictional one. Flattering as the idea might seem at first, we can immediately imagine the real-life source being unflattered by aspects of Higgins’ character. The plot contained taboo language. Higgins, moreover – to put it in modern terms – has an affair with one of his students. Not the best set of associations for a career academic.

Furthermore, the play wasn’t doing phonetics many favours. True, it brought the word phonetics to the attention of millions who might not otherwise have heard of it, but – as Jones himself remarked – ‘In Pygmalion phonetics is represented as providing a key to social advancement,’ and he adds, drily, ‘a function which it may be hoped it will not be called upon to perform indefinitely.’ His dryness, it seems, was replaced by fury when he saw the play on the first night. This was not how he wanted phonetics to be seen.

In The Real Professor Higgins, Jones’s biographers conclude that he wanted to distance himself from the character and the play, and that Shaw agreed. Shaw then went further, writing a preface which made no reference to Jones but hinted at a portrayal of the now-deceased Sweet. The ruse was successful. Nobody publicly associated Jones with Higgins, and Sweet remained the link in the public mind.

And in mine. For many years I thought it was Sweet, and I say so in a book or two. I recant.

There is a lot of recanting to be done. Type ‘Henry Sweet and Henry Higgins’ into Google and you will get over 800,000 hits. Start scrolling down and you will see the Sweet claim asserted over and over.

Another of Jones’s students was David Abercrombie, who later became Professor of Phonetics at Edinburgh. He passed his recollections of Jones on to one of his students, Peter Ladefoged. And this brings the story up to date. Because it was Ladefoged who acted as the phonetics consultant for My Fair Lady, the screen adaptation of Pygmalion, designing Higgins’ laboratory and sounding out the vowels that Eliza hears there on her first visit.

At the very beginning of the film, Higgins shows Eliza his notebook, in which he has been transcribing her speech in Sweet’s Revised Romic phonetic script, and the camera shows us what he has written. In the upper paragraph of the right-hand page, there is a transcription of her utterance ‘I say, captain…’. It is the lower paragraph that is interesting, for it is nothing to do with the film at all. It is a greeting to David Abercrombie from Ladefoged. I wonder if director George Cukor knew?

If you have a DVD of the film, pause it at that point and look at the third line up from the bottom. It says:

Peter Ladefoged died in London in January 2006, on his way back from a field trip working on the Toda language in India, just as I began writing this book. It was a tremendous loss to the world of phonetics.

One of his many interests was a concern to establish just how many vowels and consonants the human vocal tract is capable of producing in the languages of the world. The answer is more than people think. He estimated that there were over eight hundred different consonants and some two hundred different vowels.

First impressions count, so I have good cause to remember David Abercrombie. I first met him when I was an external examiner for his department in Edinburgh, back in the 1970s. Or rather, I met an aspect of his character before I actually met him. I had arrived a little early at the university, so I made my way to his office, where, the departmental secretary had told me, there were some examination scripts waiting for me to read.

I knocked at the door. No reply, but it was unlocked so I went in. There in the middle of the room was a fridge, and on top of the fridge a piece of cardboard with a large green arrow on it, pointing towards the door of the fridge. I opened the door. Inside were the examination scripts. And on top of the scripts were a bottle of French wine, a glass, and a corkscrew. No examiner ever had such a pleasant introduction to the dull routine of marking.

We had dinner at the Old Howgate Inn in Penicuik, just south of Edinburgh, where I learned that David had a house in France and was one of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the elite wine-tasting society in Burgundy. The restaurant-owner knew him well, and when it came to choosing a wine, there was nothing as mundane as a wine list to read. Instead, we were ushered down into the wine cellar, and the bottle was chosen straight from the racks. I learned more about wine from that one meal than I have ever done since. I just wish I could remember half of it.

Henry Higgins wasn’t the first fictional language expert. Four hundred years earlier, Shakespeare had given us the caricature of the pedantic schoolteacher Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Holofernes is very much concerned with correct Latin and with English spelling. He insists on having words pronounced as they are spelled. People (he is thinking of Don Armado in particular) should pronounce the b in doubt and debt, he says, and the l in calf and half. And as for leaving out the h in abhominable… Those who do so are ‘rackers of orthography’, he says – torturers of spelling – and they ‘insinuateth me of insanie’. They drive him mad!

There were several linguistic pedants around in Shakespeare’s day, most of them interested in ways of reforming English spelling. Any of them might have been the model for Holofernes. One of them was Richard Mulcaster, the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in North London, and the teacher of Edmund Spenser, who would become the leading Elizabethan poet. Another was the humanist scholar Roger Ascham, the young Princess Elizabeth’s Greek and Latin tutor, famous for his 1570 treatise on the best way of teaching Latin, The Scholemaster.