British vs. American English

I was reading this entertaining thread about how to write down usable pronunciation of one language using the spelling traditions of another language, which is very difficult.

It reminded me of something I learned a year or two ago: Eeyore, the donkey in Winnie the Pooh, is literally named Hee Haw. I was both very surprised and disappointed. I read the book to myself when I was little, and thought the name was supposed to be pronounced ee-ai-or, which seemed a very special and mysterious name, considering the other animals were called such by straight-forward names as Tigger, Piglet, Owl, Kanga and Roo.

In the fifth grade we had an English text book called "Welcome to British!". It was a real challenge for me to try to pronounce the practice sentences the way they did on the tape, using Received Pronunciation, since I grew up speaking Standard American, but to keep from being teased I soon learned to speak a sort of RP strongly accented by Danish the way my teacher and classmates did.

The book didn't teach us that English donkeys say "eeyore", so I assumed they said "hee haw", which was obviously wrong of me. I should have suspected as much, since the book claimed dogs say "bow-wow" instead of "woof woof".

Another thing the book taught us was that Tony and Catherine loved going to the swimming pool, but were very scared of Daleks. There was a picture of a Dalek, but as far as I remember, no context or explanation. Come to think of it, I do seem to remember that "The Doctor wears a very long scarf", and this is supposedly funny and somehow connected to Daleks and listening to gramophone records, which is a fun thing to do with friends.

I'd really like to get ahold of that book and read it again.