 Tallulah Tam wrote: |
I feel that Alan Jay Lerner was not so concerned about his own grammar when he wrote the song, he insults the intelligence of the audience by using the word "hung" incorrectly, especially when putting the words into the mouth of Professor Higgins who as I said, should, and most likely would, have known better. Also the rhyming is bad.
Henry, 'Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
Condemned by every syllable she ever uttered.
By law she should be taken out and hung,
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.'
I would modestly suggest:-
Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
Condemned by every syllable to utter.
By law she should be taken out to hang
For the cold-blooded murder of the English twang. ![Wink [;)]](/emoticons/emotion-5.gif)
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First of all, I like your version of the verse! But then, does "murdering the English twang" make one deserve being hanged? (I'm sure I'm slipping up with my grammar here!) Isn't twang one of the things that murders the English tongue? (I'm intending no pun or joke, it's only a vocabulary question.)
I've always taken for granted that Alan Jay Lerner, being an American, would take great care not only over making Higgins' speech irreproachable, but also over avoiding americanisms and anachronisms. As far as I know he's done the latter, but I'm amazed to find ungrammatical sentences from Higgins! Even if it's for the sake of rhyming, I think he should have tried to think of something better. After all, it's his job... But Tallulah, you say the rhyming is bad. Is it? I've just looked it up in the dictionary, and all the words seem to rhyme well (the exact words in the song are "gutters" and "utters").
Incidentally, all the rhyming words ("gutters", "utters", "hung" and "tongue") contain a vowel sound (that represented by an inverted v) that I think Scousers pronounce in a funny way. As an anecdote related to English accents, in the English examinations over here there always are several questions about phonetics (which, more than my cup of tea, are my cup of bitterness). Well, the only questions about vowel sounds I have some chance of getting right are those about this "inverted v" sound. All I have to do is to imagine how George Harrison or Ringo Starr would pronounce a word, and I know whether it contains that sound or not. Stupid little trick... But it works.
| Tallulah Tam wrote: |
Personally I DO think such a transformation is possible one only has to witness the transformations of Glynnis Paltrow and Madonna who now speak better English than the English. I am also personally acquainted with a Dutch Professor who speaks perfect English with Received Pronunciation and no trace of a foreign accent. Richard Burton is another example; when once asked how he managed to lose his Welsh accent he replied, "blood, sweat and tears". I don't know how old you are, but perhaps you remember The Jenkins brothers Clive and Roy? British politicians. To hear them speak you would not have believed they were reared in the same household. Clive had a very thick Welsh mining community accent but Roy who won a scholarship to Oxford cultivated a Received Pronunciation accent so far back it was almost ridiculous. |
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No, I had never heard of the Jenkins brothers (probably I'm too young, or maybe they're not so well known outside of England, I don't know). But, apart from the Dutch professor, I think all the persons you've mentioned have English as their mother tongue (people from Wales speak both English and Welsh, don't they?) So I wonder whether all they have to do is to get used to pronouncing certain sounds in the proper places. I mean, when I speak English my main difficulty is to try to produce sounds that are not in my own language and that I haven't got accustomed to hearing from an early age. I simply can't do it with most of them. But when Eliza Doolittle says, for example, that "the ryne in spine sties minely in the pline", although it's all wrong, I don't think she is uttering any sound that doesn't belong to "normal" English; only that she uses them where they don't belong. (Although, of course, I'm on dangerous ground here; I know very little about English accents and my ear isn't sharp, to say the least, so maybe Eliza's speech is full of non-standard sounds.)
| Tallulah Tam wrote: |
My handy encyclopedia is Macmillan's, and it only lists Sir Rex Harrison, (Reginald Carey Harrison) as a British actor, followed by his achievements. It does not mention his place of birth. But actors are usually exceptionally good at mimicry (although Robert Redford refused to learn a British accent for his part in "Out of Africa"). Sir John Mills for instance was never heard speaking in any other accent but what was considered to be a high class English accent, except if the part called for it, such as in "Ryan's Daughter, but someone once commented that his natural accent was quite a strong West Country accent. James Mason is yet another example who killed his Huddersfield accent to play upper class British gentlemen in his films. The first time I heard James Mason speak with a flat accent (in a film) I was quite shocked! As you say, it would have been "a bit shocking" to have heard Rex Harrison speak with a Liverpudlian accent.
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Rex Harrison was born very near Liverpool (in a place called Huyton, I think), but what I don't know is what is considered the scouse area. I suppose that, even if it's not properly a Scouser, Rex Harrison's accent can't be very different from it... Now that you mention all those examples of actors' accents, I realize that watching all the films dubbed doesn't help to learn to speak English, does it? I think I have seen less than ten films in English in all my life. There are some cinemas that show films with subtitles (not in my town), but I loathe them. I'm not used to it, so when I go to one of these cinemas I cannot watch the film, I spend all my time reading the subtitles! "My Fair Lady" is one of the exceptions; I bought the DVD and now I almost know it by heart in English.
(Now starts the off-topic section. My apologies!)
As to the film "Pygmalion", I recorded it from the TV a couple of years ago, only to find that, with those nasty timetables, the film had started more than one hour too late, and I could only see the beginning. So I cannot compare it to "My Fair Lady". But I had already heard that it was much more faithful to Shaw's play than "My Fair Lady". Probably, "Pygmalion" expresses much better Eliza's pride, intelligence, idependence, etc. As Shaw said at the end of the play, "Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable" (I liked it, so I learned it by heart). However, Alan Jay Lerner preferred his own ending (which I have found purists and feminists equally abhor ). When he wrote "My Fair Lady" (the theatre play) he explained how Shaw had written a sequel in which Eliza ends up with Freddy and not with Higgins. Lerner also said "Shaw and Heaven forgive me!, I am not certain he is right" (once again, I liked it ). I suppose that's the schmaltzy in me, but I prefer "My Fair Lady"'s ending! As to the scenes that quotation mentions... "Stiff and affected"... It's a good excuse to watch it all again, although I suspect what my verdict will be (I'm slightly partial to "My Fair Lady", hadn't you realized it?)