Elocution lessons
Grandad March 24th, 2009
I think I may have made a big mistake.
Over the weekend, I upgraded the software in my SatNav.
Those of you who have been following my ramblings will know how fond I am of Roger and his temperamental ways. You’ll know how I love pissing him off by refusing to follow his directions thereby giving him a hissy fit.
One aspect of Roger that I don’t think I mentioned before is his pronunciation.
Roger was obviously educated at one of those English public schools, and his diction is very precise. However, when it comes to place names outside the UK, he tends to get a bit pedantic. Irish place names give him a lot of grief, but the best of the lot are the French names.
When we brought Roger to France, he did his best. His best wasn’t good enough though, and Herself and I frequently pissed ourselves at his attempts to cope with French pronunciation.
Places like Rue des Rosiers , which should be ‘roo de rossyay’ became ‘roo-way dee rozziers’. Boulevard Périphérique and the like used to tie him up in knots altogether.
As I was saying, I upgraded the software. The first thing I noticed is that Roger is now very accurate about speed limits. He used to be fairly iffy about that and only used to display speed limits on motorways. Now he is displaying them all the time, which is handy. As we all know, they love to change speed limits frequently and illogically here in Ireland, so he has his work cut out.
The next thing I noticed was that the roads have all been updated. This saddened me, as I enjoyed driving on new roads that Roger didn’t know about. He used to think I was driving across fields, and that always sent him into an apoplectic fit. He used to plead with me to drive to the nearest road and eventually would break down in tears. I will miss that.
The other thing I discovered was that he was no longer giving phonetic pronunciations of Irish place names. I was impressed. He was speaking the names like he had been reared here. If it weren’t for the accent, I’d say he was a local.
But then I had that sinking feeling – had he learned how to pronounce French names?
When I drive in France this summer, will I be going through ‘anjey’ and ‘pwatyay’ instead of ‘angers’ and ‘po-otyerz’?
I hope not.
That would be so dull.
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