Pygmalion | Page 4

South Bend, Indiana, USA

PYGMALION
BERNARD SHAW
1912
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: In the printed version of this text, all
apostrophes for contractions such as "can't", "wouldn't" and "he'd" were
omitted, to read as "cant", "wouldnt", and "hed". This etext edition
restores the omitted apostrophes.

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.
A Professor of Phonetics.
As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel,
which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for
their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell
it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is
impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some
other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are
accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.
The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast:
that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There

have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years
past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the
eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was
still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a
velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a
very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran,
were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a
young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as
conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His
great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his
job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps
enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for
all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of
Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute
rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the
Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to
commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his
subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive
attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet
regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous,
had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of
dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for
the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who
had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually
managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had
become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It
must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into
something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of
phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but
nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with
the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an
intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include
some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty
years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very
much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.
Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to the
patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may

be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the
Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such
as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a
cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then
write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with
boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant
but obviously was the word Result, as no other Word containing that
sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any
language spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller
indications was beyond Sweet's patience. Therefore, though the whole
point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in
the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your
hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with
which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever
angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this
remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it
in his own practice to