I remember watching My Fair Lady when I was a child. I remember the ridiculous outfits, and a feeling of general discomfort at the way old dude Henry Higgins bullies a young woman into being something she ain’t… isn’t. And he did it with science.



In fact, the film is grounded in rather authentic turn-of-the-century attitudes and applications of speech science. It is based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, and in that play Henry Higgins is based on phoneticians of the Victorian era, particularly Henry Sweet, who basically introduced Europe to phonetics.



above: phonetics in My Fair Lady, from Vincent van Heuven‘s Beyond the Segments page.

When they were adapting the musical for the Hollywood film they got none other than Peter Ladefoged, who had just started at UCLA, to come and consult on the film. For those who don’t know Ladefoged basically *was* phonetics in the 20th century. We used his textbook in undergrad, I don’t even know if there were other textbooks…

Anyway, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) wasn’t the default transcription form in the era My Fair Lady was set in, so Ladefoged helped the actors work with a combination of IPA and ‘Visible Speech’, an earlier transcription style. That notebook where Henry Higgins is writing down Eliza Doolittle’s speech at the start is actually full of Ladefoged’s handwriting.



above: a transcription in IPA and Visible Speec’ from My Fair Lady, written by Ladefoged. Taken from this interesting article with lots of trivia about the film.

Ladefoged has fond memories of working on the film, but not for the reasons you may expect:



Shortly after I went to UCLA I was hired as a consultant on the movie My Fair Lady. My job was to help Rex Harrison act like a Professor of Phonetics, pointing to the correct symbols and making transcriptions in appropriate notebooks. I explained that I was only a poor Assistant Professor of Phonetics, but if I were rich enough to have a butler and three singing maids, I would have handmade notebooks bound in green leather. Six such notebooks were made to my specification. Rex Harrison took one look at them and decided they were too big to go in his pocket. So I got a set of good notebooks for my own use.

(Peter Ladefoged, in Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques (Wiley-Blackwell), 2003, p. 28)

Update (May 2, 2016): For those reading this on Tumblr who can’t see our Disqus comments section, Catharine Cellier-Smart has chimed in with this helpful observation:

In his book ‘Wordsmiths & Warriors’, David Crystal says “If [Higgins] is anyone it has to be [Daniel] Jones”, and that the “Sweet myth is still widespread”. (By 'Sweet myth’ he means the fact that people think Higgins was based on Henry Sweet).

Thanks Catharine!

Update (Sept 11, 2016): Text has been updated to note that the IPA had been invented at the time My Fair Lady is set, and that it was used in conjunction with Visible Speech in the transcription. Thanks to Ben Zimmer for noting this (see the Disqus comments section for more).

