コックニーのh-droppingとは?

RadioETC/PODCASTING

名探偵シャーロック・ホームズを現代のイギリスに蘇らせたBBCのテレビドラマ『Sherlock』を観ながら、ETC英会話のトニー先生のレッスンを受けています。

今日はこんなダイアログから。

CABBIE:　Taxi for Sherlock Holmes.
SHERLOCK:　I didn’t order a taxi.
CABBIE:　Doesn’t mean you don’t need one.
SHERLOCK:　You’re the cabbie. The one who stopped outside Northumberland Street. It was you. Not your passenger.
CABBIE:　See? No one ever thinks about the cabbie. It’s like you’re invisible. Just the back of an ‘ead. Proper advantage for a serial killer.
SHERLOCK:　Is this a confession?
CABBIE:　Oh, yeah. I’ll tell you what else… If you call the coppers now, I won’t run. I’ll sit quiet, and they can take me down, I promise.

コックニーの特徴の一つ、hの発音が抜け落ちるh-droppingについて説明をしていただきました。

Transcript

Because they know you are a foreigner, they won’t change for you to understand.
They will speak exactly like they speak.

先生の自宅でゆったりマンツーマン英会話プライベートレッスン
オンラインレッスンも！

時間・場所・その他条件にあった先生のお問い合わせはお気軽にどうぞ

That’s not English, no.
“Cor, stone the crows mate. What are the bleeding hell.”
They say things like, so many expressions on top of their strange way of speaking.
So they never say, never really speaking the correct.
It’s very difficult, yeah, yeah, very difficult.

OK, you mentioned about “H-dropping”.
OK, “H” is, basically it all comes from a laziness originally, I think.
But it turns into the language.
Then and after through generations, it becomes not a laziness.
It just becomes an accent the way people speak, like I am from Huddersfield.
But nobody in Huddersfield pronounce their “H”s.
It almost like, they are very poor, we make a joke, they are very poor of the north England, because they can not buy “H”s, that is why they can not use, because they can not afford to buy them.
So “I come from Huddersfield”.
So it will be “Uddersfield”.
And “house”, “ouse”, “head”, “ead”.
Basically you just throw away the “H”s.
Like I said, now they emphasized it.
It is not laziness.
Because now they actually put even a big emphasis on, “I am going to the Ouse”.
“I am going to my Ouse”.
They could say “house”.
It is not that difficult, but now they deliberately don’t put it on purpose.
It becomes uhm, it just becomes their way of talking.
Now they exaggerate their way of talk, yes.