Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 January 2004

A Lexicographer writes

issue 24 January 2004

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle was practising her vowels for Rex Harrison as Professor Pickering in a bit of My Fair Lady that I came across on the television the other day. If Eliza was to pass for a duchess, it was a very sensible thing to do. But the film represented her pronouncing the names of the vowels instead of their sounds. From the start Eliza said the name of ‘a’ very much as Pickering did. It wasn’t that, but the give-away sound of ‘a’ in words like lady, that she would have to change.

I noticed this little piece of illogicality when I was thinking about our names for the letters of the alphabet. We learn to name them as children, but we seldom write the names, and indeed can hardly agree how to. We can write em but must resort to inverted commas or some such shift for letters such as ‘b’.

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