I meant to post this weekend, but I found myself in an epic battle with my computer on Saturday over its functionality. I eventually won, but there was much loss on both sides.
Anyway, as I waited for my computer to run diagnostics and fail to boot yet again, I read all of the play Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's a play about a professor of phonetics, Higgins, who decides to pass off a lower class Cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a duchess by teaching her how to speak like one. If this sounds familiar, you may have seen My Fair Lady, the musical based on the original play. It was made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.
The play was less about linguistics than I thought. The setup of a phonetics professor teaching a Cockney girl to speak as if she were upper class is a vehicle for a critique of the upper class which Eliza is striving to imitate. It does, however, highlight the way our language is not always the thing that most defines us.
In a previous post, I talked about the way people subconsciously judge people by the way they speak. The linguistics community tends to make much of this connection. While the way we speak is one of the main ways we are judged, it is not always the most important way. Eliza offers us a counterexample. Higgins can teach her how to say vowels and consonants like a duchess; he can even tell her which phrases mark her as a member of the lower class. However, it is Pickering (an expert in Indian dialects and a friend of Higgins) who really teaches Eliza to be a duchess, and she says as much in the final act. Pickering teaches Eliza self-respect by treating her like a duchess from the first rather than a low class woman. In the final test, it is that air of self-respect that truly marks Eliza as upper class, not the phonetics lessons.
Anyway, as I waited for my computer to run diagnostics and fail to boot yet again, I read all of the play Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's a play about a professor of phonetics, Higgins, who decides to pass off a lower class Cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a duchess by teaching her how to speak like one. If this sounds familiar, you may have seen My Fair Lady, the musical based on the original play. It was made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.
The play was less about linguistics than I thought. The setup of a phonetics professor teaching a Cockney girl to speak as if she were upper class is a vehicle for a critique of the upper class which Eliza is striving to imitate. It does, however, highlight the way our language is not always the thing that most defines us.
In a previous post, I talked about the way people subconsciously judge people by the way they speak. The linguistics community tends to make much of this connection. While the way we speak is one of the main ways we are judged, it is not always the most important way. Eliza offers us a counterexample. Higgins can teach her how to say vowels and consonants like a duchess; he can even tell her which phrases mark her as a member of the lower class. However, it is Pickering (an expert in Indian dialects and a friend of Higgins) who really teaches Eliza to be a duchess, and she says as much in the final act. Pickering teaches Eliza self-respect by treating her like a duchess from the first rather than a low class woman. In the final test, it is that air of self-respect that truly marks Eliza as upper class, not the phonetics lessons.
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