[Lexicog] "orientate" and orthoepists

[Mike Maxwell]

Chaz and Helga Mortensen wrote:
> Henry Higgins' character is based on the orthoepists...

More specifically, someone said that in his preface, Shaw said he based the
character of Henry Higgins on Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of
Visible Speech (and the father of the more famous Alexander Graham Bell).
There's a gif of a page describing Visible Speech (complete with a very
familiar looking face diagram) at

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=magbell&fileName=196/19600204/bellpage.db&RecNum=0

Having read the preface just now
(http://www.online-literature.com/george_bernard_shaw/pygmalion/0/), I
don't think that claim is valid.

Elsewhere I've heard that the character was based on Henry Sweet, although
Shaw writes in that preface:

    Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom
    the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible;
    still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in
    the play.

Further on in the preface, he writes:

    Of the later generations of phoneticians I know
    little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom
    perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies,
    though here again I must disclaim all portraiture.
    But if the play makes the public aware that there
    are such people as phoneticians, and that they are
    among the most important people in England at present,
    it will serve its turn.

So it sounds to me rather like Higgins was a composite character.
--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu



Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/