Eivind Solfjell
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2013–2016
6:03 · 1M views · Oct 29, 2011
A scene from My Fair Lady in which Professor Higgins meets Colonel Pickering and Doolittle, singing about how the English fail to speak their own language properly. It has English subtitles.
Cited as the classic illustration of accent, class and prejudice in how people speak.
4 comments from Hacker News
I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913). Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their best opportunities ever to thrive in North American capital/recruiting/selling markets – and earlier generations of investors would have offered even harsher assessments about the impact of strong accents. One of the points I was making with the My Fair Lady -themed joke in another thread (the SayAfter.me accent training offer) was that this is an eternal issue. Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters; condemned by every syllable she utters… this video That film came out in 1964 (winning Best Picture), based on a 1956 stage musical, based on a 1913 play ( Pygmalion ). The same ideas about accent and career-success go back further, and easily translate to many other languages and cultures. Of course, an uneducated native (or disadvantaged local group dialect ) accent is a different thing than a non-native accent. A non-native accent is more likel
From the article: "Most people are very ignorant of the norms and values of the social classes more than one degree above or below their own." Somewhere, there must be a "how to" guide for social class. There's a questionnaire, but other than some meaningless content on Quora, not much guidance.[1] Where there is guidance, it's about language usage.[2] The classic on this being, of course, "My Fair Lady"[1]. This is less of an issue since TV and movies imposed a standard linguistic dialect. The author likes Paul Fussell's "Class", which is an excellent read. It's quite funny. Social class is less social than it used to be, and more marketed. As a horse owner, I've seen this change since the 1980s. In the 1980s, it would have been considered tacky to have advertising at a horse show. Now, Rolex ads are all over the place. Polo is the classic upper class sport (Silicon Valley has three polo fields), but polo players are usually people who were football jocks in high school, but not college. Well into the 1980s, regular customers could sign their register receipts at Roberts of Woodside (a supermarket with an excellent deli) and be billed monthly. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video
In bigger cities like Rome it is not hard to tell which suburb you are from or you have spent your childhood in from your accent and choice of words. But then, isn't it the same with English in England? this video
Thanks! To help those who know the recent kerfluffle moreso than My Fair Lady : "Why Can't The English Learn To Speak" this video