Basic HTML Version
On my recent Thames odyssey, Windsor to Lechlade
and back, we moored the first few nights at country
meadows and it wasn’t until Abingdon that we first
heard other people and they didn’t sound like us and
yet they live beside the same river as me. Melvyn
Bragg, the son of Carlisle working people, says that
it was the friction between his impenetrable home
dialect (much of it based on old Norse words) and his
grammar school that led to his lifelong interest in
language. I’m with him on that. I was growing up in
a working family on a South East London estate when
the 11 Plus picked me up and dropped me into a
middle class school where the governing coven soon
made it clear that things had to change. I was elocuted.
Locked for hours in the needlework room with Mavis
Hawkins, Speech & Drama teacher (we called it Spit
& Dribble) reading aloud from Frister & Rossmann
sewing machine posters I spent hours picking up the
aitches that had littered my childhood. I released my
glottal stops, learned to roll my
r’s
and weed out all
the words that didn’t really start with an
f
. I haven’t
sounded like anyone else in my family since and
I’ve been left with a lifelong fascination for accents.
It’s not all gone, some pronunciations are fossilized.
I still say
arst
instead of ask and
ll
nigh on always
forms a
w
, so that my name is
chywl.
The
l
is silent.
Once, guiding a group in my best elocuted English
I was asked if I was from Woolwich. Yes, I said, more
or less, thereabouts. The enquirer had worked on the
old Woolwich telephone exchange (on which we had
our party line) in the old
Hello Girls
days and there
was enough Woolwich hanging around my vowels for
her to recognise it like a Professor Higgins of the
Bakelite switchboard. So this month’s
Guided Tour
on Paper
while looking at where the English language
came from and how it developed is mostly interested
in what we actually sounded like through the ages
.
It’s Behind You!
What did cave men sound like? A rather curios
experiment was carried out at the University of
Amsterdam attempted to create the first words of
pre-historic men using puffs of air and plastic tubes.
Evolutionary changes to our vocal organs, namely the
shrinking of the balloon like air-sac, that apes and
other primates use to make deep booming sounds
leaving behind the bony hyoid bulla, a vestigial organ
like the tonsils or appendix, have enabled us to create
the rich mix of sounds that sets us apart from other
primates. Palaeontologists date the disappearance of
the air sac in humans to about 600,000 years ago.
The Dutch scientists puffed air along artificial vocal
tracts made from plastic tubes to make vowel sounds.
Half of the tubes had an extra chamber to mimic an
air sac and half didn’t. The scientists asked listeners
to identify the vowel sounds as background noise was
increased. They found that the air sac limited the
number of vowel sounds that could be identified and
concluded that early men with vocal tract air sacs
could create far fewer sounds and therefore probably
had smaller vocabularies. Survival of the fittest
suggests that more sounds and more words meant that
more information could be shared giving those
without air sacs a better chance of survival. Professor
Steven Pinker a Harvard evolutionary psychologist
believes that Homo sapiens arrived 100,000 years
ago with an innate gift of language and that it was the
fight for survival that led to the formation of our first
words and speech. With air sacs vowels tend to sound
like the u in
ugg
- the default cartoon caveman word
but Professor de Boer from Amsterdam thinks it’s
more likely that cavemen would have said
duh
as its
easier to form words when the vowel follows a
consonant and
d
works best with
u.
Hark At Us English