My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical film adaptation, starring Audrey Hepburn in the tittle role and based on the original 1913 stage play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.
This following song is full of prejudices:
Plot (does not spoils the end):
Professor Higgins bets against Coronel Pickering that he can turn Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower seller who speaks cockney, into a Lady by teaching her to speak "proper" English and thus make everyone believe that she is one. After a few weeks of hard work Eliza is even taken by a princess, and the young nobleman Freddy Eynsford-Hill falls in love with her. But then Higgins gets all the credits of the achievement and nobody congrat Eliza for her hard work, so she leaves Higgins, but she can’t come back to his old neighbour because everyone think she is a lady and she realize that it is not his place anymore.Comment:
The linguistic prejudices are an important subject in this movie. Eliza (the main character) lives in a poor neighbour and speaks cockney. Professor Higgins thinks that she is “killing the language of Shakespeare” speaking this way, so he tries to teach Eliza how to speak “properly” and make everyone think she is a Lady.This following song is full of prejudices:
In
this song Higgins even say that the English spoken in Scotland and Ireland is
very far from English, and the American don’t speak English anymore. Again
those are all prejudices. Of course the English spoke in Scotland, Ireland and
America are just different varieties or dialects of the English, as well as is
the cockney. As I have said, this song is full of prejudices that shouldn’t be took
seriously.
There is also an opposite prejudice, when the people at Buckingham suppose that Eliza is a Lady base just on the way she talks and acts.
In this movie we can also see an old laboratory of phonetics:
As well as the gadgets used to teach Eliza how to speak "properly":
(The xylophone is used to teach her the tones)
And the well-known quotable rhyme: The rain in spain stays mainly in the plain. (In Spanish: La lluvia en Sevilla es una pura maravilla.) While
in English this rhyme is used to teach Eliza the pronunciation of the vowels, in
Spanish it tries to teach her the difference between the pronunciations of “ll”
and “y” (as consonant), which nowadays has almost disappeared.
I'm just encouraging everyone to see this
movie, because it is a wonderful classic of the cinema that counts with a great
cast and it is very useful four our linguistic subject as well as entertaining.
