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Fix Henry Higgins guessing abilities in the README.md #108

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marnovo opened this issue Sep 28, 2017 · 1 comment
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Fix Henry Higgins guessing abilities in the README.md #108

marnovo opened this issue Sep 28, 2017 · 1 comment

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@marnovo
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marnovo commented Sep 28, 2017

From the readme:

Why Enry?

In the movie My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins is one of the main characters. Henry is a linguist and at the very beginning of the movie enjoys guessing the nationality of people based on their accent.

Enry Iggins is how Eliza Doolittle, pronounces the name of the Professor during the first half of the movie.

Is he really guessing nationality or more like neighborhood where the person was raised?

Higgins claims that his knowledge of ‘simple phonetics’ (a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the nature, production, and perception of sounds of speech) allows him to deduce a person’s origins to within six miles. Within London, he says, he can place a man within two miles, ‘sometimes within two streets’. It’s this knowledge that he uses to transform Eliza Doolittle into a socially acceptable semblance of a ‘lady’. The character of Higgins is said to have been inspired by Henry Sweet (1845–1912), a great phonetician whose works, including his History of English

Source: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/03/my-fair-lady/

@abeaumont
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Feel free to open a PR with a better answer.

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