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‘My wife is an arse,’ said the Swahili teacher on the radio. I
suddenly woke up,’Mke wangu ni mwuguzi,’ he repeated, ‘My wife is an arse
‘ His wife was really a nurse, but the ur sound does not occur in Swahili.
Speakers of Swahili and many other African languages have a deaf spot for
it.

We all have deaf spots – not just those strange sounds that we cannot
pronounce, but the differences that we cannot hear. That we cannot hear
them is incomprehensible to native speakers of the language where such differences
matter.

Through no fault of my own, I was once teaching biology to a class of
African students. They all spoke three languages – Swahili, English and
their mother tongues – while I could claim only English. ‘I’ll fix them,’
I thought, and wrote ‘Hut hat hurt heart’ on the blackboard. To them they
were all haat; African languages have only five vowels. The Italians, too,
have only five vowels, and the difference between ‘sheet’ and ‘shit’ can
be deduced only from the context. Danes have myriads of vowels which all
sound the same to me. But ask them to repeat ‘rapid rabid rabbit wrap it’,
they say rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit.

Children do not learn languages faster than adults, but they learn them
better. This is partly because their brains are still in the programming
stage, building a repertoire of sounds which they will be able to recognise
and reproduce for the rest of their lives. Once programmed, that’s that.
New sounds cannot easily be accommodated. The deaf spots start to appear
when children learn to read. It is as if they stop using their ears. The
sounds in their program become firmly attached to certain letters, and they
stay attached. When as adults, they see a word in a foreign language, they
want to pronounce the letters as their childhood program tells them. Some
people cannot change the program, no matter how clearly another pronunciation
is demonstrated – even if the correct sound exists in their own language
represented by a different letter. They imagine they hear something other
than what is said. In effect, they are deafened by the written word.

‘What is the difference between dock and dock?’ I was asked by a Dane.
Some Danes do not hear the difference between ‘dog’ and ‘duck’ because of
the way these words are written. ‘Duck’ rhymes very well (to my ears) with
tak spoken by a Dane. But knowing how it is written, they refuse to hear
it as it is spoken. The outcome can be hilarious. I once apologised (in
English) to a Dane for being delayed by the fog. ‘You were delayed by what?’
he asked.

‘Danish is easy,’ I was told by an Englishman. ‘You just put a hot
potato in your mouth and speak Norwegian.’ It is true. The written language
is very similar to Swedish, and virtually identical to Norwegian, but Danish
sounds totally different to both. It is what I call a rebel language. The
Danes wished to sound different, so they put hot potatoes in their mouths.
‘Oxford’ English is another – a dialect that arose because, it seems, some
people, consciously or unconsciously, wanted to sound distinguished. French
is related to other living Latin languages, such as Italian, Spanish and
Rumanian, but its pronunciation is bizarre. Cockney seems to be another
rebellious offshoot.

As far as their pronunciation goes, English and French are now way off
the beaten track, with the result that both we and the French tend to find
other languages difficult to pronounce. A Norwegian called Host once checked
into a French hotel. The concierge was defeated. To a French speaker the
H is not pronounced, neither are the consonants at the end, so that left
only the o, which had been crossed out, so there was nothing left to pronounce.

The letter h doesn’t represent a proper sound to the French (or to the
Italians). It is just a puff of hot air. In desperation they scatter h sounds
at random as they speak English, in the hope that some of them will land
in the right place. We find it unfathomable that such a simple sound can
cause so much difficulty. I once tried to follow a French news bulletin
which had much to say about a Monsieur Iss, of whom I had never heard. It
was Mr Heath, the former prime minister.

Arabic must be a nightmare for the French. There are, in fact, three
different h sounds, and four different ths. The first h is like ours; the
second is like the Spanish; the third is like the German ch in Bach. (I
am sure the French could pronounce the last one if they realised it was
just their own r unvoiced. They are deafened by the way it is written.)
The Arabs have the French r but because it is transliterated as ‘gh’, the
French again think they cannot pronounce it.

The Arabs laugh at the English for being unable to distinguish between
their two t’s, two s’s and two d’s. And yet with all these consonants they
have no v and no p. The b sound takes p’s place, and bees are bicked in
bods. ‘Mr Peter’ tends to be Master Bater, and in the southern dialect ‘John
Major’ emerges as Goon Nugger.

Many Africans share with the Japanese a delightful confusion of the
English l and r. A Kenya Airways hostess announced on arrival in London:
‘We hope you have a good fright, and that you will fry with us next time.’
Perhaps it isn’t surprising they have problems when it comes to a general
election. Moreover, Africans tend not to distinguish between d and nd or
between b and mb. Given also the tendency to follow consonants with an i,
blood becomes brandy, and Land-Rover becomes Randy Lover.

My wife has the solution to such international misunderstandings. Play
every baby a recording of the world’s major languages daily before breakfast,
between birth and their fourth birthday. Not to be confused with bathday,
if you’re African.

Martin Gregory is a veterinary epidemiologist, formerly based in the
Yemen and now in France.