fun little linguistics anecdote:
before i was born my parents had dog they loved called
kelly. she was a border collie of the type my family more commonly described as a 'lassie dog'. possessed of a fierce temper and her species' characteristic mental instability,
kelly earned quite a reputation for her outlandish exploits, which included mistaking my sister's tennis
racquet for an attacker and her infamous leap from my parent's 1st-floor balcony upon hearing the hoover start up. however the story about
kelly which has stuck with me the most is a comic misunderstanding that took place on the sad day that she left this world for the great kennel in the sky.
a little background is necessary for this story to make sense. my dear mum was born and raised in the part of north
london known as
tottenham, most famous to non-
londoners for its football team. something that sets apart those who were raised in
tottenham from people like me who were raised in
london's rural urban fringe is naturally the different accents with which they speak, and as my ear for accents and love of linguistics has blossomed i have often inwardly taken note of the
peculiarities of my mum's speech.
perhaps the easiest to notice is her difficulty with diphthongs, and another is a
tendency to reduce the phoneme 'L' to a 'W' in most unstressed positions. put these two together and you have quite a phonological oddity. she would often correct me for talking about the 'vale' which can be seen from her bedroom window, admonishing that i had said the word for 'what a bride puts over her face'. i protested that veil is pronounced identically but she insisted that no, 'they have different a different consonant'. 'you mean a different vowel?' i asked, to which she replied in puzzlement 'different vale?' this
circuitous confusion took place several times before i realised that my mother's ear, "vale" and "vowel" are homophones, while "veil", perhaps because of its austere meaning and infrequent use, has a special
pronunciation reserved for it.
yet
oddlier, my mother's "vale" and "vowel" are also indistinguishable from her "vow", signifying her accent's desire to be rid of the pesky "L" altogether.
what does this have to do with
kelly the border collie? well, time for a little sad story.
kelly's adventurism finally got the better of her when she darted across the road into the path of a lorry, spooked by a champagne cork or something equally innocuous. my grieving mother and her two daughters wrapped the injured hound in a the first thing that came to hand: a gaudily decorated towel brought home from a recent vacation to
disneyworld (this was the 80s). they laid
kelly on the slab at the vet's office and waited outside for the doctor's verdict.
after a poignant half hour the vet came out and took my sobbing mother by the arm, sat her down, and let her know that they had had to let
kelly go. my mother's sobbing increased and my sisters hugged her. the young vet, hoping to alleviate the sadness somewhat, asked my mother,
"would you like to keep the towel?"
my mum's sobs turned into splutters of rage, and she choked out 'h-how... how could you offer something so... so beastly! don't you kn-know that the... l-last thing i would w-w-want to see is her p-poor, severed...'
luckily my sisters were raised in the same bi-
accental house that i was, and quickly explained to my mum that the vet was talking about the
disney souvenir, not her late pooch's appendage.
see, to my mum "towel" and "tail" are both pronounced exactly the same as the
greek letter "tau". funny what trouble can occur in a collision of the accents of people who grew up just in different parts of the same metropolis.
