ANNE NOLAN,
Madam, - Last night I attended the Abbey Theatre's current production of Marina Carr's play Ariel. The actors directed by Conall Morrison, sought to reproduce the regional accent of the characters, pronouncing tea as tay, leave as lave and so on.
A serious error in this attempt to reproduce the local or dialect pronounciation was that in all or many words containing the vowel "e" as in "see", this vowel was transformed to "a" as in "age", even in cases where the words are never pronounced like this in authentic speech.
Thus we had belave for believe, betwain for between, spaich for speech, fade for feed, ait for eat, kape for keep, blade for bleed, nade for need, squayse for squeeze, and even bape for beep.
The "broad" pronunciations in question are in reality archaisms, having been the standard English pronunciation up to the 17th century. The original pronunciations are still reflected in the spelling. The rule is: where the spelling contains an "a" this reflects an archaic pronunciation which is still heard in regional speech. If there is no "a" in the spelling, it is not pronounced either.
Thus one may say mane for mean, spake for speak, drame for dream and clane for clean, though squakey clane seems a bit improbable. And bape is not only wrong by this rule: as a recent coinage it does not have an archaic version.
The National Theatre seems to have a similar problem with regional place names. In a production of Synge's Playboy a couple of years ago in the Peacock the name of Nephin, the mountain in County Mayo, was pronounced Neffin, the fada being removed from the "e", as it were. To get it really right the "n" should be slender: "nyayfin". But that might be expecting too much! - Yours, etc.,
ANNE NOLAN,
Cathal Brugha Street,
Dublin 1.