You Say Potato, page 12
How to tell a South African from a Brit
There’s a wide range of accents here, reflecting the ‘rainbow’ character of the culture. At one extreme, some South African speakers have conservative accents that sound very like RP. At the other, there are accents strongly influenced by Afrikaans or by one of the various African languages spoken in the country.
• The raising of a and e vowels, heard in New Zealand, is found in South Africa too, so pat sounds more like RP pet and pet more like RP pit. There’s an old witticism which is actually quite useful to outsiders who want to fix this pair of changes in their ears. For South Africans, it’s said, sex is what you carry coal in, while six is needed for procreation! So what happens to pit in these circumstances? That vowel becomes more central (more like the). Rawbone Malong wrote the South African equivalent to Let Stalk Strine: he called it Ah Big Yaws (I Beg Yours; i.e. pardon), and you can see that vowel quality in some of his ‘translations’ from Standard English. Look at what happens to it when ‘Would you mind passing it to me?’ becomes ‘Chuck a tear’.
• The puff of air that follows the articulation of the voiceless consonants at the beginning of words like pit, tip, and cot in RP is called aspiration. (You can feel it if you hold the back of your hand up to your mouth while saying these words. The effect isn’t there when you say the voiced sounds bit, dip, or got). This doesn’t usually happen in South African English, which is why outsiders sometimes mishear pat as bat, and so on.
• The most distinctive feature of the accent lies in its rhythm, which is much more staccato than in RP. The British accent has a ‘tum-te-tum’ rhythmical character – as heard in most of Shakespeare, for example (‘To be or not to be . . .’) – with the stressed syllables separated by unstressed syllables. South African English has a ‘rat-a-tat-a-tat’ character, with each syllable carrying a stronger degree of stress. The same kind of effect (linguists call it ‘syllable-timed’ rhythm) can also be heard in Indian English and Caribbean English.
PART THREE
ACCENTS PAST
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
DAVID There have always been accents. There was never a time when just one accent was used by everyone who spoke English. We can deduce this from the way the language first arrived in Britain. After the Romans left the British Isles, the Britons living in what is now England were attacked by tribes from the north (the Picts and Scots), and appealed for help from the Saxon peoples living in the north of mainland Europe. The first ships arrived in AD 449, and others followed, landing in different parts of the south and east coasts.
The historian Bede tells us that the new arrivals were from ‘the three most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes’. He goes on to suggest that the Jutes settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight, the Saxons across the southern counties, and the Angles in the east, midlands, and north. We have to take his descriptions with a large pinch of salt, for we know very little about the tribes he names, and he was in any case writing some 300 years later. But it’s clear that the Anglo-Saxons, as they came to be called – a name that distinguished them from the continental Saxons – were a diverse lot, who must have spoken different dialects. And when their language was first written down, starting in the seventh century, we see signs of the different accents reflected in the spellings used by the scribes.
Only around 3,000 manuscripts survive from those early days, in the period from 600 to 1150, known as Old English – around three million words. That seems like a lot until we reflect that this is less than a single modern author might write. Charles Dickens, for instance, penned over four million. But four main dialects emerge out of the Anglo-Saxon darkness: Kentish, in the south-east; West Saxon, across the south, in such areas as modern Hampshire and Sussex; Mercian, across the Midlands; and Northumbrian, in the north-east. There would have been other dialects too, but the texts we have reflect the locations of the monasteries where the scribes were writing.
There was no standard spelling in those days, so the scribes used whatever letters they felt best represented the sounds they heard, and did this in a very systematic way. The word for a ‘stone’ was spelled ston in the south and stan in the north. We can still hear it pronounced that way in Scotland, in Northern Ireland, and parts of north-east England. The Irish folk-singer Johnny McEvoy has it in the title of his Scottish epic, ‘The Wee Magic Stane’. And ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’ is, in Scots, ‘A rowin stane gaithers nae fug’.
We can see three accents in the surviving manuscripts of the Lord’s Prayer. In a West Saxon version the first line appears like this:
fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum
(literally: father our, you who art in heaven).
In a Mercian text, it is like this:
feder ure þu eart in heofenum
and in a Northumbrian text, it is like this:
fader urer ðu art in heofnum.
We can work out from the spellings that the vowel of ‘father’ in Northumbria was made with the tongue low down and central in the mouth, similar to what we hear when people from the north of England today say a word like cap. In Mercia, it was higher up and further forward, more like the vowel in set, as pronounced in present-day RP. And in West Saxon, it was somewhere in between – more like the vowel of man in RP.
THE SHAKESPEARE SOUND
BEN The room is dark, candles littered around the space. The actors I’ve been working with for the last few weeks are nervous, but excited. We’re about to do something that so many actors strive for, but few attain: something brand new with Shakespeare. We’re about to recite one of Shakespeare’s plays in the reconstructed accent that he and his company of fellow Elizabethan actors would actually have spoken in.
After rehearsal the night before, we had retired to the tavern across the road to divvy up the spear-carrier parts of The Tragedy of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Each actor had learned his or her own lines, and the cues of when to speak, but we’d only rehearsed the dances and the fights en masse, and no traditional rehearsal or run-through of the scenes had taken place. The first time we would speak our lines to each other would be in front of our waiting, candlelit audience, and so it would also be the first time that we as a Company would hear the play as a whole. And the first time anyone has heard this play in OP – Original Pronunciation – for 400 years.
Hilton, playing Gower, shuffles into the centre of the stage. He opens his mouth, and begins to speak:
To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come.
In OP, the word Gower is pronounced ‘Gohrrr’ – and the sound sends a bolt of electricity around the room, striking back at the stage beneath our feet and sizzling Shakespeare’s chorus into life like Shelley’s monster, while Hilton begins to move about the stage with a physicality like nothing I’ve ever seen before . . .
When Dad first started exploring ‘OP’ in workshops at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2004, I didn’t, to my shame, pay much attention.28 But family rivalry aside, it’s also fair to say that, in hearing about Dad’s work, I had fundamentally misunderstood the point of OP. As I said earlier, I’d sometimes used my home-town accent when privately rehearsing audition speeches for productions of Shakespeare, but I’d never used it in the audition itself, let alone the growling, earthier tones of OP.
Said aloud, would Shakespeare’s accent even be understood nowadays? Or would it sound like your English Literature teacher trying to read out Chaucer? Secondly, I have to admit that I couldn’t yet see the dramaturgical use, either. Yes, it’s interesting to see actors in ‘original practice’ costumes, doublet-and-hosed up to the neck, but it doesn’t necessarily make Shakespeare any more accessible to young minds, addled from years of having to read plays out loud behind desks in a classroom.
And then, one day, I read a line in one of Dad’s books about the Globe exploration into how Shakespeare himself might have spoken:29‘The lack of an upper-class accent is the single biggest barrier to thinking ourselves into the auditory mindset of the Elizabethans.’
What Dad was saying is that, as far as we can tell, there was no ‘upper-class accent’ in Shakespeare’s time – and that means that back then, if you wanted to act like a king or a commoner, you couldn’t simply use an accent to demonstrate your social standing. ‘So how do we show who’s King or who’s not?’, asked an actor.
‘Act,’ said the director.
This caught my attention. One day soon after that, Dad came back from a rehearsal at the Globe.
D – The Master of Movement30 was in today.
– Oh yeah?
D – Yes – you’ll like this – she leant over as they were doing a run-through of the play, and whispered, ‘My goodness, the actors are moving differently.’
My ears pricked up. This idea – that speaking Shakespeare in the accent that the plays were originally written for might provoke a different movement dynamic in actors – made sense with an almost audible click. Ever since then I have been on a different path with Shakespeare.
Having initially hated him at school, as I grew older I discovered a joy in his works in their natural context – acting them, in other words. I spent years taking workshops with physical theatre companies, learning a new movement craft and trying to find ways to combine great verse-speaking with great movement, to move away from the stand-stock-still-and-declaim style of performing Shakespeare. And yet, even as I grew closer to his work, I had a sense that something was missing. I perhaps hadn’t been able to articulate it at the time, but speaking Shakespeare in RP, much like the idea of a doublet and hose, had always felt unnecessarily restrictive to me. Dad’s work suddenly made the plays feel relevant in a way they never had before.
It was beautiful, actually. Dad has always said he lives his acting life through me by proxy (which is how I first learnt the word), and the frustrated actor inside of him was sated as the cast dragged him – literally – onto the stage in front of a full cheering house at the last OP performance. My dad, the Master of Pronunciation at Shakespeare’s Globe. That is a pride-maker.
We have a pretty good idea of how OP sounds, but I’ll leave it to Dad to play Sherlock Holmes to my—
D – Watson?
. . . Moriarty, with the linguistic clues. The thing that bakes my biscuit is how it feels to dust these old words down, and speak them to an audience.
Original Pronunciation, with its vowels further back and lower in the mouth, activates the lower register in your voice (a much more useful vocal range for, say, projecting it into a circular outdoor Globe-like theatre space). This shifts your acting centre (the focal point of your energy) from up in the throat to down into your gut and groin. In turn, this makes actors earthier and rougher in their delivery, an ocean’s leap away from the careful, stiffly delivered stance that RP so often generates.
Combine all that with Hamlet’s recommendation to ‘Speak the speech I pray you, as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue, but do not mouth it as many of our players do . . .’31 and you have actors, boy and girl, making heartfelt, earthy, practical choices with their interpretations, being clearly heard despite speaking fast32, and most of all, moving around the stage with drive and purpose. Hamlet becomes the action hero, rather than the indecisive, passive over-thinker:
Tuh be ohr nat tuh be, that is the kwestyun . . .
A lower centre of gravity, a deeper voice, more natural colour,33 the subsequent honest interpretation of the lines – and because you’re moving differently, sounding differently, and vocalizing differently, the words feel new and sparkle in the air. They feel crumbly and chewy in your mouth, like listening to a kindly old train conductor. You begin to understand the characters’ words as human speech rather than as lines of poetry . . .
. . . which is the point where I hand over the metaphorical reins of this physiological linguistic phenomenon to my father, who will hopefully explain just why this happens, before I wade too far out of my acting shallows into the darker, murkier waters of Dad’s pools.
DAVID It’s well worthwhile trying to record accents before they disappear. That’s what made the BBC Voices project of 2005 so appealing. It was the first nationwide attempt to take, as it were, an ‘auditory snapshot’ of accents and dialects in the UK. In fifty years, it will be an invaluable record of the way people spoke at the beginning of the century.
If only we had such a record from times past – from the 1940s, say, or the 1930s. The few radio recordings we have from those decades are only the tiniest tip of the accent iceberg. We shall never know how the mass of ordinary people spoke across the whole country in the 1930s. But even fragments of audio recordings from earlier times are better than nothing.
How far back can we listen? In theory, 1877, when Thomas Alvar Edison invented a means of recording sound. But not much has survived. One of the earliest examples is a phonographic cylinder recorded on 30 July 1890. On it you can hear the voice of Florence Nightingale.
In May of that year it was reported in the press that many veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War were living in appalling poverty. Despite public outrage, the government failed to act, so the St James’s Gazette set up the Light Brigade Relief Fund. Edison’s representative in Britain arranged for three recordings to be made to support the fund. One was of a veteran trumpeter sounding the charge as heard at Balaclava. Another was of Lord Tennyson reading his poem about the event. And the third was a message from Miss Nightingale to the veterans, recorded at her home at 10 South Street, off Park Lane in London.
We hear her saying her name and the date, and then, ‘When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore. Florence Nightingale.’ Her accent is reminiscent of the voices heard in early BBC recordings of the 1920s. She says thirtieth with the first vowel close to the one in modern car. Ninety ends with a short open vowel, rhyming more with modern say than see. If only there were more of it recorded. The fragment we have of this century-old accent is tantalizing.
And that’s it. To find out how people spoke before the 1870s we have to rely on other sources of evidence and our own powers of deduction as accentologists. Sherlock again.
The sources
The big dictionaries written since the eighteenth century can tell us a lot, as the editors would include a pronunciation for each of the words. It would be a personal view, of course, and the focus would be on just one accent, but this would usually be enough to identify earlier pronunciations of words that have since changed their sound. We find them describing the pronunciation of oblige as obleege, daughters as darters, and china as chayney, and showing how the stress pattern of certain words was different from what it is today, as in balCOny and comPENsate. We can even sometimes date the change: dictionaries published before 1800 show balcony with the older stress pattern only; those after the 1850s show the new pattern only.
What the dictionaries say is sometimes reinforced by anecdotes. Additional evidence comes from the complaints people made about changes in pronunciation. In Recollections of the Table-talk of Samuel Rogers, published just after his death in 1855, we read:
The now fashionable pronunciation of several words is to me at least very offensive: CONtemplate – is bad enough; but BALcony makes me sick.
Before the era of big dictionaries, a surprising number of people wrote books or essays on pronunciation. Fascination with English accents isn’t solely a modern phenomenon. Variation and change intrigued observers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries too, especially if they were interested in how poetry was to be performed or if they were involved in proposals to reform English spelling. And the writers often give us very precise and detailed clues as to how words were pronounced in their day.
As an example, listen to this famous couplet from one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets – number 116, sometimes called the ‘marriage’ sonnet, because couples often ask for it to be read out on their wedding day. It begins, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments . . .’ and ends:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
A sonnet is supposed to rhyme, and here we have a couplet which doesn’t. What’s going on?
The pronunciation has changed since 1600, that’s all. But which way? Did love rhyme with prove – ‘loove’, as it were? Or did prove rhyme with love? It was the latter. How do we know? Because writers of the time tell us so. Ben Jonson, the playwright, also wrote an English grammar, and in the introduction to that work he goes through the letters of the alphabet and tells us how they are pronounced. When he gets to letter O, we read, ‘In the short time more flat, and akin to u; as . . . brother, love, prove’.
If we read through all the people who wrote about pronunciation in a particular period, we can piece together quite a good picture of the accents that were around at the time. The writers don’t always agree, of course – any more than they do today. Which is the modern pronunciation of again – rhyming with main or with men? Do you pronounce the t in often? Is it ‘shedule’ or ‘skedule’? But there’s agreement about most of the words in use today, and we see a similar agreement in earlier periods – certainly enough to reconstruct a plausible ‘original pronunciation’ of the time.
The deductions
