Soft R’s

In an episode of Dollhouse I watched just before we left the U.S., Adele Dewitt, the very proper, very British director of the Dollhouse proclaims in a drug-induced rant: “I don’t say hard R’s.”

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot over the past couple of weeks. Indeed one of the major differences between British and American pronunciation of English is in the “R.” Final R’s are always soft, sometimes disappearing entirely.

“Dis-app-earr” = American. “Dis-app-eah” = British.

While I enjoy the soft R, it has confounded Sam a bit. One of her treats here in Brighton is that she gets to watch a little bit of telly in the early evening while I make dinner. We don’t have a telly or a t.v. in California, so it is indeed a treat. We also don’t have CBeebies programming. While Sam still loves Charlie and Lola as much as she did last year, this time around her favorite show is Chuggington— a 10-minute cartoon about a group of talking trains. (Much more palatable than poor old Thomas and Friends, in my opinion).

Anyway, the deal is that Sam gets to watch two shows while I make dinner, and then over the meal she tells me about them. This has become an enjoyable routine for both of us, since I like hearing what she’s processed from the programs and she likes embellishing the stories. Usually I can tell when her narration deviates from the storyline into the Sammy imaginary story, but sometimes I can’t.

The other night she was telling me the names of some of the Chuggington trains. “And, Mommy, there’s a train named Dumbo!”

I really doubted that, but I didn’t contradict her. Then a few days later we were talking about Chugginton with my one Mum friend here. She said that her favorite train was the Scottish one– Dunbar.

“Ah, Sammy,” I said. “It’s not Dumbo, it’s Dunbar.”

“NO!” she was pretty emphatic. “His name is Dumbo.”

Then yesterday she got to watch the very beginning of a show called “Sixty-four Zoo Lane” because I was running late with the meal preparation. When I shut the telly off, she cried, “But Mommy I really LIKE “60 Paws Zoo Lane!”

“It’s time for dinner,” I said. “And it’s Sixty-FOUR Zoo Lane.”

“NO!!”

I didn’t argue with a girl who needed her dinner. But I did wonder about her hearing. Then I thought of Ms. Dewitt and her soft R’s.

“Dunbah” the Scottish train might really sound like “Dumbo” to a 3.5 year old American girl. And when I listened to the opening music of “Sixty-four Zoo Lane,” it did sound like “Sixty-faw.”

So I’ll cut her some slack in her auditory processing of the soft R’s. After all, this evening when she was telling me about today’s episode of “In the Night Garden,” she used an English word that I rarely think to use, if ever, and didn’t know that she knew:

“Mommy, the Tombliboos took a ride on the Ninky-Nonk and their trousers fell off!”

Can you guess which word astounded me? It was neither Tombliboos nor Ninky-Nonk, I’m afraid. Just regular old “trousers.” So much more elegant than “pants.” And you know what? Sam pronounced it “trousahs.”

My daughter’s English is being corrupted by the telly.