Joe Bennett is admirable. He never misses a chance to make a joke. He gave me good laughter by saying things like: “After a hand of sausages and a flank of bacon I am greased like a Channel swimmer” (A LAND OF TWO HALVES, 40) or “I lunch on a slice of cheesecake that takes the enamel off my teeth, and two cups of coffee that replace it” (43). But his merit is not limited to such jocular utterances. He is pedagogic, too. He gave me the first-time-ever satisfactory explanation of what the kiwi accent is like.
"To generalize, the most distinctive kiwi characteristic is to move some vowels back one place on the palate. Thus pen becomes pin, tip becomes tup and bare becomes beer. But beer stays, more or less, as beer. Most kiwis rhyme here with there, ear with air. Ferry and fairly are homophones." (44)
My friend Yoko Nagao-Suzuki lectured me on the kiwi accent in Chicago in March, but at that time I was not exposed to the real kiwiphone space and didn’t get much of her message. (Yoko had received some of her high school education at a girl-only school in Wellington.) Now after 6 weeks in Auckland, Joe Bennett’s explanation really hits the point. How glad I am. Now I can move on from the recognition stage to the reproduction (phonetic) stage!
