Some years after leaving Madras I happened to live in England for a while. It would come as no surprise that my initial days and weeks were a series of embarrassing moments. Looking for radish to buy for good old "mullangi sambhar" (my daughter observes that you can take a man out of Madras, but cant take Madras out of a man), I was asked by the shop assistant in a fairly posh accent - put on for a purpose, it wasn't her normal one- if I kept horses.The implication being that they only fed radish to horses and an Indian was unlikely to keep horses. Worse, whenever I tried to spell out the words which sounded unfamiliar to their English ears (years, as I would have said in my best Madras accent those days) I would start spelling them out and end up in a right soup: yea for an aye, eye for an ouy, yum, yex and so on. So I had to relearn the sounds of the queens language and its usage too. School dinners were at 12.30 pm, I ate the soup, and so on. So one had to neutralize the Madras accent in order not to stand out in public.
I returned to Chennai to the familiar sounds of yeas, bees, hetches, yems and yexes. Not to forget the Izzeds. The complete alphabet for those of my followers not from this part of the world is as follows:
yea, bee, see, dee, yee, yeff, gee, hetch, eye, jay, kay, yell, yem, yen, woh, pee, kyoo, are, yes, tee,yew, vee, doubleyew, yex, woy, izzed. The aitches and R's to be pronounced everywhere possible. That reminds me of a story an american colleague in London told me once . He had taken the obligatory trip to Scotland to trace his roots and admired the waitress' Scottish accent at the hotel where he was staying: "you roll your R's very well, young lady". Reportedly she replied very coyly "only when I wearr my heels sirrr". I think our ancestors in the South learnt English from Scottish missionaries in the nineteenth and early 20th centuries.
To paraphrase Mark Twain (I think it was), one travels the world in search of adventure and returns home to find it. In my case it is certainly true.
I returned to Chennai to the familiar sounds of yeas, bees, hetches, yems and yexes. Not to forget the Izzeds. The complete alphabet for those of my followers not from this part of the world is as follows:
yea, bee, see, dee, yee, yeff, gee, hetch, eye, jay, kay, yell, yem, yen, woh, pee, kyoo, are, yes, tee,yew, vee, doubleyew, yex, woy, izzed. The aitches and R's to be pronounced everywhere possible. That reminds me of a story an american colleague in London told me once . He had taken the obligatory trip to Scotland to trace his roots and admired the waitress' Scottish accent at the hotel where he was staying: "you roll your R's very well, young lady". Reportedly she replied very coyly "only when I wearr my heels sirrr". I think our ancestors in the South learnt English from Scottish missionaries in the nineteenth and early 20th centuries.
To paraphrase Mark Twain (I think it was), one travels the world in search of adventure and returns home to find it. In my case it is certainly true.
You could have tried barley for the sambar, too?
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