Who is Roger Curry? And is he Canadian?
U.K. police seek help identifying elderly man
Police in rural England are begging the world for help in identifying a kindly old man who has no idea who he is and where he came from — but seems to sound a bit like a Canadian.
“This is a sad story of a man who has no identity,” Kieren Bodill of the West Mercia Police said in a statement to the National Post.
Roger Curry, as he is being called by police, was picked up near the city of Hereford under unusual circumstances. On Nov. 7, a man described as a “Canadian” flagged down an ambulance and placed Roger Curry into their care, saying he had found the elderly man wandering around. The mysterious Canadian has since vanished, although police are appealing for him to come forward.
The old man was in excellent condition. He was clean, shaven and wearing clothing from the U.K. retailer F&F. To staff at Hereford Hospital he appeared to say that his name was “Roger Curry.”
“He is saying very little but he speaks with either an American or Canadian accent,” read a public appeal by police.
Police remain unsure whether Roger Curry is the man’s name, or potentially the name of a friend. They have also looked into whether “Roger Curry” is a North American who might have a connection to the area via the nearby air force base. In 1942, RAF Hereford was used as an assembly point for officers proceeding to Canada for air training. The search through military records for relevant “Roger Currys” has proved inconclusive. Police have also been unable to match Curry to any missing persons cases.
“To be honest, the reasons for our appeal, is that we don’t know anything about him, and we don’t know if he has taken the name of someone else, or if he is in fact called Roger,” said Bodill.
Police were not even sure if the man has ever been to North America or is “purely mimicking the accent.”
An online video by BBC Midlands shows Curry saying a few broken phrases to staff with Herefordshire social service. “Yeah sure, boy,” he says at one point. At another, “pretty good, have you been in that house there?”
Although the evidence is slight, several linguists contacted by the National Post says the man’s Americanized pronunciation of “house” potentially disqualifies him as a Canuck. “If I had to guess based on these two seconds of speech, I’d guess this man is from what dialectologists call the ‘ midland’ region of the U. S.: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri,” wrote Aaron Dinkin, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, in an analysis for the National Post.
The clue, he explained, is how Curry pronounces “house” as a drawn- out “haus.” Canadians are more likely to pronounce the “ou” in “house” like the “u” in “hut.” As Dinkin noted, it’s a pronunciation frequently mocked by Americans as sounding like “hoose.”
J.K. Chambers, a U of T linguist who pioneered research into Canadian English, called Curry’s accent “possibly Canadian,” but he could not be sure. “At his age, I would have expected a more distinctively Canadian vowel further back, like mine, instead of a front vowel like Canadians the age of my children and grandchildren,” wrote Chambers in a message to the National Post.
HE SPEAKS WITH EITHER AN AMERICAN OR CANADIAN ACCENT. — PUBLIC APPEAL
BY WEST MERCIA POLICE