I thought Llandudno was full of arabs.
I thought it for a very, very long time and only realized that it was London not Llandudno when I saw a printed copy of the words a couple of years ago. I don’t think it even occurred to me before then that I might have been mis-hearing the name. It did seem a strange place to mention, but then there’s plenty else that’s strange (at least to a 10 year old’s ears) in that song, so why not Llandudno?
More recently I’ve been trying to understand why I didn’t hear the word London. And I think it’s at least partly because I have such a strange relationship with that place. And to some extent it’s that it simply doesn’t exist for me, in the same way that if you talk to someone from one particular village and ask them about their county, then they’ll struggle to answer because the county is not a homogeneous or coherent entity to them – it comprises lots of different parts each with quite different characteristics.
But this morning it came to me that actually my mis-hearing Llandudno in place of London just sums me up perfectly. It’s a perfect example of how I never understand anything anyone ever says to me because instead of the perfectly obvious and natural meaning that they intend, I hear some obscure variant that, with enough shoehorns, does actually fit to the words they’ve said. Just like the syllables of Llandudno do, if you try and make them, fit what is sung in that song. I guess it’s a kind of deafness (which reminds me of another story, for another day) and similarly infuriating, probably for the speaker who I’m misinterpreting and certainly for me. It’s difficult to understand where it’s come from, and very difficult to see how to shake it off. Any suggestions?
When I’m asked to explain how computers recognise speech (it’s a professional career), I try to get people to think of two electronic boxes, one feeding into the other.
The first box takes the speech coming in, analyses it at the level of a language’s individual sounds (phones/phonemes), and sends it on to the second box with some sort of indication of how confident it is about the string of sounds it’s detected, and what the most likely alternatives are.
The second box is where it gets interesting, for me anyway. This second box deals with the language at the word level, rather than the phone level. It knows what words are likely to be formed from which phones, and more than this it has some probability-based knowledge of what words are likely to follow one another. So in your example, I’d expect it to have a bias towards picking up ‘London is’ rather than ‘Llandudno is’, because it’ll have been told that far more sentences in English start that way. And it’ll have a go at stringing together the rest of the sentence in a similar way – ‘is full’ and ‘full of’ are common pairs of words in English, so I’d expect it to pick that up fairly well. And so on.
(That explanation’s slightly simplified, but not by much)
None of this answers the question of what on earth was going on in your brain all those years ago (I know far too many people who’d like to have a go at answering that, but I’m not one of them).
Given the detail of Rhys’s response perhaps I should clarify that I heard the line as "Llandudno’s full of arabs" – there was no is (and, indeed, there is no was, if that’s not too philosophical for a Friday).
Lanark, I have been convinced right up to the moment of reading your blog, that Llandudno was full of Arabs. Next you’ll be telling me that Jimi Hendrix didn’t ask to be excused while he kissed a guy! And that Desmond Dekker’s ears weren’t alight. Another day, another disillusionment…