The Rain in Spain

Just as I am taking French lessons through the City Hall of Paris, my wife Claire is taking English lessons! Her English is already pretty darn good as it is--in fact, she reads about 25 times more (in English) than I do--but she never bothered to learn all the hard-core grammar and therefore will occasionally make minor errors while speaking or writing. Anyways, her English class tonight went to a British play, and I tagged along, thinking it might be novel to view some entertainment in good old English.

We saw the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion at the Theater de Menilmontant. It is the story of a phonetics/linguistics expert named Henry Higgings who takes on as his project a poor flower girl named Eliza Doolittle in an attempt to convert her into a high society lady by teaching her how to talk without her low-brow Cockney accent. Accents are interesting to people learning a foreign language--they are notoriously difficult to detect. Even for my wife Claire, who is definitely fluent, has trouble distinguishing a British from an American accent at times. I am told that there are (not surprisingly) a wide variety of French accents--perhaps most notably a southern accent which involves, as best as I can tell, pronouncing the "e's" at the ends of words which are not normally pronounced--but my lack of training prevents me from recognizing them.

French for the Day: the word for "love at first sight" in French is "le coup de foudre"--literally, "the bolt of lightning." Nice imagery.