the rian in Spain fals manly on the plane. The song is a turning point in the plotline of the musical. Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering have been drilling Eliza Doolittle incessantly with speech exercises, trying to break her Cockney accent speech pattern. The key lyric in the song is The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, which contains five words that a Cockney would pronounce with an [aɪ] – more like eye than the Received Pronunciation diphthong [eɪ]. With the three of them nearly exhausted, Eliza finally gets it, and recites the sentence with all long-as. The trio breaks into song, repeating this key phrase as well as singing other exercises correctly, such as In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen, and How kind of you to let me come, in which Eliza had failed before by dropping the leading H. According to The Disciple and His Devil, the biography of Gabriel Pascal by his wife Valerie, it was Gabriel Pascal who introduced the famous phonetic exercises The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain and In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen into Pygmalion in 1938, the first of which wound up leading to the song in My Fair Lady.[1] Spanish rain does not actually stay mainly in the plain. It falls mainly in the northern mountains.[2] In Spanish, the phrase was translated as La lluvia en Sevilla es una maravilla (The rain in Seville is marvelous). The lyric about Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire implicates (but does not entail) that hurricanes ever occur at all in these areas. This implicature is false, as the only hurricane force (≥64 knot) winds that do occur in these areas (in the UK) result from extratropical cyclones, which differ from hurricanes in their causes and dynamics.[3]
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 20:55:06 +0000
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